In his new book Engraving the Savage: The New World and Techniques of Civilization Michael Gaudio takes a fresh look at Flemish engraver, Theodore de Bry's illustrations for A Brief and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia, first published in Amsterdam in 1590. These engravings were based on an original set of watercolors completed by John White, a painter who accompanied Sir Walter Raleigh to the New World in 1585. White's ethnographic illustrations describe the appearance and customs of the Carolina Algonquian people and are among the earliest European depictions of North American Indians known to scholars today.

That White and de Bry formulated a visual code for the depiction of Native people has been discussed in other texts. Recent scholars have also complicated the supposed authoritative voice of the ethnographic narrative and illustration. Coming from a background in the study of visual culture of the Early Modern world, Gaudio instead considers these images as part of Dutch Protestant world view, a difference that proves enlightening. More importantly, Gaudio builds off of past examinations and constructs a different narrative - one that engages the materiality of the medium of engraving and asks the question, "What did it mean to engrave the savage?" (xiv)

This question should be the first clue to readers that Engraving the Savage is an entirely new assessment of this collection of well-known images. Indeed, readers looking for ethnographic information about Carolina Algonquian culture in the sixteenth-century will be disappointed. Those expecting a more traditional history of de Bry's engravings will also be unsatisfied. Gaudio's wide scope does take into account both areas of inquiry, but only as support for his main agenda, in which he "attempts to negotiate between the representation of the savage and the matter of engraving" (xxi). He places importance on "dwelling on the material remainders left over from the workshop, remainders that consistently trouble the stability of the civil-savage oppositions that structures ethnographic representation" (xxi). Gaudio's conclusion is that although it is true that the engravings relate information about sixteenth century Native American customs and equally illustrate how European artists attempted to comprehend these new cultures via the visual vocabulary of classical forms and mannerist rendering of bodies, there is far more information embedded in the images about the "linear art involved in the engraver's effort to produce illusion" (53).

Even though Engraving the Savage is essentially an extended examination of one book, Gaudio exhibits an incredible depth of research. This is one of the greatest strengths of his work. In his extended examination of seemingly inconsequential images, Gaudio deftly moves between religious studies, ethnographic history, materiality studies, and back again. But Engraving the Savage is not an interdisciplinary book; even as he grounds his discussion in other disciplines, Gaudio remains firmly rooted in art history and reflects a recent shift towards a methodology of close looking. Gaudio, though, gives an important example of how this methodology can be done successfully.

The strongest of the four chapters is Chapter 2 "Making Sense of Smoke: Engraving and Ornament in de Bry's America," which reflects on the nature of smoke and mist within de Bry's illustrations. After first establishing that although it is true that the lines in engravings clearly "mean something," Gaudio makes the simple but audacious statement that "before they mean something, they are simply lines." (47). Throughout the chapter, Gaudio sets aside the historian's quest to decipher "content" in de Bry's images and instead simply reads the images as ornament - "simply the decoration of a surface with lines" (48).

In order to accomplish this, Gaudio muses on the function and meaning of smoke in de Bry's images - a seemingly inconsequential but repeated detail that is often overlooked in ethnographic studies. Smoke "means" little; in de Bry's illustrations, Gaudio argues, it becomes a site in which to prove craftsmanship through the virtuosic translation of the insubstantial into to the solid lines of the engraved image. The key to his success is even as he allows himself the freedom to speculate and follows an often winding, digressive path, Gaudio remains with the image and related discussions on clouds and grotesques. Readers are thus kept grounded; Gaudio's close looking rarely strays so far afield as to appear overly pedantic.

For example, while musing on the significance of smoke in de Bry's imagery, Gaudio exposes his method and explains its significance. He writes, "What is at stake in de Bry's smoke [...] is the history of representation itself and its role in the work of New World discovery. Understood on a semiotic level, the billowing residue of the savage's fire is the residue of the representational system through which early modern Europe attempted to lay claim to an unknown land. It is therefore important in writing the history of Europe's pictorial response to the New World that we give this smoke its due, that we acknowledge the critical disruption in meaning that it marks. To do so is to understand that the cultural work of engraving the New World - the work of assimilating it line by line to the system of representation - was not only a matter of rendering that world visible, but also of marking the limits of its visibility" (72). In other words, Gaudio's method allows him the freedom of speculation and the liberty to transcend literal meanings to consider instead the subtext of these images that communicates the important cultural work they were meant to accomplish.

Gaudio occasionally falls victim to a common problem that plagues this kind of close formal reading, which seeks to reinvest the image with a sense of agency. At times this scholarship becomes overly precious and can descend into a cutesy play on words that serves to obscure rather than illuminate. But Gaudio's commitment to reading his chosen images through their social, economic, artistic, and religious context prevents him from descending into the overly precious writing of others. The result is a mind stretching text that offers a potentially lucrative methodology for other images.

In his Engraving the Savage, Gaudio demonstrates once again that European and Euro-American images of Native peoples were shaped by European conventions, an old idea perhaps but one that bears repeating, especially by someone as insightful as Gaudio. His method allows readers to move past the facile and limited dichotomy of Savage/Civilized that has plagued discussions of the representation of Native Americans and the Colonial Other in the past. This book will appeal to scholars of American art, European print culture, and sixteenth and seventeenth-century colonial projects around the globe.

Katherine Elliott