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 Have We a Portrait of Columbus ? 
 
 ANNUAL ADDRESS 
 
 BEFORE THE 
 
 American Geographical Society. 
 
 JANUARY 9, 1893. 
 By the President, Charles P.* Daly, LL.D. 
 
 ■-■'•3R*#Ji«'- 
 
HAVE WE A PORTRAIT OF COLUMBUS?;^ 
 
 ANNUAL ADDRESS, JANUARY 9, I 893. 
 
 BY 
 
 CHAS. P. DALY, LL.D. 
 
 William Roscoe, the eminent author of the Life of 
 Lorenzo de Medici, the " Magnificent," and of other 
 valuable biographical works, expresses the opinion that 
 there are no representations which interest so strongly 
 the curiosity of mankind as portraits. That a high degree 
 of pleasure, he says, of which almost every one is sus- 
 ceptible, is experienced in contemplating the looks and 
 countenances of those men who, by their genius, or 
 their virtues, have entitled themselves to the esteem 
 and admiration of future ages. 
 
 It appeared to me, therefore, as we have recently 
 celebrated the four hundredth anniversary of the dis- 
 covery of this Continent by Columbus, that it would 
 be appropriate at such a period to devote the annual 
 address of the president of an American geographical 
 society to the enquiry whether we have any portrait 
 of the great discoverer. It is an enquiry to which I 
 
 * Reprint from the "Bulletin of the American Geographical Society." Vol. 
 XXV., No. I, 1893. 
 
2 Have we a Portrait of Columbus? 
 
 have given attention for some years. I have seen 
 both here and in Europe very nearly all the pictures 
 claimed to be his portrait. I have read everything, I 
 think, relating to the enquiry that has been published 
 and feel that I am able, at least, to lay before you all 
 that is known upon the subject. 
 
 It is a very difficult one, as is the case with so many 
 things respecting Columbus ; for I doubt if any distin- 
 guished man ever lived, about whom there is so much 
 that is conflicting, contradictory and perplexing. 
 
 Twenty-three places have been claimed to have been 
 his birthplace. He said himself that he was born in 
 the city of Genoa, and Mr. Henry Harrisse, after an 
 exhaustive research, has, I think, established that this 
 was true, and yet there are some who still maintain 
 that he was not born in the city of Genoa, but in some 
 village near it. 
 
 The year of his birth is disputed. It has been ques- 
 tioned whether the name by which he is known was the 
 true name of his family. Mr. Harrisse has shown 
 by documentary evidence who was his father and his 
 grandfather, and the humble occupation they followed ; 
 yet a recent writer, Harold Frederick, in the London 
 Illustrated Nezvs, of October 12, 1892, says that the 
 only credible information is that he was closely related 
 to a notorious and blood-thirsty pirate, the terror of the 
 merchant galleys of Venice, whose real name was un- 
 known, and who, with "a grim piratical pleasantry," called 
 himself "Colombo" or the Dove, a name adopted by 
 his son, who surpassed his father in ferocity, and who 
 called himself Colombo Giovane, or the younger, 
 and that Columbus " seems to have spent most of his 
 
 WBW YORK PU3L. LnM|' 
 IM XXCHan , 
 
Have we a Portrait of Columbus? 3 
 
 earlier life with "these Corsairs, his cousins, in their 
 piratical fleet ; that with them he burned, murdered 
 and pillaged, from the Tunisian coast to the Flemish 
 dunes and ravaged in pious zeal the infidel seaboard." 
 That with Colombo the Younger he bore his part in 
 the great sea fight off Cape St. Vincent in 1485, and 
 that "when the buccaneering Colombi disappear from 
 human records the discoverer turns up, an impover- 
 ished marine adventurer, in Lisbon, and enters upon 
 a career of comparative respectability;" in respect to 
 which it may be said that if there is anything certain 
 about his early career, it is that he was in Lisbon and 
 had lived there a married man for several years before 
 the battle referred to was fought. 
 
 What has hitherto been received as reliable, his life, 
 by his son Fernando, and which has been the main 
 source of what knowledge we have had of his earlier 
 career, has been subjected to a critical examination by 
 Mr. Harrisse, who has written a volume to show that it 
 has been extensively tampered with and cannot be 
 relied upon as authentic. 
 
 His reception at Barcelona by Ferdinand and 
 Isabella, of which such a glowing account is given 
 in his life by Washington Irving, Aaron Goodrich^ 
 in his life of Columbus, pronounces ** an exploded 
 popular error," upon the authority of the late 
 Charles Sumner, who in 1844 searched the admi- 
 rably arranged archives of Aragon and of the city of 
 Barcelona, for some record of such a prominent event 
 and could find nothing respecting it. A diario, or 
 day book, was kept at the time in Barcelona, in 
 which the arrival of ambassadors, the movements of the 
 
4 Have we a Portrait of Columbus f 
 
 king and queen, the public festivities and the trifling 
 incidents, which in our day are found in court journals, 
 were duly recorded, and yet, Mr. Sumner says, " not a 
 word appears in it in regard to Columbus." 
 
 And finally the place where his remains now repose 
 is disputed, and during the past five years fourteen 
 works, twelve in Spanish and two in Italian, have been 
 published upon that subject. 
 
 The same conflict and uncertainty exist with regard 
 to his portraits. There is no portrait or pictorial rep- 
 resentation of his person, that can positively be declared 
 to be authentic ; nor is there any evidence upon which 
 it can be asserted as a fact, that he sat for a portrait, 
 and M. F. Feuillet de Conches, who wrote an article on 
 the portraits of Columbus, in 1856, for the Revue Con- 
 teinporaine^ asks : Is it presumable that Oviedo, his son 
 Ferdinand, and after them, Benzoni and Herrera, would 
 have entered into such a detail of his personal appear- 
 ance, if there had then existed a portrait of him, to refer 
 to? and Mr. Harrisse says that as to the portraits 
 painted, engraved or sculptured, which figure in collec- 
 tions, in public places and in the form of cuts, there is 
 not one that is authentic. It is all pure fancy.* 
 
 Notwithstanding this, I believe, that he did sit for a 
 portrait and probably for more than one. It is my be- 
 lief that we have his true lineaments, and my address 
 this evening will be devoted to showing upon what that 
 belief is founded. 
 
 The fact, that up to this time, there is no portrait of 
 Columbus that can be duly authenticated, explains 
 
 *Christophe Colomb, Hen. Harr., Tome 11., p. i66. 
 
Have we a Portrait of Columbus ? 5 
 
 why, during the latter part of the last century and 
 throughout the present one, so many pictures have 
 appeared that have been claimed to be original portraits 
 of him, all of them differing more or less from each 
 other; and what is remarkable is the credulity with which 
 distinguished scholars and writers upon Columbus, 
 and the events connected with him, have accepted some 
 of these as genuine and had them engraved for 
 their works without any evidence in support of them. 
 Any one, in fact, has felt at liberty to believe and to 
 persuade others, that some old portrait he has got 
 possession of is an original portrait of Columbus. 
 Painters, sculptors and engravers have also felt at 
 liberty to offer anything as their conception of his 
 true likeness, the result of which has been to produce 
 the greatest confusion, and to warrant the assertion that 
 no man probably has ever lived of whom there have been 
 so many different representations in portraiture. 
 
 Our associate, Mr. Ponce de Leon, who, like myself, 
 has been for many years engaged in this enquiry, and 
 to whom I have been indebted for much information, 
 tells me that he has seen more than 450 different rep- 
 resentations of Columbus. I have myself seen a great 
 many, and about a month ago, in looking over my col- 
 lection, Mr. Ponce de Leon found twelve that he had 
 never seen before. 
 
 Another explanation is that up to the present cen- 
 tury no investigation was made. In 1823 Spotorno, 
 an Italian writer, devoted a few pages to the subject, 
 but what may be called an investigation was not 
 undertaken until Don Valentin Carderera y Solano, an 
 eminent Spanish painter and archaeologist, and author 
 
6 Have we a Portrait of Columbus ? 
 
 of that great work on the Art Monuments of Spain, 
 Iconografia Espaiiola, and other artistic works, alike 
 distinguished for their learning and their accuracy, who 
 knew more of the history of Spanish art than any one 
 before him, published in 1851 a most valuable memoir 
 upon the subject,* which was followed in 1856 by the 
 paper of de Conches, to which I have referred. 
 
 When the citizens of Genoa in 1842 contemplated 
 erecting in that city a monument to Columbus, the 
 municipality applied to the Spanish government to as- 
 certain if any portrait of him was known in Spain, or 
 for any information existing there on the subject. 
 The government referred the matter to the Royal 
 Academy of Madrid, and the Academy appointed a 
 committee, of which Carderera was chairman, who in 
 185 1 made a most exhaustive report, which the Academy 
 published, giving everything that was then known either 
 in Spain or elsewhere upon the subject, and laying 
 down what must be the true line of enquiry in any in- 
 vestigation thereafter for further information. 
 
 Yet, notwithstanding the elaborate investigation of 
 Carderera, and the concurrence forty years ago of 
 Feuillet de Conches in its result, this confusion still 
 continues, and we had an illustration of it, in the Cen- 
 tennial Celebration in this city last October, in the 
 appearance in shop-windows, upon the public build- 
 ings, and in the streets, of a number of different-looking 
 personages as Columbus. 
 
 Many anecdotes might be given to illustrate the 
 effect which all this has produced. One which I heard 
 
 * Informe sobre los retratos de Cristobal Colon, su traje y escudo de armas por 
 Don Valeniin Carderera. Madrid, 1851. 4to. 
 
Have we a Portrait of Colwmbus ? 7 
 
 when I was in Seville in 1881 will suffice. There 
 was in the library, left by Columbus' son, Fernando, 
 to the Cathedral of Seville, a portrait of Columbus. 
 An artist asked what was thought of it, and the custo- 
 dian replied that it was one of the most reliable por- 
 traits ; upon which the artist said : " I am glad to hear 
 it, for I painted it from imagination, and exhibited it 
 at the Exposition in Paris, at the close of which it was 
 bought by a Spanish gentleman." 
 
 As an aid in this enquiry, we have the description 
 that has come down to us of the personal appearance 
 of Columbus by those who knew him. It is not only 
 very particular, but the five persons from whom it is de- 
 rived substantially agree with each other. To this test 
 therefore all pictures claimed to be true portraits of him 
 must be subjected, and when it is applied it reduces 
 them to a comparatively small number, and it is those 
 only that I shall seriously consider. 
 
 The earliest description of the person of Columbus 
 is found in a work attributed to Angelo Trivigiano, en- 
 titled " Libretto di tutta la navigazione dei Rei de 
 Spagna, Venezia," 1504 (Account of all the Navigations 
 of the Kings of Spain), in which he is described as a 
 " robust man, of a tall stature, ruddy and with a long 
 face." ^ 
 
 The next description of him is given in- a collection 
 of voyages entitled " Mondo Novo e Paesi Nuova- 
 mente Ritrovati " (the New World recently discovered), 
 attributed to Alessandro Zorzi, a cosmographer and 
 cartographer of Venice, which was published in Vi- 
 cenza in 1507, one year after Columbus' death. It con- 
 tains a brief description of the great navigator, which 
 
8 Have we a Portrait of Columbus? 
 
 is as follows: " This Christopher Columbus of Genoa 
 was a tall, straight man, of great understanding, and 
 long visage." 
 
 The next is by Oviedo, who knew Columbus person- 
 ally. He was a page of the king, with Columbus' son, 
 Fernando, and was in Barcelona when Columbus came 
 'to that city to meet Ferdinand and Isabella upon his 
 return from his first voyage, and Oviedo saw him then. 
 
 Ovieda says '' he was a man of honest parents and life, 
 of good stature and aspect, rather tall than of middle 
 height and with robust limbs. His eye was lively and 
 the oX\\^r features of his face ^' were in good proportion ; 
 his hair being red and his face somewhat ruddy and 
 freckled." He says that " he spoke well, was wary and of 
 great intelligence, a good Latin scholar and a most 
 learned cosmographer " ; that " he was gracious, when 
 he wished to be, but wrathful when aroused." f 
 
 The next is by Las Casas. This is the most valuable 
 of the several descriptions of him by his contemporaries, 
 because it is the fullest, and by a man who knew him 
 well in the latter part of his life. He says : " As regards 
 his exterior and physique, he was tall, above the medium 
 size ; his face was long and dignified; his nose aqui- 
 line, his eyes bluish, his complexion inclining towards a 
 glowing red. His hair and beard, when he was young, 
 were fair, but very soon turned white with so much 
 fatigue. He was witty and lively, speaking very well, 
 but was eloquent and vainglorious when speaking of 
 himself. He was serious with moderation, friendly to 
 strangers, amiable and pleasant with the people of his 
 
 * Harrisse erroneously translates it " other parts of his body." 
 f Oviedo, Book II., c. 2. 
 
Have wc a Portrait of Columbus? 9 
 
 household. With moderate gravity, he was discreet in 
 conversation, and so he could gain easily the love of 
 those who met him. Finally, he represented, with a 
 venerable aspect, a person of great position and author- 
 ity and worthy of all reverence. He was sober and 
 moderate in his eating, drinking, dressing and shoe- 
 ing."* 
 
 His son Ferdinand's description of his father is this : 
 " The Admiral was a man well-formed and of more 
 than the medium stature ; of a long visage and with 
 cheeks a little high, without inclining to fat or lean. 
 He had an aquiline nose and light eyes. He was fair, 
 with a lively color. In his youth he had blond hair, 
 although when he reached thirty years of age it became 
 white." t 
 
 There is a description of Columbus by Benzoni, who 
 never saw him. Benzoni went to the New World in 
 1 541, thirty-five years after the death of Columbus, 
 and remained there for fourteen years, and may have re- 
 ceived the very particular description he gives from 
 persons there who had known Columbus. I refer to it, 
 not only because it agrees with the previous descrip- 
 tions, but because it is of interest, as it is the only one 
 that mentions that his mouth was a little large, a feature 
 observable in what are known to be the^older portraits. 
 He says, " He was a man of reasonable stature, of sound 
 and vigorous limbs, of good judgment, of lofty mind 
 and of gentlemanly aspect. He had lively eyes, red 
 hair, an aquiline nose and the mouth a little large, and 
 
 *Las Casas. Historia de Las Indias. Madrid, 1875. Vol. I., p. 43. 
 f Vita di Cristoforo Colombo descritta da Ferdinando suo Figlio. Capitolo 
 III., p. 12. 
 
lo "Have we a Portrait of Columbus? 
 
 above all he was a friend of justice, but wrathful when 
 he was offended." * 
 
 Andres Bernaldez, Cura de los Palacios, was an in- 
 timate personal friend of Columbus, who was a frequent 
 guest at his house. He gives in his " Historia de los 
 Reyes Catolicos " (Vol. II., p. ']%^ the following account 
 of Columbus, upon his return from his second voyage : 
 " The admiral came to Castile in the month of June, 
 1496, in a dress of the color of a Franciscan friar. It 
 was almost exactly the shape or form of the dress of 
 such a friar, with the cord of St. Francis around his 
 waist, as an act of devotion." I refer to it, because in 
 the earliest representation of his person, positively 
 known, he is clothed in a dress of this kind. 
 
 What we get from these descriptions is that he was 
 a straight, well-built man, who was rather above the 
 medium height, that he had a long visage and high 
 cheek bones, but with the lineaments of his face well- 
 proportioned ; that his eyes were light and piercing, 
 his nose aquiline, and his complexion fair ; that in his 
 youth his hair had been red, but became white when 
 he was thirty ; which may be regarded as sufficient to 
 test the authenticity of anything claimed to be a por- 
 trait of him. 
 
 A knowledge of the character of a man is of some as- 
 sistance in judging of the genuineness of what is claimed 
 to be his portrait. Many judge of the character of a 
 person b}'' the face, the features or the general expres- 
 sion. Women do so intuitively. But in the case of 
 Columbus there is as much uncertainty about his char- 
 acter as there is in so many things respecting him. 
 
 * Benzoni, La Historia del Mondo Nuovo, Lib. i., p. 30. 
 
Have we a Portrait of Columbtis ? 1 1 
 
 It would naturally be supposed that a biographer, 
 after a full investigation of all that is known respecting 
 a man. would be able to present a carefully considered 
 and reliable statement of his character, but so far from 
 this being the case, the conflict among the biographers 
 of Columbus is not only greater but more extreme than 
 elsewhere. 
 
 More than sixty years ago, Washington Irving, in 
 his life of Columbus, gave a carefully drawn sketch of 
 his character, founded upon all that was then known 
 respecting him. It is too long to quote entire, but I 
 will give substantially the material part of it. In him, he 
 says, were singularly combined the poetical and the prac- 
 tical. His mind grasped all kinds of knowledge whether 
 procured by study or observation ; while his daring, but 
 irregular genius, bursting the limits of imperfect science, 
 bore him to conclusions far beyond the intellectual 
 vision of his contemporaries. He discerned the phe- 
 nomena of the exterior world with wonderful quickness 
 of perception, and the ability of quickly converting facts 
 to principles distinguishes him from the dawn to the close 
 of his sublime enterprise. He aimed at dignity and 
 wealth in the same lofty spirit in which he sought re- 
 nown. He was devoutly pious, religion mingling with 
 the whole course of his thoughts and actions. He was 
 a man of quick sensibility, liable to great excitement, to 
 sudden and powerful impulses. He was naturally irrita- 
 ble and impetuous; keenly sensible to injury and injus- 
 tice, yet the quickness of his temper was counteracted 
 by the benevolence and generosity of his heart. He was 
 free from the feeling of revenge, ready to forget and 
 to forgive, aud the magnanimity of his nature shows 
 
1 2 Have we a Portrait of Columbus ? 
 
 forth through all the troubles of his stormy career. 
 While Irving does not justify his enslaving the native 
 population, he considers that he was goaded on by the 
 mercenary impatience of the crown, the sneers of his 
 enemies and the unprofitable result of his enterprises. 
 That it was a blot upon his illustrious name and 
 should be considered as an error of the times in which 
 he lived.* 
 
 Prescott has said that " Whatever the defects of 
 Columbus' mental constitution, the finger of the his- 
 torian will find it difficult to point to a single blemish 
 in his moral character. That whether we contemplate 
 his character in its public or private relations, in all its 
 features it wears the same noble aspect. It was in 
 perfect harmony with the grandeur of his plans, and 
 with results more stupendous than those which Heaven 
 has permitted any other mortal to achieve." 
 
 In respect to these passages, the last American biog- 
 rapher of Columbus, Mr. Justin Winsor, the librarian 
 of Harvard College, assumes the responsibility of say- 
 ing, especially in respect to the observation of Prescott, 
 that it is difficult to point to a more flagrant disregard 
 of truth ; that it seems to mark an obdurate purpose to 
 disguise the truth, and that this " is nowhere more 
 patent than in the palliating hero-worship of Washing- 
 ton Irving." 
 
 Upon a charge so severe and sweeping as this I feel 
 that it is due to these two distinoruished American 
 authors to mention that Humboldt told me in 1851 that 
 there was then no historian in Europe that he would 
 place above Mr. Prescott ; and as to Washington Irving's 
 
 * Life of Columbus, Vol. II., B. iv., c. 5, Putnam's ed. N. Y., 1849. 
 
Have we a Portrait of Columbus f 13 
 
 biography, Navarrete, who was certainly competent to 
 judge, said, after it was published, that in fulness, impar- 
 tiality and exactness it was superior to any that had 
 preceded it,* and Mr. Harrisse, who was equally, and 
 in view of what is now known, even more competent, 
 and who is not given to undue praise, says, in a recent 
 publication : f " The work of Washington Irving is more 
 than literary. It is a history, executed with judgment 
 and impartiality, which leaves far behind all descriptions 
 of the discovery of the New World, published before, 
 or since. He studied with care almost all the docu- 
 ments that were known in his time, which testifies to 
 the probity of his researches." 
 
 In 1856 Roselly De Lorgues, a French writer, pub- 
 lished a biography of Columbus, in which, in his esti- 
 mate of his character, he transcends anything said by 
 Irving, Prescott, or any other writer. " We see in him," 
 he says, "a man who in virtue was perfect; of entire 
 purity of heart ; who in moral grandeur surpasses the 
 most celebrated types of antiquity and who is not in- 
 ferior to the noblest heroes formed by the Gospel ; 
 a man who from the nature of his mind and his religious 
 character, partook more of heaven than of earth," and 
 closes in these words : " To express our deepest con- 
 viction, we declare before man who kijows it not and 
 before God who knows, Christopher Columbus was a 
 Saint," printing the last sentence in large capitals. J 
 
 Whilst this French writer raises Columbus to an ele- 
 
 * living's Life of Columbus, Vol. I. Preface, XVII. N. Y.: G. F. Putnam, 
 1850. 
 
 f Christophe Colomb, Vol. II., p. 163. 
 
 :}: Histoire de Christophe Colomb par Roselly de Lorgues. Paris, 1S56. 
 Tome II., pp. 443, 465, 472. 476. 
 
14 Have we a Portrait of Columbus? 
 
 vation so high, a subsequent American biographer 
 Aaron Goodrich, sinks him to a depth correspondingly 
 low. He accuses him of cupidity, ingratitude, arro- 
 gance, perfidy and treachery. He declares that his 
 prevailing traits were hypocrisy and deceit, with which 
 were combined cowardice and cruelty, and that it was 
 from some such an original that Moliere drew his char- 
 acter of Tartuffe ; that his tastes were brutal, that no 
 character in history so successfully made a cloak of re- 
 ligion, and that no depravity could be attributed to him 
 that would be too gross for belief ; that the love of gain 
 and not science or religion was his motive power ; that 
 Gold was his God ; and winds up the chapter upon his 
 character in these words : " We look in vain through 
 his life for any trait or action that would endear him to 
 the heart of men, for one deed that may be regarded as 
 the impulse of a great and noble or of a generous heart ; 
 we find nothing but low cunning, arrogance, avarice, 
 religious cant, deceit and cruelty."* 
 
 Winsor's observation upon this degrading picture of 
 the great discoverer is, that " The critic's temper is too 
 peevish and his opinions are too unreservedly biased 
 to make his results of any value," f and gives his own 
 estimate of Columbus, which is not a laudatory one. 
 He describes him as "a creature of buffeting circum- 
 stances," and "a weakling in every element of com- 
 mand; " that while " not destitute of keen observation of 
 nature, this quality was not infrequently prostituted to 
 ignoble purposes;" that he was "a devout Catholic, 
 
 * Goodrich's Life of Columbus, pp. 86, 131, 321, 350, 355, 358, 364, 370. 
 N. v., 1874 
 
 t Winsor's Christopher Columbus, p. 504. Boston and New Yoik, 1872. 
 
Have we a Port^'ait of Cohimbits ? 15 
 
 according to the Catholicism of his epoch, but that when 
 tried by any test that finds the perennial in holy acts," 
 he does not bear examination ; that there was " no all- 
 loving Deity in his conception," but " his Lord was one 
 in whose name it was convenient to practise enormities ;" 
 that while "he mourned bitterly that his own efforts 
 were ill-requited, he had no pity for the miseries of 
 others;" that " no man ever evinced less capacity for 
 ruling a colony ;" that ** the problems he encountered 
 were those that required an eye to command, with tact 
 to persuade and will to coerce, and he had none of 
 them;" whereas J. G. Kohl, the celebrated German 
 traveller and scholar, in his " Discovery of America," 
 with substantially the same facts before him, says that 
 whilst " there was something visionary in Columbus' 
 nature, yet when the time for action arrived he was 
 never found wanting in decision and energy" ; and de- 
 scribes him generally, as a man in whose organization 
 were united physical energy and strong ideality ; that he 
 had a glowing imagination, with which were combined, 
 however, acute powers of observation and an earnest 
 desire to gain experience ; tendencies so opposite, that 
 in most men the imagination or the practical will pre- 
 dominates, but in his case the proper balance was main- 
 tained. Finally, Mr. Winsor says that, "no man craves 
 more than Columbus to be judged with all the palliations 
 demanded of a difference of his own age and ours," 
 and then impairs the effect of this concession by saying 
 that he considers it his duty at the same time, to 
 judge the paths which he trod by the scale of an 
 eternal nobleness.* 
 
 * Winsor's Columbus, pp. 449 to 512. 
 
1 6 Have we a Portrait of Columbus? 
 
 In this conflict I have asked our associate Fellow, Mr, 
 Ponce de Leon, for his opinion, as he has read nearly 
 everything relating to Columbus, and it is not very fav- 
 orable. It is this : that he was a type of the Italian of that 
 period, having no regard for the truth, when he thought 
 it his interest to resort to falsehood, and who could play 
 the hypocrite, as he did with Isabella, when he deemed 
 it necessary ; that he was cringing to superiors and 
 overbearing to inferiors, qualities usually combined, and 
 was hated by nearly every one under him. While am- 
 bitious of renown, he was avaricious and mean in money 
 matters, wanting everything for himself He was out- 
 wardly devout, but never suffered his religion to inter- 
 fere with anything he wanted to do ; that he was a man 
 of great energy and of an iron will, but was not cruel, 
 and altogether a better man than most of those that he 
 had to deal with ; that it is to be considered that what 
 he often witnessed, the cruelties that the Inquisition 
 inflicted upon the Moors and the Jews, and the sale of 
 enemies and negroes as slaves, had made him callous 
 to human suffering and indifferent to the rights of his 
 fellow-men. Mr. Ponce de Leon thinks that after he 
 was brought to Spain in chains, his mental faculties 
 became impaired ; that he was thereafter sad, depressed 
 and discontented, his correspondence during this period 
 showing that he was not the man that he had been, and 
 finally that he was not worse than his age, but upon 
 the whole better, which, in respect to that age, he says, 
 is saying a great deal. 
 
 But as it is desirable, for the purpose already stated, 
 that we should have, amid this conflict of opinion, the 
 best idea of him that can be obtained, I have selected 
 
Have zve a Portrait of Cohcmbiis ? i 7 
 
 what I regard as the broadest, the fairest and as a 
 whole the most complete representation of him I know 
 of, which is the one given by Peschel, the eminent Ger- 
 man geographer and anthropologist, abridging it some- 
 what in the translation 
 
 He says : " What made Columbus so great was the 
 stormy impulse of his age to pass beyond the boundary 
 of the Old World, which had become too contracted. 
 It was a restless longing toward the East and a keen 
 desire for its treasures that possessed all seafaring peo- 
 ple before the birth of the great Genoese, and Colum- 
 bus possessed what was essential for such an undertak- 
 ing — a keen sight for the phenomena of nature and a 
 lofty power of conception, which bound together as in 
 one what was most remote and even most improbable, 
 with surprising intuitions and amazing errors. If the 
 creations of his fancy were as real and as vital to him 
 as his great intuitions, their tenacious growth was so 
 interwoven with all his knowledge, that he never gave 
 way before the learning and intelligence of his age, 
 which held him for a madman ; nor wearied, though 
 repelled with scorn, in hawking about from one Euro- 
 pean court to another his vast design of a western way 
 to the land of spices, and, though he knew it not, to an 
 undiscovered world. Even after his great discovery he 
 looked upon his deed as a miracle, his visions as the 
 breath of a divine inspiration, and himself as the chosen 
 instrument of a high decree. 
 
 " ' Neither sagacity nor mathematics,' he says, ' nor 
 charts profited me anything. It came about only in 
 fulfilment of what Isaiah had said.' During an attack 
 of fever on the coast of Nicaragua he thought that he 
 
1 8 Have we a Portrait of Columbus f 
 
 heard a messenofer from Heaven who comforted him 
 with a promise that all his hardships would be recorded 
 in marble. He brooded over the prophetic chorus in 
 the Medea of Seneca, in respect to what would take 
 place beyond the Atlantic — [a prophecy made fifteen 
 hundred years before its fulfilment and one of the most 
 remarkable ever uttered by man, — which, translated 
 from the Latin, may be rendered in these words : 
 
 The time will come in far-off years 
 
 When the Ocean shall loosen the bonds of Nature, 
 
 And a great land appear, 
 
 And the seaman discover tiew worlds. 
 
 And Thule be no more the farthest land.] 
 
 "Natures, Peschel says,which are deeply stirred within 
 seldom have the gift of drawing strongly to themselves 
 what moves and acts around them ; men approach them 
 with reluctance, and do not feel their neighborhood to 
 be genial, which explains why Columbus did not win 
 the enthusiastic attachment of the Spanish adventurers 
 who followed him. 
 
 " Since we have been able, he says, by means of his 
 written remains to draw nearer to this great man, as a 
 man, we learn with pain that he was wanting in regard 
 for the rights of his fellow beings. He hunted the 
 aborigines with fierce dogs, treated them as property, 
 the prizes of the finders, and distributed them to the 
 holders of plantations, and gold-mines, thereby accom- 
 plishing their extinction. When we see, however, in 
 our own day how the rights of the weaker races are 
 shamefully violated, we may have some indulgence for 
 this man of the fifteenth century, though it is bitterly to 
 be regretted that he is not to be counted with the noble 
 spirits of his age, like Isabella and the brave Domini- 
 
Have we a Portrait of Columbus f \ 9 
 
 cans of Hispaniola, who stood up and contended for 
 the rights of the native population ; nor can we repress 
 a feeling of impatience when this great man on every 
 page of his writings, even in the pathos of religious 
 visions, shows his greed of gain and is haunted by 
 dreams of monopolies and fiscal plans. We sympathize 
 with the man who gave a world to Castile, and died 
 with a bitter feeling that he had served princes who were 
 ungrateful, and who escaped by his death one stroke of 
 fate which would have been harder to bear than the 
 manacles of Bobadilla. It was permitted to him to 
 carry to his grave the glorious illusion " that Cuba was 
 a province of the Chinese Empire, that Hispaniola was 
 the island of Zipangu, and that between the Caribbean 
 Sea and the Bay of Bengal there lay no water-covered 
 hemisphere, but only an isthmus. The discoverer of 
 America died without suspecting that he had found a 
 new continent. He believed the distance between 
 Jamaica and Spain to be but the third part of a circle 
 of latitude, and exclaimed : " The earth is not so large 
 by far as people think." The doubling of the world 
 by a new continent did not lie in his thought, and his 
 great deed would have seemed to him sorely diminished 
 if he had been forced to admit that behind the ocean, 
 over which he had triumphed, there lay yet another 
 vast sea, for then his plan to bring together the western 
 and the eastern civilizations would have been left but 
 half accomplished." 
 
 The earliest pictorial representation of the person 
 of Columbus, of which we have any information, was 
 in the gallery of Paolo Giovio, or, to give him his Latm 
 name, by which he is better known, Paulus Jovius, at 
 
20 Have we a Portrait of Coluvtbtis ? 
 
 Lake Como, in Italy, a wood-cut of which is in the sec- 
 ond edition of a work of Jovius, entitled Elogia Virortim 
 bellica virtute illustrium, or Eulogies of Men illustrious 
 for their warlike prowess, published at Basel in 1576, 
 and as this wood-cut is, as far as we know, the earliest 
 published portrait of Columbus, it will be an appropri- 
 ate introduction to this branch of our enquiry to give 
 some account of Jovius and his celebrated collection. 
 He was born at Como in 1483 and was consequently a 
 contemporary and a countryman of Columbus, but 
 probably never saw the Admiral. In 1506, when Co- 
 lumbus died, Jovius, who was then in his twenty-third 
 year, was a practising physician in Rome, which pro- 
 fession he gave up for the pursuit of letters, and be- 
 came distinguished as a writer of biographical and his- 
 torical works ; and having sought advancement in the 
 Church, Adrian VI. made him a canon of the Cathe- 
 dral of Como. When the Constable de Bourbon sacked 
 Rome, in 1527, Jovius having lost all he possessed, 
 Clement VII., to reimburse him, made him Bishop of 
 Nocera de' Pagani, in the Kingdom of Naples, then 
 under the dominion of the Crown of Spain ; and in 1530, 
 when the pope and Charles V., having been reconciled, 
 had an interview at Bologna, Clement took Jovius 
 with him, where it is said he was received by the em- 
 peror and the princes and noblemen in his suite with 
 marked distinction. He was a man of learning and of 
 ability, whose productions were widely read through- 
 out Europe, but a venal writer, who from large gifts 
 received from those whom he praised and those who 
 feared the venom of his pen, and by the sale of bene- 
 fices, amassed a large fortune, with the proceeds of 
 
Have we a Portrait of Columbus ? 21 
 
 which he built a villa, or rather a palatial residence, 
 upon a peninsula on Lake Como, upon what he sup- 
 posed to be the ruins of the villa of Pliny the Younger, 
 though in this, it appears, he was mistaken, and here he 
 brought together a great collection of rare and curious 
 things — antiquities, pictures, statues, and other works of 
 art, medals, gems, novel curiosities, both from the East 
 and the West Indies, and many other objects of interest, 
 which were arranged in seven stately galleries, to which 
 he applied distinctive names, such as the Vestibule of 
 Homer, the Hall of Pliny, the Hall of Minerva, the 
 Apartment of the Sirens, the Hall of the Graces, etc. ; 
 and he gave to the whole the general name of the 
 " Abode of the Muses," from the Greek original of our 
 modern word " Museum." 
 
 A great central feature of this collection was a 
 gallery devoted to the portraits of illustrious men, 
 of which Vasari says he had upward of five hundred, 
 obtained largely by gifts from sovereigns, princes, noble- 
 men, and artists ; and among them was a portrait of his 
 countryman Columbus. Italian writers say that he was 
 constantly begging genuine portraits from kings, 
 princes, noblemen and artists, and when he could not 
 attain them by gift, that he employed the very best 
 artists; and that he took great pains to secure those 
 that were genuine. In the preface to his Elogia, 1551, 
 he states that the warlike (bellicosi) heroes, whose 
 eulogy he pronounces, "may be seen in his gallery set 
 forth in their true likeness, in admirable portraiture." 
 And in his letters published by Ticozzi and Boteri, he 
 refers to the great care he took in collecting authentic 
 portraits, " never feeling satisfied," he says, with those 
 
22 Have we a Portrait of Columbus? 
 
 he received, *' fearing their incorrectness." As he was 
 not only a Spanish bishop, but a man of great influence 
 with Charles V., who gave him a pension, as well as 
 with the eminent personages of his court, it may fairly 
 be assumed that if a portrait of Columbus then existed 
 in Spain, he, of all other men, was the one most likely 
 to obtain it. Count Giovio says (Lari Artistici, Gio- 
 vanni Giovio, Como, 1881) that it is believed that he 
 got his portrait of Columbus from the navigator's son 
 Diego, which, without something more authentic than 
 this, may be regarded as doubtful, for Diego had been 
 dead for more than ten years, when Jovius in 1537 
 erected his villa at Como. 
 
 It may well be believed that what he says of the 
 great care he took to get only reliable portraits for his 
 gallery was true. Some of the portraits which are 
 printed in the first part of the edition of the Elogia 
 of 1576, such as that of Romulus and a few others, 
 were necessarily imaginative ; but it may have been 
 otherwise with distinguished men of the fifteenth and 
 sixteenth centuries, whose portraits, unless known to 
 be genuine, would scarcely have been admitted in a 
 gallery that was renowned throughout Europe, and 
 that, with the collection of which it formed a part, 
 was visited by people of all classes and of all countries, 
 from kings and princes downwards. 
 
 Tiraboschi says (Storia della Letteratura Italiana, 
 Vol. VII., Libro III., p. 897, ed. Firenze, 1810), that 
 the Museum of Jovius was one of the most memorable 
 undertakinofs which the love of the fine arts and of 
 letters produced in the sixteenth century. He adds : 
 
 "The description which he himself and others after 
 
Have we a Portrait of Columbus f 23 
 
 him have made of it, excites astonishment in us that a 
 man in private Hfe could accomplish so much ; and he 
 owed a great part of the happy success of his great idea 
 to his very histories themselves ; for when it was known 
 that he was writing the events of his time, many, solici- 
 tous for their good name, sent him valuable gifts, hop- 
 ing in this way to render the historian favorable to them." 
 
 Its value may be judged by the circumstance that 
 Giulio Romano bequeathed to it his collection of the 
 paintings of Raphael It was so celebrated that Cosmo 
 First, Grand Duke of Tuscany, had copies of many of 
 the portraits made for his collection in Florence, which 
 are now in the Ufhzi gallery. These copies were made 
 by an artist named Cristofano dell' Altissimo. 
 
 Altissimo went to Como in 1552, the year that Jovius 
 died, and completed the copies by 1555.* Vasari 
 gives a list of the portraits Altissimo copied. It is 
 not in Bohn's English edition of Vasari, but will be 
 found in the edition of Bologna, 1674 (3d vol App. 
 Sign. Eff.). It contains 253 names, among which is 
 " Colombo Genovese " and the portrait of Columbus, 
 now in the Uffizi gallery at Florence, is supposed to 
 be that copy. It appears also that another painter, 
 Bernardino Campi, copied the same series at the same 
 time as Altissimo for Donna Ippolita Gonzaga,f 
 and if he copied the Columbus there would have 
 been two copies contemporaneously made, by different 
 artists, of the Jovian portrait. 
 
 Lanzi J says that Altissimo " copied the features of 
 
 * Vasari's Lives of the Painters, Bohn's Eng. edition, Vol. VI. 
 
 f Notes to Vasari by S. P. Richter, Bohn's ed. of Vasari, Vol. 6,301. 
 
 X History of Painting in Italy, Bohn's Ed. 1847, Vol. I., p. 197. 
 
24 Have we a Portrait of Columbus? 
 
 the celebrated men, but attended little to other circum- 
 stances ; whence it happens that the Giovian collection, 
 the Medicean one alone, exhibits many very dissimilar 
 manners, but the features of the originals are very faith- 
 fully expressed," which Bryan repeats with the remark 
 that these copies have a high degree of finishing with- 
 out labor. ^ 
 
 Jovius published several works in the form of eulo- 
 giums upon the illustrious men in his gallery, one of 
 them being devoted to Columbus, and no one who has 
 written before or since has pronounced a higher eulo- 
 gium upon him. What is remarkable for the period is 
 the thorough knowledge he possessed of what Colum- 
 bus had done ; the only error being that, as to its re- 
 sults, he confounded one voyage with that of another. 
 In this Elogium, as he called it, which is well written and 
 eloquent, he says who does not wonder that this man, 
 with a most open countenance and the amazing strength 
 of a vast intellect, should have been born in a mean 
 little village near Savona, and closes his eulogium with 
 this passage : " So that Columbus seems to be in every 
 way worthy to be honored with a most fitting statue at 
 Genoa, by those Ligurians who to-day regard things 
 of the present time rather than those of a former 
 period;" and how truly he judged them appears in the 
 fact that it took them just three hundred years to act 
 upon this suggestion. 
 
 It should, however, be stated that if what is said of 
 Jovious by certain writers is correct, he is not free 
 from the suspicion of being a man capable of palming 
 
 * Bryan's Dictionary. 
 
Have we a Portrait of Columbus f 25 
 
 off the portrait of another in his gallery as that of Co- 
 lumbus, if it could be done without fear of detection. 
 
 It is said that Adrian VI. made him a canon upon 
 the condition that he would say something honorable 
 about him in his historical works. Whether this was 
 true or not, what he did say, and that not in a history, 
 or a biography, but where it would scarcely be looked 
 for, in a work upon Natural History, was that "he was 
 without talent, ability, or mind, and, in a word, almost 
 stupid."* It is also said that he frankly declared that 
 he had two pens, one of gold and one of iron, and that 
 he used either, as the occasion served. 
 
 Bodin, while commending the elegance of his writ- 
 ings, says that he prostituted his pen in writing history 
 and got more by telling lies than other men by relat- 
 ing the truth ; that when asked why he told so many, 
 he replied that he did it to oblige his friends ; that he 
 knew the age would not give any credit to his history, 
 but that posterity would not doubt what he said. Vos- 
 sius states that he promised an ancient genealogy to 
 all scoundrels who paid him well, traduced others who 
 would not, and had the fate of all liars, as he was not 
 believed when he spoke the truth. Brantome calls him a 
 great liar, Scaliger says the same, and Maresius 
 speaks of him with the utmost contempt. But Bayle 
 says that he can hardly believe that he confessed all 
 that is related of him, as he boldly declared that he 
 printed his book in the lifetime of those concerned, 
 as he did not fear to be convicted of falsehood, and 
 he has been defended by Oudin, Boccalini, Marcel and 
 
 * Biographic Universelle, Paris, 1816, torn. 17, p. 434, etc. 
 
26 Have we a Portrait of Columbus^/ 
 
 other writers ; the truth probably being that he was 
 not as bad as he was painted. 
 
 It is not probable, however, that he palmed off an- 
 other portrait for that of Columbus. He could not 
 have done so safely in a gallery so much visited, for 
 there were men then living who had known Columbus, 
 and Carderera says that at that highly-cultivated 
 period of the sixteenth century it would not have been 
 possible to put up a portrait of another in a public 
 gallery as that of Columbus without detection. 
 
 This historian, biographer, and great collector died 
 in Florence in 1552, and the reader of his epitaph in 
 the church of San Lorenzo, in that city, was informed, 
 in a Latin couplet, that he was the glory of the Latin 
 tongue, and superior either to Sallust or Livy, a judg- 
 ment which posterity has not confirmed.* 
 
 The fate of his gallery may be briefly told. When 
 Clement VH. gave him a better benefice at Como than 
 he had had before, he also lodged him in an apartment 
 in the Vatican, which he occupied until 1549. But Paul 
 IIL, Clement's successor in the papacy, having refused 
 to appoint him Bishop of Como, when that see became 
 vacant, he left Rome and passed the remaining three 
 years of his life at his villa in Como, or in visiting dif- 
 ferent courts in Italy, dying, as has been said, in Flor- 
 ence in 1552 of an attack of the gout. His villa was 
 broken up by the military operations in Italy toward 
 the close of the sixteenth century. The villa itself was 
 destroyed by the rising of the water of Lake Como, and 
 when Boldoni saw it in 161 7 it was a ruin. The col- 
 lection of the portraits of illustrious men, however, 
 
 * Niceron, Memoires, etc.. Tome 25, pp. 360, 361. 
 
Have we a Portrait of Coluinbtts? 27 
 
 was kept together, as a whole, until 1587, when they 
 were divided between two families of Jovius' descend- 
 ants, the head of one family taking the men of warlike 
 prowess, and the head of the other the learned men. 
 
 After this it underwent several subdivisions, which 
 in the end resulted in the dispersion of the whole col- 
 lection.* Where the portrait of Columbus went was 
 not known, but in 1880 a search was made, in that part 
 of the collection which had descended to Count Giovio, 
 at the suggestion of Mr. J. S. Jorrin, a gentleman of 
 Havana, who has for many years been engaged in in- 
 vestigations relating to Columbus, and a portrait was 
 found with the abbreviated inscription over it of Colum- 
 buSy Lygur, Novi Orbis Reptor (Columbus, Ligurian, 
 Discoverer of the New World), Liguria being the terri- 
 tory in which Genoa is situated. This picture is now 
 in the possession of Dr. d'Orchi, of Como, from whom 
 it gets its present name, and I shall hereafter refer to it. 
 
 I will now, with the aid of the stereopticon, show you 
 the portraits, beginning with those that alone, in my 
 judgment, are entitled to consideration, and which in 
 the order of time, as far as we know, are the oldest ; 
 and will then show you the more prominent of those 
 that have been believed in, with little or nothing to sup- 
 port the claim made for them. 
 
 This is a photograph of the Jovian wood-cut from a 
 copy of the edition of the Elogia of 1576 that is in my 
 possession. 
 
 Carderera says of it, what will be equally obvious 
 to you upon looking at it, that the proportion and gen- 
 
 * Lari Artistici, Giovanni Giovio. Como, 1881. Printed for private circula- 
 tion. Lanzi's History of Painting in Italy. Vol. I., p. 197. Bohn ed. 
 
28 
 
 Have we a Portrait of Columbus ? 
 
 eral form of the head, the long face and the curvature 
 of the nose conform to the description of Columbus 
 
 The Jovian Columbus. 
 
 by his contemporaries, but that beyond this all is vague 
 and uncertain ; that the right eyebrow is a perfect arch, 
 while the left is rather straight ; that the upper lip is 
 very confused, as well as the muscles of the face, which 
 
Have we a Portrait of Colu77tbus? 29 
 
 are scarcely defined, because, he remarks, the art of en- 
 graving on wood did not then in such a sympathetic face 
 admit of more perfect details. The wood-cut,he observes, 
 is so rough and worn that it is impossible to judge with 
 exactitude ; that it would not be a sufficient guide for an 
 artist to reproduce the physiognomy of Columbus, 
 owing to the roughness and indistinctness of the en- 
 graving, and because it does not sufficiently define 
 some important features. He and Senor Angel de los 
 Rios, a distinguished member of the Madrid Academy, 
 and an eminent literary man in Spain, agree that this 
 wood-cut must be the standard in this enquiry, as it is the 
 most ancient testimony that a portrait of Columbus had 
 been painted, and because he is represented in the frock 
 of a Franciscan monk, which was the kind of dress 
 worn by Columbus when the curate Bernaldez saw him 
 in Castile, upon his return from his second voyage. 
 Senor de los Rios, moreover, has shown that this was 
 the kind of dress then worn by sailors in Spain as a pro- 
 tection against the weather, and which, he says, is still 
 worn by Spanish sailors and by farmers in the Basque 
 provinces.* Carderera compared this wood-cut with a 
 sketch of the picture in the Uffizi gallery, which he 
 had made for him by a distinguished artist in Florence 
 and he was satisfied of the identity of the two heads. 
 
 I will now show the picture in the Uffizi from a 
 photograph of it. 
 
 You will see that it agrees with the wood-cut in the 
 manner in which the hair is worn, in the shape of the 
 forehead, in the high-arched eye-brows and the fixed 
 
 *Boletin de la Real Academia de la Historia, Tomo I., Cuaderno III. 
 Feb. 187Q. 
 
30 Have we a Portrait of Columbus? 
 
 look out of the eye, so far as these features are indi- 
 cated in the wood-cut ; in the aquiline nose and the 
 long face, which looks, however, fuller. I have seen 
 this portrait twice during the past forty years, and if I 
 may rely on my recollection, it represents a man of 
 
 The Altissimo Portrait. 
 
 forty or a little over, with dark hair. We do not posi- 
 tively know the year of Columbus's birth, and his age 
 at any particular period has, therefore, been a matter 
 of conjecture ; though as appears from a document re- 
 cently discovered at Genoa it may be fixed within a 
 range of five years. In respect to his hair, his son Fer- 
 
Have we a Portrait of Columbus f 3 1 
 
 dinand says that it turned white when he was thirty, 
 whilst Oviedo, who saw him at Barcelona after his re- 
 turn from his first voyage, says that his hair was red, 
 and he was then, according to the recently-discovered 
 document, at least forty years of age, so that upon these 
 two points there is the same uncertainty as in other 
 matters respecting him. In pointing out that the face 
 is more round and full in this picture than in the Jovian 
 wood-cut, and that the hair is neither red, nor gray, but 
 dark, you will remember what I quoted from Lanzi, 
 that whilst Altissimo copied the features, he attended 
 /zV//^ to ^M^r circumstances, and I have read in another 
 writer, whose name I cannot recall, that in making these 
 copies he painted them so as to conform to the then 
 prevailing taste of the Renaissance, and in doing so he 
 may have taken many liberties. 
 
 In the general effect the two pictures do not look 
 alike, in respect to which I may quote the remark of 
 Carderera, that variations born of the school and man- 
 nerism of each artist are no obstacle to a good resem- 
 blance ; of which I will now show you a striking illustra- 
 tion in two copies of this very portrait in the Uffizi 
 Gallery. 
 
 When Thomas Jefferson was minister to France in 
 1784 he was desirous of obtaining a copy of a portrait 
 of Columbus to bring to this country, and being told 
 by the best-informed persons that the one in the Uffizi 
 was considered a genuine portrait, he had a copy made 
 of it, which is now in the possession of the Massachu- 
 setts Historical Society ; and when Gouverneur Morris 
 afterwards went as minister to France he also had a 
 copy made of the one in the Uffizi, which after his death 
 
32 Have we a Portrait of Columbus? 
 
 his widow presented to the New York Historical 
 Society where it now is. I will show you these 
 copies together, and without a careful examination you 
 would scarcely suppose that both are copies from the 
 same picture. 
 
 You will observe that this picture in the Uffizi has 
 not the Franciscan garment that is in the wood cut. It 
 may be that the copyist, Altissimo, thought it unfit in 
 the portrait of a distinguished man, or it may be that 
 the engraver of the wood-cut, who, it appears, like Altis- 
 simo, was not a faithful copyist, may have heard, for 
 the fact was then known, that Columbus had worn such 
 a habit, and thought it appropriate in the wood-cut to 
 clothe him in what was in his times the dress alike of 
 a sailor and of an ecclesiastic. 
 
 The wood-cuts in the Elogia of 1576 were engraved 
 by Thomas Stimmer. Ginguene, a French writer, in 
 an article in the Biographie Universelle in 18 16, says 
 that the portraits engraved in this book " were not 
 copied with fidelity from those that ornamented the 
 gallery of Jovius." He does not say upon what this 
 statement was founded ; but a century ago, he may 
 possibly have seen portraits that were known to have 
 been in the Jovian gallery. He was a very learned man 
 and the author, among other works, of a voluminous 
 history of Italian Literature. He was noted for his 
 high integrity and his accuracy, and it may be fairly 
 assumed that a scholar of this nature would not have 
 made such a positive statement as this, unless he had 
 found evidence to warrant it.* 
 
 ' Thomas Stimmer was a Swiss who, between the years 1570 and 1590, prac- 
 tised his art in Basel and at Strasburg. The art of wood engraving at that 
 
< 
 
 H 
 
 o 
 
 0. 
 
 CO -^ 
 
 s I 
 
Have we a Portrait of Columbus? 33 
 
 Some years ago I met with a photograph of Colum- 
 bus which greatly impressed me. I then knew noth- 
 ing of the source from which it was derived; but in 
 going over the Naval Museum of Madrid in 1881 I 
 saw the picture from which it was taken. I made in- 
 quiries respecting this portrait, and a few days after- 
 
 period, the last quarter of the sixteenth century, was iu a low state (Linton's 
 Masters of Wood Engraving, p. 120), and Stimmer was among the best of those 
 that followed it. He was, what was unusual at the time, a designer, as well as an 
 engraver and was employed for some years by Peter Perna, the publisher at Basel, 
 in illustrating popular works. Papillon says that he had taste and a marvellous 
 facility in composition (Traite de la Gravure en Bois, tom. I., pp. 258, 259), quali- 
 ties which would not necessarily warrant the assurance that he was a faithful 
 copyist of 130 portraits of the Joi^ian gallery, but the kind of artist who might be 
 tempted to take liberties. Ginguene is not the only writer that refers to the want 
 of fidelity in these wood-cuts. Niceron, in his history of illustrious literary men 
 ( Memoires pour servir a I'histoire des hommes illustresdans la republique des lettres, 
 Paris, 43 Vols., 1724-1741, 847, H. L.), goes even farther than Ginguene, for after 
 stating that this Elogia of J jvius is one of the most interesting and useful of his 
 works, says that it is sometimes found with portraits which are for the most part 
 fanciful. Peter Perna in his edition of this Elogia, in 1575, states upon the title 
 page that it is " now adorned with portraits, expressed to the life'' from Jovius' 
 gallery, and in his preface to another work of Jovius, Elogia Virorum Literis 
 lUustrium, published by Perna two years afterwards, which has likewise wood- 
 cuts of the personages whose eulogiums are given, he says that the wood-cuts 
 with which it is illustrated are " set forth with the greatest fidelity to the pro- 
 totypes newly brought forth from that suburban Como, at no less expense than 
 they were taken to it"; which may be nothing more than a publisher's advertisement. 
 Mr. Harrisse, in a recent publication (Christopher Columbus and the Bank 
 of St. George, New York, 1888), says that the oldest effigy of Columbu*: is a 
 rough wood-cut in Jovius' " Illustrium Virorum Vitse " printed in Florence in 1549. 
 I have not seen the edition of the Vitcs, as it is called, of that year, but the edi- 
 tion of the work two years afterwards by the same publisher, the Duke's printer, 
 L. Torrentini, contains no eulogy on Columbus, nor any wood-cuts. In the same 
 year, in the same city, the same printer published, the Jovian Elogia Virorum 
 Bellica Virtute Illustrium (Men illustrious for their warlike prowess) which 
 contains the eulogy on Columbus, but has no wood-cuts, nor engraving of any 
 kind, except the publisher's imprint on the title page. Jovius was the author of 
 at least four different works which were either biographies or what he called 
 eulogies upon the illustrious persons in his gallery. I. Elogia Virorum Illus- 
 trium, Venice, 1546; 2. Illustrium Virorum Vitse, Florence, 1549, 1551, Basel, 
 
34 Have we a Portrait of Cohimbus f 
 
 wards the head of the Museum politely addressed me a 
 note, to the effect that neither he nor his predecessor had 
 ever been able to learn anything respecting its history, 
 I have since learned, from what is said of it by Car- 
 derera and from other sources, that the Minister of Ma- 
 rine, many years ago, ordered a portrait to be painted 
 
 1577; 3- Elogia Virorum Bellica Virtute lUustrium, Florence, i£5i; Basel, 1575 ; 
 4. Elogia Virorum Literis Illustrium, Basel, 1577, and there are other titles: 
 Elogia veris clarorum virorum imaginibus apposita quae in Musaeo loviano Comi 
 spectantur . . . addita Adrian! Pont. Vita, Venitiis, 1546, fol.; and Elogia Doctorum 
 Virorum ab avorum memona publicatis ingenii monumentis illustrium, Venice, 
 1546 ; Antwerp, 1557; Basil, 1571, in respect to all of which there is some con- 
 fusion among biographers and authors, as Jovius made additions and changes 
 in these works, an elogiurn that had appeared in an earlier work being some- 
 times transferred to a later one as more appropriate, so that these different works 
 are sometimes confounded with each other. 
 
 If the edition of the work known as the Vitae (Illustrium Virorum Vitae, 
 Florence, 1549) contained this woodcut of Columbus, as Mr. Harrisse states, it 
 is noticeable that no eulogy upon Columbus nor wood cut of him is in the second 
 edition of that work printed by the same publisher in the same place two years 
 afterwards, and that the Elogia Virorum Bellica, etc., printed by him the same 
 year, 1551, has the eulogy on Columbus, but no cut of him; which I state, having 
 examined both editions. 
 
 So far as I have been able to ascertain, the wood-cuts, of which that of Colum- 
 bus was one, first appeared in Peter Perna's edition of the Elogia Virorum Bellica, 
 etc., in 1575, the title page of which indicates, by the words "and tiow 
 adorned with portraits," etc., that the work was then, for the first time, illustrated 
 by these wood-cuts. In a subsequent edition of the work some years afterwards, 
 Perna, in a preface in which he dedicates this edition to Francis de' Medici, 
 after mentioning that the work was " formerly dedicated to Cosmus, that great 
 prince, by the greatest historian of our age," commends the edition to Francis, 
 "as now illustrated by true images from the life, gathered, increased and or- 
 namented with great care, equal art and no less expense," which I interpret as 
 meaning that it was he, Perna, who had illustrated the work by these wood-cuts. 
 There is another circumstance which confirms my impression that they first 
 appeared in this edition of Basel of 1575. The engraver Stimmer surrounded 
 each of the portraits with an elaborate border or frame, embracing figures and 
 other ornamental designs. In the copy that I have of this edition, which con- 
 tains 130 wood-cuts, ten frames are printed with the space for the portraits left 
 blank, indicating that when this copy went to the press, the figures to fill these 
 blank spaces had not then been engraved. 
 
 n 
 
Have zue a Portrait of Columbus f 
 
 35 
 
 of Columbus for his department, and that the artist em- 
 ployed painted it from an engraving of Columbus by 
 Capriolo, an Italian engraver, in a work called Ritratti 
 di Cento Capitanz Ilhcstri {j^ovtvdAis of a hundred illus- 
 trious captains), which Capriolo published in Rome in 
 
 Columbus. 
 {Marine Museum, Madrid^ 
 
 1596, twenty years after the publication of the Jovian 
 wood-cut, and which, judging from the descriptions of 
 Columbus' personal appearance that have come down 
 to us and what we may accept as to his character, is to 
 my mind the most satisfactory representation of him 
 which exists. It greatly impressed Carderera, who 
 thinks it was engraved from another portrait than the 
 
36 
 
 Have we a Portrait of Columbus ? 
 
 one in the Jovian Gallery, which was painted from the 
 life, after the great discoverer's final return from his 
 fourth voyage, when he was sad and down-hearted, 
 through the ingratitude of the king and his courtiers, 
 but had an admirer in an artist who would have found 
 
 CHRISTOPHORO COLOMBO 
 
 The Capriolo Engraving. 
 
 a pleasure in making a portrait of so great a man, 
 either in painting or sketching him. 
 
 The learned Baron Vernazza has said that it is not 
 known that there was before 1506, the year in which 
 Columbus died, any painter or sculptor living in Spain, 
 except Antonio del Rincon, the court painter of Ferdi- 
 nand and Isabella. It is an unsafe thing for any writer 
 
Have we a Portrait of Columbus ? 37 
 
 to make such a positive statement as this, for I find 
 that there were in Spain, during Columbus' time, fifteen 
 painters, all men of ability,* that several of them were 
 portrait-painters, and that between 1492 and 1506 there 
 were three painters in Seville, where Columbus lived 
 during most of the time that he was in Spain, Juan 
 Sanchez de Castro, Juan Nunez, his pupil, and Gon- 
 zalo Diaz. 
 
 It is true that the painting of portraits of individuals 
 was not then as general in Spain as in Italy or the 
 Netherlands. Painters there were mostly employed in 
 executing works for churches, or convents, or otherwise 
 decorating religious edifices. They painted religious 
 subjects such as saints, apostles, or scenes from the 
 Saviour's life, generally representing single figures or 
 groups of persons, of whom there being no portraits, 
 they were painted from living models; so that these 
 artists may be said to have been constantly employed 
 in the art of portraiture, and any one of them could 
 have painted a good portrait. 
 
 The more I have examined the Capriolo engraving, 
 the more I have been convinced that we have in it the 
 true likeness of Columbus at a late period of his life 
 and such as no artist of that period would be likely to 
 have created. The face is somewhat broader than in 
 the portraits previously referred to ; but this is a pecu- 
 liarity of Capriolo's engravings. In all other respects 
 Carderera and De los Rios recognized that the features 
 
 * Juan Sanchez de Castro, Pedro Sanchez, Juan Nunez, Gonzalo Diaz, 
 Nicolas Francisco Pisan, Jorge Ingles, Frutos Flores, Juan Flamenco, Fran- 
 cisco de Amberes, Juan de Flandes, Juan de Borgona, Antonio del Rincon, Alvar 
 Perez de Velloldos, Garcia del Barcia, Juan Rodriguez, and some others. 
 
38 Have we a Portrait of Columbus ? 
 
 are the same as the one in the Uffizi. The stereopti- 
 con view of it that I have shown is from a copy of the 
 work in my possession, now a rare book, which, after 
 a search of many years, I succeeded in obtaining. 
 
 The argument of de Conches that if there had been 
 a portrait to refer to, Oviedo, Fernando, and after 
 them Benzoni and Herrera, would not have given such 
 details of Columbus' personal appearance, is not con- 
 clusive. The utmost that can be inferred from this is 
 that they probably did not know of any portrait. It 
 does not prove that one had never been painted. 
 Oviedo saw him upon his return from his first voyage. 
 Las Casas knew him only in the latter part of his life, 
 and Ferdinand was a youth of eighteen when his father 
 died, and it does not follow if a likeness of him had 
 been taken, that Oviedo, Fernando, or Benzoni and 
 Herrera, or any one of them, would necessarily have 
 known it. 
 
 In the engraving, Columbus is dressed in a close-fit- 
 ting habit, as in the Uffizi picture, over which a mantle 
 is classically draped. This the artist employed by the 
 Minister of Marine did not follow ; but substituted for 
 it the dress in the Yanez picture, to be hereafter referred 
 to, as that picture was in 1763, and painting the por- 
 trait in colors he gave the eyes, the hair, and the com- 
 plexion as described by Columbus' contemporaries. It 
 appears to have been removed from the Department 
 of Marine to where it now is in the Naval Museum. I 
 had a copy of it made while I was in Madrid for our 
 Society, and it may be seen in our principal room. A 
 recent German writer, who it would seem was not aware 
 of the engraving of 1596, frorn which it was taken, thinks 
 
Have we a Portrait of Columbus? 
 
 39 
 
 that it, and the recently discovered portrait under the 
 Yaiiez, are, when we carefully examine the description 
 of Columbus by his contemporaries, the most like him.* 
 Domenico Colombo, lord of the castle of Cuccaro, in 
 Piedmont, claimed to be a relative of Columbus and a 
 representative of that family who brought a suit be- 
 fore the Council of the Indies to inherit, when the male 
 
 The Cancellieri Engraving. 
 
 line of Columbus became extinct, and set forth, among 
 other things, that his family had in their possession a 
 genuine portrait of Columbus, which Harrisse thinks 
 is entitled to consideration. 
 
 A fine engraving of this picture was published by 
 Napione in 1808, in his work on the birthplace of Co- 
 lumbus, and another was published by Cancellieri, the 
 writer of a work on the navigator, from which this por- 
 trait gets its name. Carderera, whilst recognizing its 
 
 *'Allgemeine Geschichte von Wilhelm Oncken, Berlin, 1882, pp. 232 to 240. 
 
40 Have zve a Portrait of Columbus ? 
 
 general resemblance to the preceding portraits, points 
 out a slight variation in the hair and in the e5'ebrows. 
 
 A few miles north of Genoa, close to the sea, on the 
 Corniche road, is Cogoleto, which for more than a cen- 
 tury enjoyed the distinction of being the birthplace of 
 Columbus. It is a small village of a single street, 
 upon one of the houses of which one Antonio Colombo 
 in 1650 placed an inscription to the effect that Colum- 
 bus was born in that house. I was at CoQfoleto in 1881, 
 and making some general inquiry of the person who oc- 
 cupied the house respecting Columbus, he took me to 
 another house in the same street, and ascending^ to the 
 second story brought me into a room where the village 
 archives were kept. A venerable old gentleman, the 
 apparent custodian of the archives, was seated at a 
 table, and, when informed that I was making enquiries 
 respecting Columbus, he turned in his chair and draw- 
 ing back a green curtain exhibited what is known as the 
 Cogoleto portrait. Isnardi, who wrote a book on 
 the birthplace of Columbus, states that the history 
 of this picture has been traced for more than three 
 hundred years, a statement with which the picture 
 certainly, at least in its appearance, agrees, for it is 
 old and very much worn. The late Admiral Bald- 
 win, who was then a member of our Council and at the 
 time in command of the United States squadron in the 
 Mediterranean, had, at my request, a photograph taken 
 of it, of the size of the original, for our Society, which 
 now hangs upon our walls. The portrait appears to 
 me to have been the work of a not over-skilful artist.* 
 
 *The photographic copy of the Cogoleto picture in the Society's possession was 
 found to be too indistinct to reproduce in a satisfactory wood cut. 
 
Have we a Portrait of Columbus ? 
 
 41 
 
 It has a hard, somewhat heavy and solemn look, but 
 has the same features as the previous portraits, with the 
 same depression in the chin that is seen in the Altissimo, 
 the Capriolo and in the other earlier portraits, but much 
 more marked. It has the same dress as in the Altissimo, 
 
 . , ^"^'^''-^ ^f^-"*^. 
 
 The Belvedere Columbus. 
 
 and it will be noticed that the mouth " is a little large," 
 as mentioned in the description of Benzoni. It has the 
 inscription above the head : Christophorus Coltimbus 
 Novi Orbis Reptor (Christopher Columbus, Discoverer 
 of the New World). 
 
 Among those who had copies made in the sixteenth 
 century from the Jovian gallery was Ferdinand, Arch- 
 
42 Have we a Portrait of Columbus? 
 
 duke of Austria, who, in 1579, sent artists to Como to 
 have copies of these celebrated portraits for his castle 
 in Innsbruck, and the portrait of Columbus now in the 
 Belvedere at Vienna is supposed to be one of these 
 copies. This is from an engraving of it in my posses- 
 sion, and its resemblance, in its general features, to the 
 portrait in the Uffizi gallery at Florence, by Altissimo, 
 will be recognized. 
 
 This is from a book of engravings by Crispin de Pass, 
 published in 1598, twenty-two years after the Jovian 
 wood-cut and two years after the Capriolo engraving. It 
 has the long face, the aquiline nose, the high-arched eye- 
 brows, and the same dress as the wood-cut, with a gold 
 chain, as Columbus was known to have worn one, and 
 with a nautical instrument in his hand. Carderera points 
 out that the shape of the nose has been altered by the 
 engraver, and he appears to have made a few other un- 
 important changes.* 
 
 In 1763 a Mr. Yanez brought from Granada to Ma- 
 drid four portraits, all of the same size and general ap- 
 pearance, which were purchased by the Spanish Gov- 
 ernment ; one of which was a portrait of Columbus. It 
 had a light cloak crossing the breast, and in the dress 
 and features was different from any portrait previously 
 known. About twelve years ago it was subjected to a 
 critical examination, when it appeared to have been re- 
 touched, and upon rubbing the paint in one corner the 
 letter C was found, which led to a removal of the outer 
 covering, when a much finer portrait was discovered 
 beneath, corresponding in all respects with the descrip- 
 
 * The description given in the text is thought to be sufficient without a wood 
 cut. 
 
Have we a Portrait of Columbus ? 
 
 43 
 
 tion 'of Columbus by his contemporaries, and having 
 the inscription on the top : Columbus Lygir Novi 
 Orbis Reptor (Columbus, Ligurian, Discoverer of the 
 New World). 
 
 The YaNez Portrait. 
 
 Experts recognize from the canvas and other indica- 
 tions that it was painted in Italy about the middle of 
 the sixteenth century, and was probably brought to 
 Spain about that period, when a love of pictures and 
 of all objects of art was awakened in the Spanish noble- 
 men who returned from Italy. I saw this recovered 
 portrait in Madrid in 1881, and Gen. Fairchild, who 
 
44 Have we a Portrait of Colujnbusf 
 
 was then our minister in Spain, had a copy of it made, 
 which is now in the Wisconsin Historical Society, and 
 is the one from which the photograph shown was 
 taken. 
 
 This is the portrait in the Royal Library at Madrid, 
 
 The RiNCON Portrait. 
 
 which has been attributed to Antonio del Rincon. It is 
 not found in the catalogue of his works that have come 
 down to us, and nothing is known of its history beyond 
 the fact that it was in existence in the early part of the 
 seventeenth century. It is a very fine portrait, full of 
 life and expression, and may well have been the work 
 of the master to whom it is attributed. It represents a 
 
Have we a Portrait of Columbus? 
 
 45 
 
 younger man than the one in the Uffizi. and its corre- 
 spondence with the features in that portrait will be read- 
 ily recognized. 
 
 This is the d'Orchi portrait to which I have re- 
 ferred, and the last of those which I think entitled to 
 
 The D'Orchi Portrait. 
 
 consideration. Mr. Jorrin,of Havana, the gentleman at 
 whose request, as I have said, the search was made that 
 resulted in finding it, says that it was too old and worn 
 to^have a satisfactory photograph made from it, and that 
 Count Giovio had a copy of it, in water colors, carefully 
 made by a French artist, from which the photograph 
 now shown may have been made, which I have taken 
 from a French illustrated paper. 
 
46 Have zve a Portrait of Columbus f 
 
 Mr. Jorrin gave, in 1887 in a newspaper in Havana, 
 a very full account of his relations with Count Giovio 
 in the finding of this picture. He thinks it has been 
 repaired and retouched, a long time ago. It has the 
 long visage, the large arched eyebrows, the kind of 
 forehead, the aquiline nose, the depression in the chin 
 and the same distribution of the hair and the same 
 dress as in the Uffizi picture, and from the cir- 
 cumstances under which it was found, it may possibly be 
 the portrait that was in the Jovian gallery. It is a strong 
 and satisfactory picture, and looks like one that may 
 have been painted from life. 
 
 My address has extended to such length as not to 
 admit of any thing beyond some general observations 
 upon these nine portraits, which embrace the earliest 
 known. I can only say that they all, to me, represent 
 the same man. You have seen them, however, and can 
 form your own judgment. They differ from each other 
 in the expression and in their general effect, and so do 
 the original portraits of Washington by Peale, Sharp- 
 less, Robertson, Stuart and others. It is certainly re- 
 markable that they all have the same features, or char- 
 acteristics, the peculiar curved depression in the chin, 
 which no artist is likely to have invented ; the large ex- 
 pansive bony orbit of the eyes, the aquiline nose, the rec- 
 ognizable length of the visage and the ample chest, de- 
 noting the "well formed man" of " robust limbs " as 
 Columbus is stated to have been by Oviedo and his son 
 Ferdinand, which convince me that one or more of 
 them are actual portraits, or that they all have been 
 painted from a common type. The Rincon is that of 
 a younger looking man than the d'Orchi, while the 
 
Have we a Portrait of Cotumbiis f 47 
 
 d'Orchi is a face not as old as the one in the Capriolo 
 engraving. The face of a person differs at different per- 
 iods of life, and the change is often so great that the 
 man at one stage of life differs -very much from the 
 same man at another. If the Spanish experts are right 
 in their supposition that the recovered Yanez, as well 
 as the three pictures that were purchased with it by the 
 Spanish Government in i 763, were, from the indications 
 upon which they rely, all painted about the middle of the 
 sixteenth century,then the Yanez may have been painted 
 from the one that was in the Jovian gallery, which was 
 then in existence, and that there was a portrait of Colum- 
 bus there, I think after what has been stated, admits of 
 no doubt. I regard the Capriolo engraving, the Yanez, 
 and the d'Orchi as the most satisfactory. I think we 
 have in them the true features and general appearance 
 of Columbus ; the d'Orchi at an earlier, and the Cap- 
 riolo at a later period. Carderera considered the Cap- 
 riolo engraving the most valuable of all the representa- 
 tions of Columbus with which he was acquainted when 
 he wrote his article on Don Angel de los Rios' report in 
 1879,* ^"d so far as my information has extended, that 
 appears to be generally the opinion of artists and those 
 most competent to judge. 
 
 I will now show you the more prominent of the pic- 
 tures that have been supposed to be portraits of 
 Columbus. 
 
 This is from an engraving in a work published by 
 Thevet in 1586, who says he engraved it from a por- 
 trait that he found in Lisbon. It is not probable that 
 Columbus had his portrait painted at the early period 
 
 • Boletin dela Real Academia de la Historia, Tomo I., Cuaderno III., p. 258. 
 
48 
 
 Have we a Po7' trait of Columbus? 
 
 that he was in that city, and this represents a much older 
 man than he was when in Portugal. It has a great pro- 
 fusion of curly hair, a very large hawk-like nose, with a 
 heavy moustache and large beard covering up the lower 
 part of the face and leaving little to distinguish the 
 general features, and contour of the face. 
 
 The Thevet Portrait, 
 
 Theodore De Bry published for some years and in 
 several languages a serial known as his Collection of 
 Voyages. It has many imaginary things, and is a work 
 of little value except to collectors, from its curious en- 
 gravings and the difficulty of obtaining complete sets of 
 it. The fourth part of this collection, which was pub- 
 lished in 1594, has an engraved medallion head of Co- 
 lumbus. It is ver)^ small, about three-quarters of an 
 
Have we a Portrait of Columbus f 49 
 
 inch in diameter, and in the form of the head, the curve 
 of the eyebrows, the aquiline nose, and, so far as it can 
 be discerned, what appears to have been intended for 
 a depression in the chin, it may be said to have some 
 resemblance to the early portraits, but in other particu- 
 lars it is unlike. The fifth part of this collection, pub- 
 lished the following year, 1595, contains another and a 
 very different engraved portrait of Columbus, which is 
 the one here shown, and is now known and referred to 
 as the De Bry. In the text of the work he gives this 
 account of it : ''Since Columbus," he says, "was a man 
 of sagacity, of great intellect and courage, the King and 
 the Queen of Castile, before he departed from them, 
 ordered that his likeness should be taken to the life by 
 some most excellent painter, so that if he did not re- 
 turn from that expedition, they might have some me- 
 morial of him, and I found to my great delight a copy 
 of this portrait recently, after finishing the former 
 fourth book, with a certain friend of mine, who had re- 
 ceived it from the painter himself. I wished you also 
 to have part in this, and to that end have had the like- 
 ness cut in copper by my son, in a small form, as per- 
 fectl}^ as it could be done, and now show and present it 
 to you." And then says, "and in truth the virtue of 
 the man is altogether such as to deserve that his like- 
 ness should be laid before the eyes of all good men, for 
 he was an upright man, courteous, magnanimous, and 
 of good morals ; a very firm lover of peace and justice.'^ 
 From the position of these words in the text, '' ab ipso 
 pictore"" (from the painter himself), an ordinary reader 
 would suppose that De Bry's friend received the copy 
 from the painter to whom Columbus sat for the por- 
 
50 Have we a Portrait of Columbus? 
 
 trait, and this I think De Bry meant the reader should 
 infer, as it would enhance the value of a book embel- 
 lished by the engraving of a man whose virtue, he in- 
 forms the reader, "was such as to deserve that his like- 
 ness should be laid before the eyes of all good men." 
 If this was what he meant, that the copy was obtained 
 by his friend from the artist who painted the original, 
 the fact was scarcely possible, unless the artist had 
 reached an extraordinary age, for in the year in which 
 De Bry says he received this picture, 1595, Columbus 
 had been dead for ninety years. 
 
 Spotorno refers to another statement of De Bry re- 
 lating either to this or to the medallion head of the 
 previous year, which Spotorno gives as one of his 
 reasons for impugning the authenticity of the De Bry 
 portrait. "Theodore De Bry," he says, ''pretended 
 that he possessed a portrait of the hero, the same that 
 was to be seen in an apartment of the Council of the 
 Indies, from which place, having been stolen and carried 
 to the Netherlands for sale, it came finally into the 
 hands of De Bry, who gave an engraving of it in his 
 America."* There is no evidence that there ever was 
 any portrait of Columbus in any apartment of the Coun- 
 cil of the Indies, and moreover an exhaustive search 
 was made in inventories and other records of the royal 
 establishments of the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella, 
 and down to and including that of Philip II., for any 
 evidence that a portrait of Columbus had been in the 
 possession of either of these sovereigns, and none could 
 be found. 
 
 No reliance, I think, can be placed on the statement of 
 
 * Memorials of Columbus, p. cxvii., London, 1823. 
 
Have we a Portrait of Cohtmbus f 
 
 51 
 
 De Bry. Navarrete distrusted it (Memorias, vol. 
 viii., p. 18; Boletin I., 3, 245). Professor I. D. But- 
 ler, in his Monograph on the Portraits, calls it " a 
 Dutch imposture," and that the whole account was fab- 
 ricated may fairly be assumed from the fact that the per- 
 
 The De Bry Engraving 
 
 sonage represented in the engraving in no way conforms 
 to the description of Columbus by his contemporaries, 
 and is wholly different from any of the portraits that are 
 known to have been in existence before it. 
 
 There is nothing in it indicating the intelligence, 
 acuteness and ideality we should expect to find in a 
 portrait of Columbus. It is a heavy, stolid head with 
 elaborate curls under a barret cap, and has three prom- 
 
52 Have we a Portrait of Columbus? 
 
 inent warts upon the face. If Columbus had three such 
 deformities upon his face as these, his contemporaries 
 who have described his features with so much exact- 
 ness would, I think, have mentioned it. 
 
 The head in this engraving is shrouded in the large 
 hooded cap formed from the chaperon, which came into 
 use in the middle of the 15th century (Lacroix, Manners 
 and Customs of the Middle Ages, p. 533; Planche, Cyclo- 
 pedia of Costume, vol. i., pp. 294, 295), and the hooded 
 cap and robes strike me as being Italian or German, 
 rather than Spanish of the 15th century — the usual 
 covering for the head of men in Spain at that period, 
 as far as we can judge from the paintings and draw- 
 ings that have come down to us, being the high conical 
 cap and the sombrero. 
 
 Some years ago a portrait was discovered, known 
 now as the Versailles portrait, which is claimed to be 
 the one from which the De Bry engraving of 1595 was 
 made, and, therefore, as supporting De Bry's statement. 
 If this were true, however, it would only prove that fact, 
 and would not verify the other part of the story. I 
 have not seen this Versailles portrait, but when com- 
 paring the Darmstadt engraving of it with the one in 
 De Bry, I am satisfied that instead of its being the one 
 from which the De Bry was engraved, that it was 
 painted from the De Bry. During the three centuries 
 that have elapsed since De Bry's book was published 
 there have been many reproductions of the De Bry, 
 chiefly engravings. I have many of these engravings 
 in my possession, and in most of them the engraver, 
 or draughtsman, has undertaken to improve upon the 
 De Bry by making it more artistic and effective. To 
 
Have we a Portrait of Columbus? 53 
 
 do[this many liberties have been taken and material alter- 
 ations have been made. This is the case with the Ver- 
 sailles portrait. It has evidently been painted from the 
 De Bry engraving by some artist during the three cen- 
 turies that have intervened, who, whilst preserving 
 the resemblance, has undertaken, and succeeded, by 
 making material changes, in producing a much more 
 artistic and finer work of art. It differs from the en- 
 graving in these particulars. The representation of 
 the hair is not the same, the elaborate curls of the en- 
 graving being discarded. The position of the face is 
 changed so as to give it a different expression, and the 
 mouth is altered. Instead of the corrugfated face and 
 deep wrinkles of the engraving, the face is smoother 
 and broader, the three prominent warts are not on it, 
 and the figure is clothed differently. If De Bry's son 
 had engraved from the painting, it may be assumed 
 that he would not have put three warts upon the face, 
 which were a deformity, when there were none in the 
 picture, and this, with the other material differences, 
 convinces me that the painting was made from 
 the engraving and not the engraving from the paint- 
 ing. 
 
 I have been thus particular in respect to the DeBry 
 because this representation of Cojumbus, which has 
 nothing to support it but De Bry's statement, has been 
 more multiplied and has had more prominence than 
 any other. It has been inserted in several works as 
 his true portrait. There is an exquisite engraving of 
 it, by Raimondi or some other Italian artist, and the 
 recognition of it still continues. At the late Centennial 
 celebration in this city it was the chief decoration of 
 
54 Have we a Portrait of Columbus? 
 
 the City Hall, and the one that adorned the front of 
 the Herald office. 
 
 This portrait is by Parmigiano. I show it, because so 
 distinguished a writer as Prescott has given it in his 
 History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella as 
 the portrait of Columbus. I have seen it in Naples. It 
 is a very fine picture, and evidently the work of that 
 eminent master. It is sufficient to say that Parmigiano 
 was three years of age when Columbus died, and if he 
 intended it as a portrait of Columbus it was a work of 
 imagination. It has a large moustache and long beard, 
 neither of which was worn in Spain until long after the 
 death of Columbus. It is probably the portrait of some 
 distinguished Italian nobleman. 
 
 This is by Antonio Moro, a celebrated painter,, 
 a native of the Netherlands, who went to Spain in 
 1552 and was largely patronized by Philip II. The 
 picture, which is an admirable work of art, is said to 
 have been in one of the vessels of the Armada that was 
 wrecked off the coast of Great Britain, and to have 
 come into the possession of an English family. It has 
 a moustache and ruff, neither of which was worn in 
 Spain in the time of Columbus. It is now in the pos- 
 session of Mr. Gunther of Chicago, who is said to have 
 paid a large sum of money for it. 
 
 This is the one published by Munoz in his work in 
 1793. It has, like the previous portrait, a large ruff, 
 and has nothing to support it, except the reputation it 
 acquired by being printed in Muiioz's work. 
 
 This is the one found by M. Jomard, an eminent 
 member of the French Academy, about fifty years ago^ 
 in a gallery at Vicenza in Italy, with the name of 
 
Have zve a Por^ trait of ColiLmbus f 55 
 
 Columbus upon it, and all that he could learn was that 
 it had been bequeathed to that city by a family residing^ 
 there. That it has a peaked beard, a large moustache 
 and a full ruff is sufficient to show that it represents a 
 person who lived a century after Columbus. The 
 eminence of M. Jomard as a scholar and his be- 
 lief in it gave it for some years considerable promi- 
 nence. 
 
 Mr. Harrisse states that there is a portrait in the Ar- 
 senal of Cartagena in Spain of Columbus, for which he is 
 said to have sat. In 1852 the committee, of which Car- 
 derera vv^as chairman, being authorized by the Spanish 
 Government to prosecute their investigation in all parts 
 of Spain, and all Spanish officials being required to afford 
 them every facility, caused enquiries to be made, 
 among other places, in the Arsenal of Cartagena, and 
 were officially advised that there was no portrait of 
 Columbus there. As this was more than forty years 
 ago, I thought I would have an enquiry made this year, 
 and accordingly wrote to a friend in Spain, who had 
 a correspondent in Cartagena, to whom he wrote, and 
 who replied that the general in charge of the arsenal 
 having been but recently appointed, he applied to his 
 secretary, who had been in the office for years, and also 
 to the general in charge of the Department of Con- 
 struction, who had been in the arsenal as long as my 
 friend's correspondent could remember, and to several 
 other officers employed in it, and none of them had 
 ever seen, or heard of any portrait of Columbus there ; 
 the correspondent adding that the only thing in the ar- 
 senal relating to Columbus was a marble statue of 
 
 LofC. 
 
56 Have we a Portrait of Columbus f 
 
 him, made in Naples in 1876, and which had recently 
 been presented by the government to the town.'^ 
 
 I will now call your attention to the Albany portrait, 
 because it has for many years had a prominent place 
 in the Senate chamber of this State, and has been 
 claimed to be authentic, with nothing whatever to sup- 
 port the claim. It was presented to the State by Mrs. 
 Maria Farmer in 1784, after failing to sell it, as appears 
 by an advertisement of the period in Rivingtoii' s Ga- 
 zette, In her communication to the State she said 
 that it was a copy of an original painting of 1592, 
 which had been in the possession of her family for 
 150 years. It in no way resembles the description 
 of Columbus by his contemporaries or the earlier 
 portraits. Wm. Henry Bogert, the- Clerk of the Senate 
 in 1850, made an official report to the Senate upon it, 
 in which he said : " The facts of a curious and event- 
 ful history cluster around this portrait. Its lineage is 
 far better supported than that of most pictures present- 
 ing like claims, and every research made in respect to 
 it has only confirmed its authenticity." It is extraordi- 
 nary how men will write like this where they know noth- 
 ing; and my old friend Mr. Bogert, who is not now 
 living, would have been greatly mortified if I had told 
 him what I thought of his statement. 
 
 I might refer to some other portraits, such as the 
 Juan de la Cosa, the Montanus of 1671, the Berwick- 
 Alba, the Malpica, the Cladera, the Venetian Mosaic, 
 
 * I have since received communications in writing made by the Secretary of 
 the Governor in charge, and of the General in charge of the Department of Con- 
 struction, stating that there is no portrait of Columbus in the Arsenal, and that 
 they never heard that any portrait of him had been there. 
 
Have we a Portrait of Coluinbus ? 57 
 
 the portrait presented by the Duke of Veragua, the de- 
 scendant of Columbus, to the city of Havana ; the Hone 
 portrait, engraved for Edwards's Work on the West In- 
 dies, the Flameng etching, reproduced in the work of 
 Belloy, the Giulio Romano in Genoa, the Hermitage in 
 St. Petersburg, the Hull portrait in Connecticut and the 
 two portraits, one a miniature said to have been given 
 to an official in Washington by Sophia Matilda, 
 Queen of Holland, and a larger one on panel, with a 
 carefully painted ruff, which are in the possession of 
 the Hon. Wm. A. Bryan, of Morristown, N. J., and some 
 others ; but I shall pass them by, and refer only to the 
 last one that has been brought to public attention, that 
 known as the Lotto portrait, now owned by Mr. Ells- 
 worth of Chicago, which has the signature of Lorenzo 
 Lotto, an eminent painter of the Venetian school. Mr. 
 Harrisse has denied eight of the statements put forth in 
 an account of the history of this picture, and has shown 
 that the map which the person represented holds in his 
 hand is the one made by Johannes Ruysch, which first 
 appeared in the Ptolemy, printed at Rome in 1508, the 
 earliest engraved map of America that is known ; '* and 
 as we are told," Mr. Harrisse says, " that this picture 
 bears the date of 1502," which would be six years before 
 this map was published, he pronounces the picture a 
 fabrication. 
 
 Mr. John C. Van Dyke, however, in an article in the 
 Cosmopolitan Magazine of last October, gives the date 
 of the picture as 1 5 1 2, " though," he says, " the date has 
 been hastily scrumbled over with gray paint." So that 
 whether Mr. Harrisse has been misinformed as to the 
 date, or the date has been altered to 15 12, is a matter 
 
58 
 
 Have we a Portrait of Cohimbus f 
 
 to be determined only by an expert. Under these cir- 
 cumstances the picture is not free from suspicion, for it 
 
 The Lotto Portrait. 
 
 has not been unusual for pictures to be fabricated and 
 sold as works of eminent masters that have deceived, 
 accomplished experts. 
 
Have we a Porti'ait of Coiutnbus? 59 
 
 Mr. Van Dyke's paper is one that has been carefully 
 considered by a writer well informed on the subject 
 upon which he writes, and his reasons, therefore, for be- 
 lieving it to be a portrait of Columbus are entitled to 
 respectful consideration. Assuming the portrait to be 
 a genuine work of Lotto, as Mr. Van Dyke believes, 
 and he is evidently well acquainted wnth the works of 
 that master, the first enquiry is, what is known as to its 
 history to warrant the belief that Lotto painted it as a 
 likeness of Columbus? 
 
 Mr. Van Dyke admits that it cannot be traced beyond 
 a certain Italian family that he names, and that at a 
 comparatively recent period a person named Gandolfi, 
 to whom it had been sold, had it somewhat repaired 
 and restored. Mr. Van Dyke further says that from 
 1500 to 1503 no one knows where Lotto was, that he 
 might have been in Spain and may have sketched 
 Columbus from life and never finished the picture until 
 1 5 1 2, but that it is more likely that Trivigiano, who was 
 an intimate friend of Columbus, and who had an elab- 
 orate map of the newly-discovered countries made for 
 Domenico Malipiero, a Venetian senator, about 1501, 
 brought, with this map, to Malipiero in Venice some 
 sketch or portrait of Columbus, as a complement of the 
 map, and as a present to the Venetian senator ; as 
 Trivigiano, he says, in a translation sent by him to that 
 senator of the first book of Peter Martyr's Decades, has 
 a description of Colambus in these words, "Christo- 
 pher Columbus, a Genoese, high, tall, red, very clever, 
 with a long face," which he thinks " is insufficient and 
 meaningless, unless accompanied by a sketch or portrait 
 of the man, and that it is not impossible that such a 
 
6o Have we a Portrait of Columbus f 
 
 sketch, or portrait, served as Lotto's model for this larger 
 picture." 
 
 This is all matter of conjecture, the bearing of which 
 depends altogether upon whether it receives any sup- 
 port from the picture itself, which I have not seen. I can 
 judge of it only by the engraving that accompanies Mr. 
 Van Dyke's article, and deriving my impression solely 
 from that, I should say that it does not. 
 
 Mr. Vandyke divides the portraits which are regarded 
 as possibilities into two types, the Jovian, of which he says 
 "the D'Orchi and the Yanez are examples, and the Ligu- 
 rian type, of which the Ministry of Marine portrait of 
 Madrid is a later and the Lotto an earlier presentation, 
 and perhaps the archetype." He says that "the differ- 
 ence between the two men shown in these two portraits 
 is slight indeed," and such as " might result from two dif 
 ferent artists " viewing the same sitter, or the sitter him- 
 self being seen at two different times or ages, or from 
 the careless restoration from which both pictures have 
 suffered." He was evidently not aware that the 
 Ministry of Marine portrait was painted about half a 
 century ago, and has undergone no restoration ; that 
 the head of Columbus in it was copied from the 
 Capriolo engraving of 1596, and that the dress was 
 taken from the Yaiiez portrait as the Yanez portrait 
 then was. It is better, therefore, to compare this por- 
 trait by Lotto with the Capriolo engraving, and upon 
 doings so, instead of the difference beingf "sliofht 
 indeed," there is a wide and irreconcilable difference. 
 The Lotto has not the same round, prominent, bony 
 orbit of the eye that is found in the Capriolo engrav- 
 ing, in the Altissimo, the d'Orchi and the six other 
 
Have we a Portrait of Columbus? 6i 
 
 of the nine early portraits to which I have referred ; 
 showing that the anatomical structure of this part of 
 the head in the Lotto is different from all of the 
 others. They have all, as a most marked character- 
 istic feature, broad, lofty, arched eyebrows ; whereas, 
 in the Lotto, the eyebrow is straight, with a droop 
 ing lid, that gives to the whole countenance a sinister 
 expression, and instead of the "tinge of melancholy" 
 that Mr. Van Dyke sees in the face, the face looks 
 to me like that of a man who was frequently, if not 
 habitually, cross. 
 
 Jovius, in his eulogy upon Columbus, obviously re- 
 ferring to the portrait in the gallery at Como, speaks 
 of him as " this man with a most open countenance, of 
 unexampled greatness of mind, and with the astonish- 
 ing vigor of a great intellect," and in giving thus the 
 appearance of a man in a portrait, he was writing about 
 what he understood, for we have the authority of Vasa- 
 ri that Jovius was a man of much knowledge and 
 judgment in matters respecting the arts in Italy. ■^" No 
 one would think of designating the personage in the 
 Lotto portrait as a man "of a most open countenance," 
 while it would not be an inapt designation of the man 
 in the earlier portraits I have referred to, including the 
 Jovian wood-cut, imperfect as it is. 
 
 There is another difference. All these nine por- 
 traits represent a man with not an over-abundant head 
 of hair, and that turned up and off from the forehead 
 and sides of the face in natural curls. It is, in every 
 one of them, what would be called a curly head of hair. 
 In the Capriolo engraving the hair is much fuller than 
 
 * Vasari's Lives, etc., Bohn ed., Vol. V., p. 531. 
 
62 Have ive a Portrait of Cohmibtis ? 
 
 in the others and falls down in long curls. But in the 
 Lotto portrait the hair is not curled at all. It is long, 
 straight and lank, and instead of springing up from the 
 forehead as in the other portraits, it is there divided 
 and falls down at the sides, in long masses, close to the 
 shoulders, where it is trimmed evenly, so as to be of 
 uniform length. In fact, the disposition of it is such as 
 to make it so characteristic a feature in the man's 
 likeness, that the artist, with a certain freedom of 
 touch and considerable artistic skill, has evidently 
 given an exact representation of it. It gives 
 to the whole face a peculiar expression and in this feat- 
 ure is unlike any portrait that I can recall, except that 
 of the musician Liszt. Mr. Van Dyke, recognizing, I 
 suppose, its difference in this respect from the other 
 portraits, cites the authority of Carderera for the fact 
 that " in the Columbian period, among the better classes 
 the hair was as long as to cover the ears, and cut in a 
 horizontal line." But this does not reconcile the differ- 
 ence that in the Capriolo engraving, and in the other 
 pictures, the hair is curly, whilst in the Lotto picture it 
 is straight, and instead of curling upward from the fore- 
 head or falling in curls at the sides, as in the other pic- 
 tures, it falls down straight in every part. 
 
 There is nothing in this Lotto portrait to indicate 
 the man "with marvellous intuitions" of Peschel, or 
 " of great energy and an iron will," as stated by Mr. 
 Ponce de Leon, which is recognizable however in the 
 capacious eyes and strong face that is found in the 
 Capriolo engraving and in other of the early portraits. 
 I do not see in it, as Mr. Van Dyke does, the "air of 
 authority," and the "mariner" and "commander," but 
 
Have we a Po^^h^ait of Cohunbus ? 63 
 
 simply a gentlemanly-looking personage, with some- 
 what of the keen and scrutinizing eye of a scholar, and 
 instead of "the reproachful and half disdainful look " 
 that Mr. Van Dyke finds in the face, the general ex- 
 pression of the face, as it appears to me, to convey it 
 by a single word, is peevish. It is not a satisfactory 
 picture upon which to found the belief that it is a like- 
 ness of Columbus, and it is greatly to be regretted that 
 the United vStates Government, in commemoration of 
 the Centennial year, should have stamped it on two 
 millions of the silver currency of the country, and en- 
 graved it upon the postage stamps as a reliable repre- 
 sentation of the person of the great discoverer. The 
 Ligurian type shown in the portrait of the Ministry of 
 Marine, Mr. Van Dyke says, repeats itself in suc- 
 ceeding engravings and ideal portraits, and is so famil- 
 iar, he says, that painters of the present day adopt it 
 in historical paintings of Columbus, and that "it seems 
 to be the popular conception of what the discoverer 
 ought to be." My investigation of the whole subject 
 satisfies me that the popular conception is right, and if 
 our Government had followed it, it would have been 
 more creditable than to have adopted a portrait that 
 has but recently been brought to the public attention 
 and will not, as 1 have undertaken to show, bear the 
 test of investigation; and with this criticism of the last 
 picture that has been brought forward as a portrait of 
 Columbus, my address will close. 
 
H 4/ 
 
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