Giolo, the Painted Prince

Prince Giolo, Son of ye King of Moangis or Gilolo: lying under the Equator in the Long[itude] of 152 Deg[rees] 30 Min[utes], a fruitful Island abounding with rich spices and other valuable Commodities. This famous Painted Prince is the just Wonder of ye Age. His whole Body (except Face, Hands and Feet) is curiously and most exquisitely Painted or Stained full of Variety and Invention with prodigious Art and Skill perform'd. In so much of the ancient and noble Mistery of Painting or Staining upon Human Bodies seems to be comprised in this one stately Piece. The more admirable Back-parts afford us a Representation of one quarter part of the Sphere upon & betwixt his shoulders where ye Arctick & Tropick Circles center in ye North Pole of his Neck... The Paint itself is so durable, which nothing can wash it off or deface ye beauty of it. It is prepared from ye Juice of a certaine Herb or Plant, peculiar to that Country, w[h]ich they esteem infallible to preserve Human Bodies from ye deadly poison or hurt of any venomous Creature whatsoever, & none but those of ye Royal Family are permitted to be thus painted with it. This admirable Person is about ye Age of 30, graceful and well proportioned in all his Limbs, extreamly modest & civil, neat & cleanly; but his Language is not understood, neither can he speak English. (1697)

In 1691, the buccaneer and naturalist William Dampier returned to England after a daunting circumnavigation of the Earth, his first of what would be three round the world journeys. When he returned to London, Dampier was accompanied by a slave from the island of Miangas he had acquired in the course of this journey -- a man he called 'Prince Giolo.' 

As Dampier recollected in his published account of his travels, "[Giolo] was painted all down the breast, between his shoulders behind; on his thighs before; and in the form of several broad rings, or bracelets, round his arms and legs. I cannot liken the drawings to any figure of animals, or the like, but they were very curious, full of great variety of lines, flourishes, checkered work, etc. keeping a very graceful proportion, and appearing very artificial, even to wonder, especially that upon and between his shoulder blades... He told me that most of the men and women of the island were thus painted." (William Dampier, A New Voyage Round The World, 1697)

Dampier was blunt about his reasons for taking Giolo back to London: "I proposed no small advantage to myself from my painted prince... [that] might be gained by shewing him in England" (Voyage, 347). A manuscript by Dampier curently housed in the British Library is even more blunt: "I only brought with me this Journall & my painted prince which I might haue made a great deal of money by but I lep out of the frying pan into the fire in leaueing gouernour Senden to come home with Captain heath." For more on this see Geraldine Barnes, "Curiosity, Wonder and William Dampier's Painted Prince," in the Journal for Early Modern Studies. Giolo is also discussed in a recent book on Dampier called A Pirate of Exquisite Mind. I hope to consult Dampier's manuscripts when I do research in London this July, so perhaps I'll be able to write about Giolo in much more detail in a month or two.

At the moment, the best account of Dampier and Giolo that is freely available online seems to be this blog entry. Although usually mentioned as an interesting anecdote, Giolo's story was quite tragic. Exhibited for money in London, Giolo was later taken to the University of Oxford to be examined, where he died from smallpox. Apparently, samples of Giolo's tattooed flesh were preserved in the library of St. Johns College, Oxford under the macabre entry, "a bit of an Indian prince's skin," but they appear not to have survived.

Pintados, 'the Painted Ones,' in an early Spanish record of the Philippines, the Boxer Codex, c. 1595.

Europeans as 'Other'

They eat with their fingers instead of with chopsticks such as we use. They show their feelings without any self-control. They cannot understand the meaning of written characters. - From Charles R. Boxer, The Christian Century in Japan, 1549-1650 (London, 1951).

Chinese and Japanese representations of sixteenth century Europeans have always fascinated me. We're used to seeing early modern Europeans as the normative figures in the story of global exploration. After all, they were the ones who wrote the chronicles, diaries and letters upon which traditional historical narratives of the so-called 'Age of Discovery' were based. Japanese Nanban ("Southern Barbarian") art, or Nanbanbijutsu, and the accompanying chronicles such as the one quoted above, can be fascinating correctives to these Eurocentric narratives.

A seventeenth century Japanese painting of a group of Portuguese merchants, accompanied by what may be an African slave. Japanese depictions of early modern Europeans in paintings and literature tend to emphasize their terrible personal grooming -- "they stank of butter" as one observer put it -- and physical ugliness.

A nanban painting of a Portuguese carrack, seventeenth century. This particular ship design was quickly adopted and assimilated by Japanese craftsmen, as was the arquebus, the direct ancestor of the flint-lock rifle.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, East Asian depictions of Europeans began to change. Chinese painters at the court of the Kangxi Emperor, for instance, began to depict European Jesuits in a more sympathetic light. I'm particularly fascinated by this 1685 portrait of the Dutch Jesuit astronomer Ferdinand Verbiest. Clad in the robes of a Chinese man of learning, Verbiest's European origin is virtually indiscernible:

This sketch by Peter Paul Ruebens of the French Jesuit Nicolas Trigault makes for an interesting visual contrast. The note on the drawing states that he is adorned in Chinese dress.

The late eighteenth century witnessed an increase in European power in the East Asian sphere, and with it a new visual vocabulary for depicting Europeans. This painting by the remarkable Japanese artist Shiba Kokan (1747-1818) depicts A Meeting of China, Japan and the West. Note the European (probably Dutch) figure's up-to-date anatomical book.

For those interested in learning more, Charles Boxer's The Christian Century in Japan, 1549-1650 is an excellent start, as are many of the essays in Stuart Schwartz's collected volume Implicit Understandings (Cambridge, 1994). Wikipedia's page on the Nanban trade is pretty good as well.

First post - The History of Four-Footed Beasts

Greetings friends and strangers.


This is the first post in a blog, RES OBSCURA, designed to serve as a record of the strange things I come across in the course of my research as a graduate student in early modern (sixteenth through eighteenth century) history. 

Early modern visual culture and natural history are special interests of mine, so with that I christen RES OBSCURA with some selections from Edward Topsell's learned, lavishly-illustrated and often unintentionally hilarious Historie of Fovre-Footed Beastes (London, 1607, 1658).

Although early modern contemporaries like Montaigne showed an evident fondness for cats, Topsell appears to have been wary of humanity's feline companions:

   

Above all the brain of a Cat is most venomous, for it being above measure dry, stoppeth the animal spirits, that they cannot passe into the ventricle, by reason whereof memory faileth, and the infected person falleth into a Phrenzie… To conclude this point, it appeareth that this is a dangerous beast, and that therefore as for necessity we are constraned to nourish them for the surpressing of small vermine: so with a wary and discreet eye we must avoid their harms (83).

Topsell also apparently had a bone to pick with small dogs:

These Dogs are little, pretty, proper and fine, and sought for to satisfie the delicatness of dainty dames and wanton women’s wils, instruments of folly for them to play and dally withal, to trifle away the treasure of time, to withdraw their mindes from more commendable exercises, and to content their corrupted concupiscence’s with vain disport (a silly shift to shun irksome idleness). 

Most of Topsell's animal entries have some basis in fact, but occasionally he let imagination (and the hearsay of sailors and travelers) get the better of him:

A greatly exaggerated boa constrictor.

And a rather unsettling 'Manticore.'

The University of Houston Library has kindly digitized the illustrations from this remarkable book and made them freely available online here. A reprint appears to be available on Amazon, Topsell's Histories of Beasts, and extracts from his work are also included in a book called Curious Woodcuts of Fanciful and Real Beasts.