1492–1600
Columbus & the Age of Discovery
In 1492 Christopher Columbus sailed west from Spain and reached the Caribbean. Over the next hundred years, Portuguese, Spanish, English and French explorers like da Gama, Magellan and Cortés crossed oceans and met peoples who had never been in contact with Europe. The Age of Discovery connected the world, but it also brought conquest, disease and hardship for Indigenous peoples.
Why artists painted it
Artists of the 1800s made these voyages look like grand adventures. Today we can also ask who is missing from the picture and what the people who already lived there would have shown.
Landing of Columbus · John Vanderlyn, 1847
Landing of Columbus
John Vanderlyn · 1847
🕰️ Painted about 250 years later
Columbus steps ashore in the Caribbean in 1492, planting the Spanish flag. Painted 350 years later, it shows how Americans imagined the moment.
Christopher Columbus Before the Council of Salamanca
Emanuel Leutze · 1841
🕰️ Painted about 240 years later
Columbus argues his plan to sail west before skeptical scholars.
Christopher Columbus at the Gates of the Monastery of Santa María de la Rábida
Benet Mercadé · 1858
🕰️ Painted about 260 years later
Christopher Columbus, poor and worn out, stops with his young son at a monastery in Spain, where a friendly prior helps him get a hearing at the court of Queen Isabella.
The Inspiration of Christopher Columbus
Jose Maria Obregon · 1856
🕰️ Painted about 260 years later
Columbus sits alone beside the sea, lost in dreams of the voyage west that will change the world.
Cortés and Montezuma at Mexico City
Anonymous (Kurz & Allison) · 1890
🕰️ Painted about 290 years later
The Spanish conqueror Hernán Cortés and the Aztec ruler Montezuma meet in the great city of Tenochtitlan in 1519, followed by war.
Pizarro Seizing the Inca of Peru
John Everett Millais · 1846
🕰️ Painted about 250 years later
In 1532 the Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro captured the Inca emperor Atahualpa, beginning the Spanish conquest of the Inca empire.
The Virgin of the Navigators
Alejo Fernández · 1535
👁️ Painted at the time
The Virgin Mary spreads her cloak over sailors, explorers and ships in an altarpiece painted for the Spanish House of Trade in Seville in about 1535.
Namban Screen: The Arrival of the Portuguese
Kanō Naizen · 1600
👁️ Painted at the time
A huge Portuguese trading ship sails into a golden Japanese harbor, with people in strange foreign clothes.
Sir Francis Drake
Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger · 1591
👁️ Painted at the time
Francis Drake rests his hand on a globe in a portrait celebrating his voyage around the world from 1577 to 1580, the first by an English captain.
The Landing of Henry Hudson
Robert Walter Weir · 1835
🕰️ Painted about 240 years later
The English explorer Henry Hudson sails up what is now the Hudson River in 1609 and meets the Lenape people on the shore.
The Last Voyage of Henry Hudson
John Collier · 1881
🕰️ Painted about 280 years later
Henry Hudson, his son and a few others sit in a small boat in the icy northern sea after the crew turned against him in 1611 and cast them adrift.
America Discovered (Vespucci Awakens America)
Stradanus · 1589
👁️ Painted at the time
The explorer Amerigo Vespucci stands in front of a woman who stands for America, newly awakened, in an allegorical engraving by Stradanus of about 1589.
Portrait of a Man, Said to Be Christopher Columbus
Sebastiano del Piombo · 1519
👁️ Painted at the time
This famous portrait is said to show Christopher Columbus, but it was painted by Sebastiano del Piombo in 1519, years after Columbus died, and no one knows what the explorer really looked like.
Hernán Cortés
José Salomé Pina · 1879
🕰️ Painted about 280 years later
Hernán Cortés, the Spanish conqueror who led the fall of the Aztec empire in 1519 to 1521, in a 19th-century portrait by the Mexican painter José Salomé Pina.