Facts on File

Abstract

WHO WAS CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS?1 THE ANSWER IS IN THE eye of the beholder. If biographers have described him according to their own bias ("the only good biography," said Elizabeth Hawthorne, the Salem novelist's sister, echoing Thomas Carlyle, "is one that ought not to have been written"2), novelists, poets, and playwrights are more likely to fabricate, to imagine, to innovate, to idealize. History has not, of course, granted us a photograph of the admiral, but portraits abound. Most of the approximately 70 surviving paintings, done from 1506 to the present, are based in the imaginations of the different artists: Ridolfo del Ghirlandaio (circa 1530), Tobias Stimmer (1575), Theodore de Bry (1595), Daniel Chodowiecki (1791), Karl von Piloty (circa 1850), Niccolo Barabino (1887), Eduardo Cano de la Peña (circa 1890), George Edmund Varian (circa 1900), Joaquín de Sorolla y Bastida (circa 1900), and Leonardo Lasansky (1984).3KeywordsCrew MemberGreat DiscovererMagical RealismVerbal PluralityWestern HarborThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.