ALLEGORY, TRAGEDY, AND THE AMBIVALENCE OF STRADANUS'S VESPUCCI

This essay considers the structural ambivalence in an allegorical print by Johannes Stradanus showing Amerigo Vespucci on his ship. Overtly, the work presents the Florentine navigator as having mastered the winds and fortune through science and virtue, but, if interpreted under an Aristotelian conception of the tragic, the print casts its protagonist as vulnerable to failure. The engraving's designer-patron, Luigi Alamanni, and his fellow members of the Accademia degli Alterati had the erudite knowledge required to activate the second, concealed meaning of the work, and political reasons for doing so. The back part of the essay positions these two visual arguments in relation to Aby Warburg's ideas about humanist self-confidence and its expression in art of the fifteenth century, as well as to postcolonial critiques of that Renaissance discourse. The dynamic of interpretation established by the print as an allegory ensured that it could espouse the congratulatory view of European man and its postcolonial opposite, both at once.