Page 118 - Art In The Age Of Exploration (Great Section on Chinese Art Ming Dynasty)

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bought a little tortoise in Antwerp. The paint- Such delicacies are mentioned throughout alpoint." Diirer had already sketched a black
er and his wife had previously been presented Diirer's diary, as for example when Rodrigo Fer- man (cat. 192) in charcoal, perhaps for use in a
with parrots by Rodrigo Fernandez d'Almada, nandez d Almada gave him two boxes of quince composition of the Adoration of the Magi.
the Portuguese factor: "Rodrigo has given my electuary and many sweetmeats of all kinds, or Although the two drawings — at any rate that of
wife/ wrote Diirer in his diary, "a small green when he received from Joao Brandao two fine the maid —do not seem to have been done to be
parrot/' for which she bought a birdcage. large white sugar-loaves, a dish-full of sweet- given to the sitters, they are among the first
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Rodrigo gave them a second parrot a few days meats, and two green pots of preserves. In portraits of black people made in Renaissance
later. In June or July 1521, Diirer recorded Antwerp Diirer spent time with the wealthy Europe.
another gift from the Portuguese, a parrot from Genoese silk merchant Tomaso Bombelli, as The Portuguese traded with Brazil and also
Malacca for which Diirer bought a new cage. 27 well as with various members of the Portuguese controlled the sea route to Africa and India
Diirer had sketched a parrot as early as the very community, especially the Portuguese factors. via the Cape of Good Hope; this trade bought
first years of the sixteenth century and used it Thome Lopes, Portuguese ambassador and immense wealth and the influx of many new
for his drawing of the Madonna with a multi- factor in Antwerp from 1498 to 1505, invited products to Lisbon and Antwerp. Among the
tude of animals and for the Fall of Man, his Diirer "to a great banquet on Shrove-Tuesday rarest objects acquired by Diirer in the Nether-
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famous engraving of 1504. African and Indian 1521 which lasted till 2 o'clock and was very lands were probably ivories and Chinese porce-
parrots were bought in Antwerp by German costly... To the... feast very many came in lains : from his diary, we know that Diirer
merchants at the beginning of the sixteenth costly masks and especially Tomasin and Bran- received "three pieces of porcelain" from Bran-
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century. We know from a letter written by the dao." Diirer in fact saw more of Thome Lopes' dao and "a beautiful piece of porcelain" from
Nuremberg city council in 1505 to Anton Tetzel successors, Joao Brandao, factor from 1509 to Lorenz Sterck, Treasurer of the Provinces of
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and Diirer's friend, the humanist Willibald 1514 and again from 1520 to 1526, and his Sec- Brabant and Antwerp. Although Chinese por-
Pirckheimer, that agents of the Nuremberg retary Rodrigo Fernandez d'Almada, who later celain is occasionally mentioned in fourteenth-
merchants had been robbed of a basket load of became factor, who seem to have been his best and fifteenth-century inventories, it was
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parrots. Slightly later, in 1511, grey African friends in Antwerp. In return for their exotic extremely rare until the opening of the Portu-
parrots were sent by the Fugger of Augsburg to gifts such as those mentioned above, he gave guese sea route to India in 1498, when Vasco da
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the Bishop of Breslau, Johann Turzo, while them prints and paintings and made their por- Gama sailed to Calicut; it appeared in large
Konrad Peutinger, the famous Augsburg scholar, traits. The famous painting of Saint Jerome quantities only at the beginning of the seven-
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had talking parrots from India. Feathers of (Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga, Lisbon) was a teenth century.
parrots and macaws were also brought back gift to Rodrigo, who took it with him to Portu- Diirer also acquired objects in ivory: alto-
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from Brazil —so many, in fact, that a Venetian gal. Diirer also portrayed Joao Brandao's black gether he bought four combs, a button, a small
spy reported from Lisbon that Cabral had dis- servant, Katherina (cat. 193): the silverpoint ivory skull for a florin, and two saltcellars from
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covered "a new land they call the land of the drawing inscribed Katherina alt 20 Jar can be Calicut for three florins. The saltcellars may in
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Parrots/' Bright red macaws, in fact, symbolize related to a passage in Diirer's diary in which he fact have been Afro-Portuguese ivories (see
South America on the Cantino map. 33 wrote: "I drew a portrait of this moor with met- cats. 67-71) which are among the finest African
Like lions, apes were known in Germany
during the Middle Ages. Diirer engraved his
well known Madonna with a Monkey as early
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as 1498. Long-tailed monkeys, however,
became relatively widely available only with the
maritime discoveries. Lucas Rem, the agent of
the Welser in Lisbon between 1503 and 1508,
acquired "strange, new parrots, long-tailed
monkeys, and other rare and curious things" to
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be sent to Augsburg. Diirer also bought a little
monkey for four gold florins in Antwerp. The
poor creature probably did not last long. At any
rate, when Diirer sent a drawing of a dance
of monkeys to Felix Frey, of Zurich, in 1523,
he commented "in regard to the dance of the
monkeys that you asked me to draw, I am
sending you an awkward sketch, for I have
not seen monkeys in a long time. Please be
understanding/' 36
The Antwerp that Diirer visited was one of
the most cosmopolitan cities in Europe and, as
we have seen, a major center for the spice trade,
especially between Portuguese and German
merchants. Apart from spices, the main imports
were sugar in various forms, most of it to be
resold to Germans. Sugar products came mostly fig. 2. Albrecht Diirer, Lioness. 1521, watercolor and body color on vellum. Musee du Louvre, Paris, Edmond
from the Canaries and other Atlantic islands. de Rothschild Collection. Photo Reunion des musees nationaux

EUROPE AND THE MEDITERRANEAN WORLD 117