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Landscape with a Scene of the Conquest of America by Jan Mostaert

Jan Mostaert · 1535-01-01

This is Jan Mostaert's "Landscape with a Scene of the Conquest of America," painted around 1535. It is among the very first European attempts to picture the New World. The painter never crossed the Atlantic. He worked from written reports, rumor, and imagination in the provincial town of Haarlem.

Look at the base of that huge white rock in the center. Tiny figures with bows and arrows hold their ground against an advancing force. Above them, perched impossibly on the cliff's edge, is a small hut. The painting's whole human weight is in that fragile dwelling, the last place of refuge in a landscape being taken.

Jan Mostaert was a Dutch Renaissance painter known mainly for portraits and religious work. This painting is an outlier: a confused, crowded attempt to picture a continent he would never see. The animals tell the same story, deer continue grazing while domestic goats appear at the far right, quiet symbols of transformation and colonial arrival.

It is easy to scroll past this as just a busy old landscape. But those tiny bowmen, and that small shape above them, carry the full cost of what the title states plainly: a conquest.

Details

Look in the shadow of the great white rock.
Look in the shadow of the great white rock.
Defenders with bows, outnumbered, holding the rock's base.
Defenders with bows, outnumbered, holding the rock's base.
Above them, a single dwelling holds the edge of the cliff.
Above them, a single dwelling holds the edge of the cliff.
The bright, calm sky above the violence below creates an ironic serenity , light floods the scene without moral judgment
The bright, calm sky above the violence below creates an ironic serenity , light floods the scene without moral judgment
A dense, almost processional mass that reads as an advancing army or gathered force; the sheer number creates a sense of overwhelming pressure moving right
A dense, almost processional mass that reads as an advancing army or gathered force; the sheer number creates a sense of overwhelming pressure moving right
Transcript

They called it a landscape. But it's a war. Painted around 1535, when Europe was just learning the shape of the Americas. Look in the shadow of the great white rock. Defenders with bows, outnumbered, holding the rock's base. Above them, a single dwelling holds the edge of the cliff. Jan Mostaert never crossed the ocean. He painted this from written reports. A community's last high ground, imagined by a man in Haarlem.