Imagining America.

• Author: Lyon, David
• Position: Madrid's Museo de America - Includes related article

A unique collection in a Madrid museum reveals Old World perceptions of New World wonders

Although Spain's Museo de America is charged with explaining the Americas to Europeans, the museum may be even more intriguing to visitors from the Americas. Only fifty years old and closed for more than the last decade, the museum is the physical and spiritual heir to five centuries of Spanish attempts to understand a world Spain once conquered but never subsumed.

Museums are judged by the twin yardsticks of their holdings and their interpretation of those objects. Although the Museo de America doesn't have the depth of archaeological materials held by many of the national museums in the Americas, no institution can match its perspective of five hundred years of Spanish inquiry and observation. It has inherited both the curiosity and the collections of official Spain, enabling it to take equal measure of the original inhabitants of the Western Hemisphere and of the European colonists.

This uniquely multidisciplinary institution is devoted to a world with which Spain has had a long, complex relationship. Chartered in 1942, the museum received relevant collections from senior institutions founded in the previous century, such as the Museo de Ciencias Naturales, Academia de la Historia, and the Museo Arqueologico Nacional y de Antropologia. Situated on a hillside in the University City district overlooking Old Madrid, the Museo de America occupies a modest stone structure that once served as a parish church. Its cool, arcaded hallways surrounding a central courtyard echo an architecture found in colonial cities throughout the New World.

Closed from 1981 to 1993 for building renovation and redesign of its exhibits, the Museo de America today reveals a contemporary assessment of its collections that reflects current thinking about Spanish attitudes toward "America" - as the entire Western Hemisphere came to be called in Spain. The exhibition halls represent a structuralist approach to their complex subject, with an introductory exhibition on The Tools of Knowledge, which leads to examinations of physical geography, population patterns, social organization, religion, and language. In keeping with contemporary scholarship, the museum tries to remain culturally unbiased.

Yet The Tools of Knowledge introduction to the Museo de America signals immediately that this museum is about a European view of the Americas. Half a millennium later, it is hard to appreciate the intellectual crisis in Europe prompted by the discovery of a "new" world. Once everyone (except perhaps the navigator himself) realized that Columbus had stumbled across previously unknown lands rather than a direct route to the Far East, the classical vision of the world was shattered. The European construction of the world was based on the continents of the Mediterranean basin: Europe, Asia, and Africa. This tripartite world fit neatly with Aristotelian and Christian thought and theology, in which the triangle - nature's most stable form - was the model. What to do with a fourth continent, an unbalancing fourth side? The "known world" since ancient times had centered on Europe, extending eastward and southward into mystery.

The display of antique maps demonstrates how mariners more concerned with navigation than philosophy dealt with the previously unknown land-masses. The earliest maps, dating from the sixteenth century, show increasing familiarity with the coastline of the Americas, coupled with enduring ignorance about the interior: Initial European knowledge of the Americas was truly only skin deep. But it did not take long for Spanish explorers - and colonists - to fill in the blanks. Even early maps of the Antilles show tremendous and accurate detail in a region quickly settled by Spain. More general maps of North and South America blend accuracy and fantasy, with imagination given freer rein with every league inland. These maps show the hands of their makers: Areas where Spanish ships sailed are represented accurately, but regions held by France or Britain are rendered more loosely. For example, a seventeenth-century map and chart of...