Wind and Fortune in the Representation of the France Antarctique

His project focuses on two large mid-sixteenth-century wooden reliefs in the Musée départemental des antiquités de Rouen that depict nude indigenous people and the trade of dyewood—the famous brazilwood, or “pau brasil” in Portuguese, or “ibirapitanga” in Tupí-Guaraní—in the context of the French attempt to colonizing Brazil. Meant to be part of a frieze adorning the façade of the so-called Hôtel de l’île du Brésil, in the Saint Maclou neighborhood, the Rouen wooden enseignes are a tangible - although allegorical -representation of early modern French transatlantic ambitions. My aim is to provide a new visual and iconographical analysis of these reliefs by establishing a thriving dialogue with texts that were being produced in France at the same time and in the same cultural context. In fact, it has not been noted that the reliefs’ iconography is dominated by a crucial element: a windy landscape. Winds understood as “invisible bodies” (corpora caeca) by Lucretius seem to have been central in Michel de Montaigne’s Des cannibales writing process, begun after having met Tupí indigenous individuals in Rouen, as Screech and Lezra have demonstrated. Winds are the eternal companions of Fortune, which can be indeed found represented in one of the panels as a mother breastfeeding her child, according to a model drawn by Leonardo, among others. According to my interpretation, the Rouen panels emerge here not as inaccurate depictions of indigenous people, but as cultivate visual allegories of a new beginning in a new land, just like André Thevet quotes Virgil in the page in which the area of Rio de Janeiro is baptized France Antarctique.