THE PORTRAITS OF COLUMBUS.
The Hon. William Eleroy Curtis, an American journalist, Secretary of the Bureau of the American Republics, Washington, D. C. Born at Akron, Ohio. From an article, "The Columbus Portraits," in the Cosmopolitan Magazine, January, 1892.
Although Columbus twice mentioned in his alleged will that he was a native of Genoa, a dozen places still demand the honor of being considered his birthplace, and two claim to possess his bones. Nothing is certain about his parentage, and his age is the subject of dispute. The stories of his boyhood adventures are mythical, and his education at the University of Pavia is denied.
The same doubt attends the various portraits that pretend to represent his features. The most reliable authorities—and the subject has been under discussion for two centuries—agree that there is no tangible evidence to prove that the face of Columbus was ever painted or sketched or graven, during his life. His portrait has been painted, like that of the Madonna and those of the saints, by many famous artists, each dependent upon verbal descriptions of his appearance by contemporaneous writers, and each conveying to the canvas his own conception of what the great seaman's face must have been; but it may not be said that any of the portraits are genuine, and it is believed that all of them are more or less fanciful.
It must be considered that the art of painting portraits was in its infancy when Columbus lived. The honor was reserved for kings and queens and other dignitaries, and Columbus was regarded as an importunate adventurer, who at the close of his first voyage enjoyed a brief triumph, but from the termination of his second voyage was the victim of envy and misrepresentation to the close of his life. He was derided and condemned, was brought in chains like a common felon from the continent he had discovered, and for nearly two hundred years his descendants contested in the courts for the dignities and emoluments he demanded of the crown of Spain before undertaking what was then the most perilous and uncertain of adventures. Even the glory of giving his name to the lands he discovered was transferred to another—a man who followed in his track; and it is not strange, under such circumstances, that the artists of Spain did not leave the religious subjects upon which they were engaged to paint the portrait of one who said of himself that he was a beggar "without a penny to buy food."