This book offers English-speaking readers selections from a major Renaissance biographical encyclopedia, The True Portraits and Lives of Illustrious Men (1584) of André Thevet, the first such work to accord the honor of inclusion to Indian worthies like Moctezuma, Atahualpa, and the redoubtable Brazilian chief Quoniambec. The present work features Thevet’s six sketches of Indian notables and an equal number of lives of European explorers—Columbus, Magellan, Cortés, Pizarro, Albuquerque, and Vespucci—together with reproductions of the original copper-engraved portraits of the subjects done by Thevet, according to the editor of the present work, with considerable concern for authenticity.
André Thevet and his works were and are, to put it mildly, extremely controversial. In his own time, Thevet’s veracity and scholarship as a geographer and writer of travel accounts came under heavy attack. His unhappy reputation clung to him until the twentieth century, when anthropologists discovered the value of the ethnographic, mythological, and historical material on the Brazilian, Mexican, and Canadian Indians in his writings. But Thevet’s rehabilitation remains partial, and his faults—his medieval lack of critical sense and his tendency to invent legends, his careless and sometimes dishonest use of sources, his attribution to other writers of statements that never actually existed—are patent to scholars who read his writings.
The selections from the True Portraits in this book reveal these flaws. Roger Schlesinger and Edward Benson have made no serious effort to assess the truth or falsity of Thevet’s accounts, limiting their annotation to “items of special interest.” Indeed, the sketches of such figures as Cortés, Pizarro, Moctezuma, and Atahualpa are riddled with errors, and they possess much less informational value than the contemporary accounts of Spanish chroniclers. However, Schlesinger correctly asserts that these sketches “provide a unique example of the information disseminated about the Age of Exploration and the New World in late sixteenth-century Europe, especially in France. . . . Therefore their significance does not depend solely upon their truthfulness” (p. 17). Certainly they tell a good deal about Thevet’s own mentalité. Items I find of special interest include his violent attack on the Brevíssima relatión of Las Casas as written by an impostor; and his portrait of Moctezuma as a Renaissance ruler who schemed and dissembled with Cortés, trying by every possible means to avoid defeat but failing miserably, having to contend with one more cunning than himself.
