Abstract

This article studies the development of a circuit of visual images of the New World established during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries between Brazil and Europe. The images produced by the first travelers who visited the territory were received in Europe and redesigned to be commercialized in the market for exotic products. Two important groups of inaugural images of Brazil constitute the corpus of this work: the illustrations of a travel book on Brazil written by the German sailor Hans Staden, published in 1557, and the paintings produced by the Dutch artist Albert Eckhout between 1637 and 1644. Staden’s illustrations are confronted with their re-creations by the engraver Theodor de Bry, who re-edited Staden’s work in a collection published initially in 1590. In a similar way, Eckhout’s paintings and drawings were the source of inspiration for the series of tapestries “Indes,” produced by The Manufacture Royale Gobelins initially in 1690. The original images and their counterparts are compared in order to reveal the edition and adaptation of the images, in which new pictures were produced by a process of moving the function of the images from a descriptive to an exotic one.