National Humanities Center: America in Class: Early Visual Representations of the New World

A lesson that examines how Native Americans were portrayed by artists in the sixteenth century, whose aim was to convey their appearance to a European audience, and thereby encourage investment in future New World explorations. By studying and comparing various artworks, as they ponder thought-provoking questions, students will come to an understanding of how the artists interpreted what they saw and translated it into their visual representations.