COLUMBUS (after Giovio).
Fac-simile of the woodcut in Paolo Giovio’s Elogia virorum bellica virtute illustrium (Basle, 1596), p. 124. There are copies in the Boston Athenæum and Boston Public Library. It is also copied in Charton’s Voyageurs, iii. 81, from whom Hazard (Santo Domingo, New York, 1873, p. 7) takes it. The 1575 edition is in Harvard College Library, and the same portrait is on p. 191. This cut is also re-engraved in Jules Verne’s La découverte de la terre, p. 113.
A vignette on the map of La Cosa, dated 1500, represents Saint Christopher bearing on his shoulders the infant Christ across a stream. This has been considered symbolical of the purpose of Columbus in his discoveries; and upholders of the movement to procure his canonization, like De Lorgues, have claimed that La Cosa represented the features of Columbus in the face of Saint Christopher. It has also been claimed that Herrera must have been of the same opinion, since the likeness given by that historian can be imagined to be an enlargement of the head on the map. This theory is hardly accepted, however, by the critics.[284]
THE YANEZ COLUMBUS
(National Library, Madrid).
This picture was prominently brought before the Congress of Américanistes which assembled at Madrid in 1881, and not, it seems, without exciting suspicion of a contrived piece of flattery for the Duke of Veraguas, then presiding over this same congress. Cf. Cortambert, Nouvelle histoire des voyages, p. 40.
Discarding the La Cosa vignette, the earliest claimant now known is an engraving published in the Elogia virorum illustrium (1575)[285] of Paolo Giovio (Paulus Jovius, in the Latin form). This woodcut is thought to have been copied from a picture which Jovius had placed in the gallery of notable people which he had formed in his villa at Lake Como. That collection is now scattered, and the Columbus picture cannot be traced; but that there was a portrait of the discoverer there, we know from the edition of Vasari’s Lives of the Painters printed by Giunti at Florence (1568), wherein is a list of the pictures, which includes likenesses of Vespucius, Cortes, and Magellan, besides that of “Colombo Genovese.” This indicates a single picture; but it is held by some that Jovius must have possessed two pictures, since this woodcut gives Columbus the garb of a Franciscan, while the painting in the gallery at Florence, supposed also to follow a picture belonging to Jovius, gives him a mantle. A claim has been made that the original Jovius portrait is still in existence in what is known as the Yanez picture, now in the National Library in Madrid, which was purchased of Yanez in Granada in 1763. It had originally a close-fitting tunic and mantle, which was later painted over so as to show a robe and fur collar. This external painting has been removed; and the likeness bears a certain resemblance to the woodcut and to the Florence likeness. The Yanez canvas is certainly the oldest in Spain; and the present Duque de Veraguas considers it the most authentic of all the portraits.[286] The annexed cut of it is taken from an engraving in Ruge’s Geschichte des Zeitalters der Entdeckungen (p. 235). It bears the inscription shown in the cut.[287]
The woodcut (1575) already mentioned passes as the prototype of another engraving by Aliprando Capriolo, in the Ritratti di cento capitani illustri, published at Rome in 1596.[288]