Torture of the prisoner [by nude Indians]

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This 1593 engraving shows a prisoner under torture by nude figures, and the bracketed words in its title suggest the cataloguer supplied the identification of the attackers. The print belongs to the tradition of European engravings of the Americas that circulated widely in the late sixteenth century, when Protestant and Catholic presses alike produced illustrated accounts of Spanish conquest, colonial settlement, and encounters with Indigenous peoples. Such images were often dramatic and bore only a loose relationship to the particular events they claimed to show, so they reveal as much about European audiences and their anxieties as about the peoples depicted. Its violent scene is worth reading alongside the text it was made to accompany.

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