"The Conquest of Tenochtitlán," one in a series of seven paintings, ca. 1660, depicts the encounter of Spanish and Aztec cultures during the conquest of Mexico.
"The Cultures & History of the Americas," a Library of Congress exhibition, celebrates the recent donation to the Library of the Jay I. Kislak Collection. The exhibition features 50 items from the more than 4,000 rare books, maps, documents, paintings, prints and artifacts relating to the early Americas from the time of the indigenous peoples of Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean through the period of European contact, exploration and settlement. The exhibition was made possible by the generous support of Jay and Jean Kislak and the Kislak Foundation. An online version of the exhibition is also available at www.loc.gov/exhibits/.
"Those of us who grew up in the Northeast thought American history began in 1620, when the Mayflower landed at Plymouth Rock. But decades before that, the Spanish settled St. Augustine, and even earlier, the French came to what is now Jacksonville [Florida]. Equally important are the native civilizations of the Americas—sophisticated cultures that thrived here long before Columbus."
Those are the words of Jay I. Kislak, discussing his rationale for concentrating on collecting materials that illuminate and explain the early history of Florida, the Caribbean, and Mesoamerica. Kislak donated the collection to the Library of Congress last year through the Jay I. Kislak Foundation, and the exhibition, "The Cultures & History of the Americas," gives Washington-area visitors the first chance to view a sampling of the unusual and amazing riches of the Kislak Collection.
While the collection focuses on a unique intersection of time and place—the circum-Caribbean region and Mesoamerica during the first encounters and the early years of exploration and discovery in the 16th century—its materials extend from 1200 B.C. (Olmec culture) through the colonial period to the early decades of the United States.
The donation from the Kislak Foundation also includes a grant to help support the development and dissemination of scholarly work in the culture and history of the Americas, including publications, fellowships and an annual lecture on a topic related to this field of study.
Italian artist Baptista Boazio created this engraving of St. Augustine, Fla., to accompany "A summarie and true discourse of Sir Francis Drake's West Indian Voyage," published in London by Biggs and Croftes in 1589.
Early in his career as a real estate broker and mortgage banker, Kislak moved from New Jersey to Florida and began a 50-year exploration of the early history of his new home state. Over the years his interest deepened, and he acquired many rare books and manuscripts, focusing especially on the early years of European exploration. Together with his wife, Jean, a former art curator, Kislak expanded his collecting to include artifacts produced by indigenous civilizations before Columbus. He was particularly intrigued by the art of the Maya, a highly literate culture that developed a complex hieroglyphic writing system that they used to record their history and beliefs on architectural elements, pottery, personal items and in books.
"The Cultures & History of the Americas" highlights some of the treasures of the Kislak Collection and gives an idea of the breadth and scope of the materials that comprise this major gift to the Library of Congress.
The complete collection contains several thousand rare books, maps, manuscripts and documents, as well as an extensive research library of secondary sources. Complementing the books and manuscripts is a group of masterworks of pre-Columbian artifacts and colonial art from North and South America, spanning three millennia of Native American and European cultures.
"Like manuscripts, books and other works in two dimensions," Kislak said about his collection, "the three-dimensional objects in the collection also convey the myths and stories of the cultures from which they emerged. Pottery and other sculptural objects can be powerful vehicles for communicating history, whether they use the glyphs of language or other iconographic forms or images."
A permanent display of the collection will be mounted elsewhere in the Thomas Jefferson Building, once the full collection has been received and processed and the exhibit space has been prepared, so that visitors as well as scholars can enjoy and learn from the long history they share with the earliest Americans.
The themes explored in the exhibition include the pre-Columbian cultures of Central America and the Caribbean as revealed in sculpture, architecture and language; encounters between Europeans and the native cultures; the process of European colonization; and trade and piracy in the American Atlantic and Caribbean.
Pre-Columbian Cultures
Among the pre-Columbian highlights in the exhibition are artifacts from the Olmec, Mayan, Nayarit and Taino cultures. The Olmec are considered one of the earliest civilizations in Mesoamerica and the mother culture of later societies including the Maya. Their artifacts exhibit a high degree of craftsmanship. The exhibition includes an Olmec sculpture of a seated male figure (Las Bocas, Mexico, 1100-500 B.C.). Body features are picked out with incising, and tiny drill holes mark the ears, nostrils and mouth corners on this extremely naturalistic figure.
Sculpture (1100-500 B.C.) of a seated male figure from the Olmec culture, one of the earliest civilizations in Mesoamerica. - Justin Kerr
Ancient West Mexico was the home of a highly sophisticated people, the Nayarit, who entombed their dead surrounded by ceramic sculpture. Known as "anecdotal sculptures," these types of models are a major source of information about ancient ritual beliefs and everyday life. On display in the Library's exhibition is an unusually complex model of a house (200 B.C.-A.D. 300), its two stories possibly representing life on earth and the afterlife, showing occupants at a feast, with musicians providing entertainment. Below the second level porch, a man sleeps in a woman's lap. Three attendants climb the steps, bearing containers of food and drink. Meanwhile, three birds perch on the ledges of the second tier.
Also on display is an exceedingly rare pre-Columbian duho (ceremonial wooden stool) from the Caribbean region (Hispaniola, A.D. 1000-1500) found only in dry highland caves. There are two basic types: low horizontal forms with concave seats such as this one and stools with long curved backrests. Scholars differ as to the function of the stools. Some believe they represented seats of authority. Others think they served as altars for votive offerings. Still others argue that the Taino peoples used them as ceremonial trays for cohoba, a hallucinogenic snuff prepared for shamanistic rituals.
Mayan civilization is heavily represented in the exhibition. As in all societies where lineage serves political purposes, the Maya kept dynastic lists in varied forms, including architectural elements, sarcophagi and ceramic objects. One such ceramic vase (Guatemalan lowlands, A.D. 700-900), with its calligraphic hieroglyphs and restricted palette of red and brown-black on cream, is part of a tradition called "codex style" that is thought to mimic the appearance of Mayan books. Most painted vessels of this type deal with mythological topics, but this example is one of a small number that deal with historical information. This vase records the names and dates of rulers associated with the city-state of Calakmul in the Yucatan, Mexico.
The Kislak Collection includes approximately 170 Mayan flasks that vary in detail and size. Most, according to recent scholarship, contained "may," a mixture of powdered native tobacco and calcareous lime used for ritual and magical protection. Each flask is decorated with images or glyphs representing the intended use. The fine flasks displayed represent the variety of bottles in the collection.
The Mayans also recorded their culture and history on plaques. One such artifact is a jade plaque carved on two sides (A.D. 400-700). The front of this piece shows the face of a warrior, with a supernatural animal headdress and jade earflares and collar. There are five tiny holes for sewing the item to a garment. The reverse side appears to have been carved at a later time, perhaps as a war talisman. It is the image of a deity sitting in lotus position with his head turned in profile. His large square eye is ringed and the pupil is in the form of a curl, typical of the Sun God.
Encounters Between Europeans and the Native Cultures
After his first transatlantic voyage, Christopher Columbus sent an account of his encounters in the Americas to King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain. Several copies of his manuscript were made for court officials, and a transcription was published in April 1493. On display is a Latin translation by Leandro de Cosco, based on a more accurate transcription of Columbus' manuscript, which was published the same year. In reporting to his sovereigns, Columbus wrote with great enthusiasm and conviction, as the following passage illustrates:
"There I found very many islands, filled with innumerable people, and I have taken possession of them all for their Highnesses, done by proclamation and with the royal standard unfurled, and no opposition was offered to me."
In the 1930s, Mexican artist Diego Rivera was commissioned to create illustrations for an English translation of the "Popol Vuh" myth, which recounts the religious beliefs and legends of the ancient Quiché Maya people, who inhabited the highlands of Guatemala. This section describes human blood sacrifice in exchange for the gift of fire before Tohil, one of the four gods given to the first humans. - © Banco de Mexico Diego Rivera & Frida Kahlo Museums Trust
Another item on display is a priest's handbook (ca. 1544-1570), a remarkable composite manuscript in two Mayan languages, as well as Latin and Spanish. It was most likely created by Dominican priests working with Indian populations in the middle of the 16th century in the Guatemalan highlands. It contains a variety of materials written out phonetically in the Kekchi and Quiché Mayan languages, including the lives of saints, religious instructions and hymns, guidance on marital arrangements and the church feast days. That such a book, destined for daily use, survived at all is extraordinarily rare. It provides a unique window into issues of cultural interaction and missionary practices and experiences during the early period of contact.
A catechism in Timuquan assembled by Francisco Pareja and published in Mexico in 1627 is also on view; it is one of the earliest known artifacts in any Indian language from what is now the United States. Francisco Pareja came to Florida in 1595 and worked among the native peoples for 31 years, particularly among the Timuquan peoples. The systematic destruction of Timuquan culture by the Spaniards makes texts like this one precious legacies of a world otherwise lost. No other copies of this edition are known to exist. Father Pareja's writings preserve almost all that is known about the Timuquan language and customs.
The first natural history of the Americas ("Historia Naturae, Maxime Peregrinæ, Libris XVI Distincta,"Antwerp: Ex Officina Plantiniana, Balthasaris Moreti, 1635) by Juan Eusebio Nieremberg describes and categorizes the flora and fauna of the Americas, particularly of Mexico (New Spain), and provides information on the customs and rites of the Aztecs and Incas. Because it includes the indigenous names for the plants and animals described, the work became an important linguistic document for the Nahuatl language of Mexico and the Quechua language of the Andes.
Discovery and Exploration
Several notable maps can be seen in the exhibition. One of the most important is the Carta Marina, the 1516 nautical map of the world by Martin Waldseemüller, the author of the 1507 world map that was acquired by the Library in 2003. (A facsimile of the 1507 map is on display in the Library's "American Treasures" exhibition.) Long thought to be lost, the Waldseemüller maps were rediscovered in 1901 by Father Josef Fischer, a Jesuit historian, in the library of Prince Waldburg-Wolfegg in the family's castle in Baden-Württemberg, Germany. They were in mint condition, carefully bound together inside a folio. In 2003, the Library of Congress acquired the 1507 map, and the Kislaks purchased the Carta Marina.
In a letter following the opening of the exhibition, Jay Kislak paid special tribute to Margrit Krewson, former area specialist in the Library's European Division, for "introducing us to HSH Prince Johannes and Princess Viviana" and for her "assistance in the acquisition of the Carta Marina." He added "I certainly feel contented, and the collection is inestimably enriched with the addition of the wonderful Waldseemüller map and accompanying Schöner gores."
Equal in size to the 1507 map, the Carta Marina is markedly superior to the earlier map in artistic detail, reflecting possibly the hand of the artist Albrecht Dürer, and incorporates greatly expanded and corrected geographical information. The Carta Marina could be considered the first printed nautical map of the entire world.
A full-length portrait of a Mayan lord and forty-four hieroglyphic signs are carved on all sides of this diminutive "Tortuguero" offering box, one of very few surviving Mayan personal objects made of wood. The text yields important insights into the complex hierarchical Mayan social system. As we understand the text today, the main protagonist is the lord depicted on the cover, Aj K'ax B'ahlam, who held an important secondary office under the patronage of the seventh century Tortuguero king Ik' Muyil Muwaahn II. The text concludes with the date the box was made, Oct. 14, A.D. 681, and names it the yotoot mayij or "offering container" of Aj K'az B'ahlam himself.
Five handsome hand-colored engravings created by Italian artist Baptista Boazio to accompany "A summarie and true discourse of Sir Francis Drake's West Indian Voyage," published in London by Biggs and Croftes in 1588-1589, are all on view in the exhibition. The maps are illustrated in fascinating detail with the fleet of 23 ships, as well as land battle plans of the English attacks on Spanish harbor forts. Animals, flags, crests and compasses decorate the cartography. These Boazio maps are historically important not only for understanding Sir Francis Drake's (1540?-1598) activities, but also because the four city plans represent the first printed view of each locality.
Thomas Jeffreys' 1780 atlas ("The West India Atlas: or a Compendious Description of the West Indies: Illustrated with Forty Correct Charts and Maps Taken from Actual Surveys. Together with an Historical Account of the Several Countries and Islands which Compose that Part of the World") was the first comprehensive British atlas of Florida and the Caribbean and is on display here. It includes the first large, detailed, printed maps of a number of Caribbean islands, such as Antigua, St. Christopher and Barbados. On many of these individual maps, the topography is rendered with particular skill. They provide unprecedented interior detail documenting the sugar industry, slave life, roads, trade routes, and even individual homes and estates.
The first edition, in Dutch, of "The Buccaneers of America" by Alexandre Exquemelin, one of the most important books about pirates ever written. The author went to the Caribbean in 1666 with the French West Indies Co. and served as surgeon for nearly 10 years with various buccaneers, reporting the exploits of Henry Morgan, François Lolonois, Pierre le Grand and Bartholomew Portugues.
An 1842 drawing of a Mayan monument by Frederick Catherwood is one of only a few originals that survived a disastrous fire in a New York gallery in July 1842. John Lloyd Stephens, the outgoing American writer, and Frederick Catherwood, a quiet English artist, were the first explorers to describe accurately and illustrate the art of the pre-Hispanic Maya of Mexico and Central America. Through their highly popular publications (first published in 1841 and 1843 and still in print today), they introduced the ancient Maya to a world that knew little of their existence and stimulated research on the Maya for generations.
Cortés and Montezuma
Two of the most dramatic pieces in the exhibition are large oil paintings from the Conquest of Mexico series. Painted in the latter half of the 17th century in Mexico by unknown artists, the eight paintings in the series depict the encounter of Spanish and Aztec cultures and the ultimate victory of the Spanish over the native peoples. All eight paintings will be on display in the permanent Kislak gallery.
One of the paintings displayed, the third in the series, depicts Hernando Cortés (1485-1547) meeting the Mexican emperor Montezuma (1480?-1520). The landscape and treatment of indigenous dress serve to romanticize the meeting of these two powerful leaders. Cortés approaches Montezuma with his arms opened in a gesture of embrace, which the Mexican leader respectfully rejects by raising his left hand. Montezuma's idealized body, dignified stance, full beard and the golden sword in his right hand owe more to European ideas about the appropriate bearing of a king than to ethnographic accuracy. Furthermore, while the feather skirts shown on Montezuma and his court were part of the standard European iconography for depicting "Indians," skirts like these are not known to have been worn anywhere in the Americas.
The second painting in the exhibition, the seventh in the series, depicts the conquest of Tenochtitlán (now the site of Mexico City). The battle between the Spanish under Cortés and the Mexicans under the last Aztec leader Cuauhtémoc is more properly called a siege. It began in May of 1521 and lasted into August. Ultimately Cortés ordered the complete destruction of Tenochtitlán, including its palaces, temples and squares. This painting attempts to distill the excitement, bloodshed and drama of the siege into a single moment. Cortés leads his Spanish armies across one of the causeways and into the city. The captains of the other parts of his army also lead their troops toward the center of the city and the main temple compound. The Mexicans put up a spirited and skilled resistance, but by August the death of much of the population, as well as months of scarce food and water, meant that they could no longer defend the city. The surrender of the survivors, the destruction of the main temple and the capture of Cuauhtémoc marked both the end of the battle for Tenochtitlán and the end of the Aztec empire.
A manuscript on amate (fig tree bark) paper shows how land rights were passed on from the Aztec tradition. As part of the annihilation of the Aztec civilization after Cortés conquered Montezuma's empire, the Spaniards burned the Aztec archives. Surviving examples of Indian codices are rare. Although this manuscript claims to date from the early 1500s, it is part of the so-called "Techialoyan" land records prepared in the 17th century, using old methods to substantiate native land claims with the Spanish regional authorities in Mexico. These "titulos primodiales" were essentially municipal histories that documented in text and pictures local accounts of important events and territorial boundaries.
Early Years of the United States
Three items in the exhibition relate to the early years of the new nation. One of them is George Washington's 1762 almanac in which he recorded everyday activities at his Mount Vernon plantation. He describes mainly planting tobacco and raising cattle and sheep, although finance and slaves are also mentioned. Washington kept a diary from 1747, when he was a teenaged surveyor, until his death in 1799, with the notable exception of the period of most of the Revolutionary War. With this addition from the Kislak Collection, the Library of Congress now holds 37 of the 41 known original Washington diaries.
Left, monumental jaguar sculpture, Southern Veracruz, Mexico, ca. A.D. 600-900; center, this carved, mottled greenstone mask, provenance unknown, has been attributed to the Olmec culture in Mexico, 900–500 B.C.; right, this sculpture of a house with 15 inhabitants from western Mexico ca. 200 B.C.-A.D. 300, shows life and the afterlife as seen by the Nayarit culture. - Justin Kerr and others
Another item is a manuscript letter from James Monroe (1758-1831) to Lord Henry Holland (1773-1840) dated Nov. 29, 1811, in which then Secretary of State Monroe warns that continued British repression of American commerce will ultimately lead to war. It is part of a small archives of treaty drafts, memoranda, reports and letters in the Kislak Collection related to the unratified Anglo-American treaty of 1806. Although successfully negotiated, the treaty was quickly repudiated by President Thomas Jefferson because it did not end impressment of American citizens into the British Navy. As Monroe had warned, the unresolved issues did lead to a crisis and eventually to the War of 1812.
When the United Status purchased the Louisiana Territory in 1803, its boundaries were left very vague. In the Adams-Onís Treaty of 1819, U.S. Secretary of State John Quincy Adams had acquired Spanish Florida for $5 million and established the southern and western boundaries of Louisiana and the Spanish Territory. This letter dated May 6, 1820, is one of 13, written over a two-year period, by John Adams to Don Francisco Vives about the United States-Florida boundary. These letters shed light not only on the specific difficulties regarding the treaty but also on the tenor of diplomatic dialogue during this period of United States history. Each letter is annotated on the back with a summary of the contents in Spanish.
Interactive Presentations
Library staff demonstrate new interactive technologies that allow users to electronically "turn the pages" to a selected volume in the Kislak collection - John Nelson
Two interactive kiosks in "The Cultures & History of the Americas" enhance the visitor's understanding of the items on display. The first simulates the experience of actually turning the pages of a 17th century Dutch book on buccaneers, using the new "Page by Page" technology developed at the Library, and a second station highlights the Tortuguero box, a seventh century wooden artifact from the Mayan culture, so-called because its inscriptions can be associated with Tortuguero, Mexico. It allows visitors to examine the box and decipher its ancient hieroglyphs.
Building on technology developed first at the British Library and enhanced by the National Library of Medicine, Library of Congress specialists created a new program—dubbed "Page by Page"—that allows users to replicate the experience of turning the pages of a real book by touching the computer screen. Beyond the simple act of turning the pages, the visitor can also zoom in anywhere on the page to enlarge a portion of the image, read or hear an English translation of the Dutch words on the page and open the foldout pages to their full, extended size.
The book used in this display is Alexandre O. Exquemelin's 1678 "De Americaensche Zee-Roovers" ("The Buccaneers of America"), one of the most significant books on the exploits of pirates ever written, which is still in print. Its most recent edition in English, from which the translation for the video kiosk is taken, was published in 2000. The original book, on display in the exhibition, is the first edition of an eyewitness account of famous buccaneers and their exploits by a surgeon who spent nearly a decade traveling with them in the Caribbean in the 1660s.
Donor Jay Kislak, left, explains to Gov. Jeb Bush (R-Fla.) the importance of some selections of his comprehensive pre-Columbian collection of books, maps and artifacts on display in the Jefferson Building. - John Nelson
Library staff collaborated on the "Page by Page" project with the National Library of Medicine and selected the sample pages for the interactive display to give a good representation of the vivid narratives and full-page engravings found in the original book.
Developed by Second Story Interactive Studios, the second video kiosk provides a survey of pre-Columbian artifacts in the Kislak Collection and in-depth exploration of the Tortuguero box, a small but highly important wooden artifact (see p. 83). The interactive kiosk allows visitors to manipulate the box on the screen, turning it around and upside down, removing the lid and reading translations of the carved glyphs that cover the box, which relate a series of political events that took place during the life of a scribe named Aj K'az B'ahlam, the box's owner.
