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Accounts of Columbus's Appearance


MY PORTRAIT OF CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS below, and detail below that, shows a man with a long face, cruel eyes and aquine nose. It is my estimation of his character that a certain amount of deception and cruelty was forced upon him if it did not already exist. Of course he needed great force of personality and dedication to do what he did - sail into the great unknown! The Gean de Bry etching below seemed to me to be closest of all to what Columbus really looked like.

The Admiral was a well-built man of more than medium stature, long visaged with cheeks somewhat high, but neither fat nor thin. He had an aquiline nose and his eyes were light in color; his complexion too was light, but kindling to a vivid red. In youth his hair was blond, but when he came to his thirtieth year it all turned white.---Description by his illegitimate son, Ferdinand

At the time of Columbus's triumphant entry into the city of Barcelona in 1493 after his first voyage, young Fernandez de Oviedo y Valdes or Oviedo was a page for the Spanish court. In his book, Historia General y Natural de Was Indias, he wrote that Columbus was of "good stature and appearance, taller than the average and strongly limbed: the eyes lively and other parts of the face of good proportion, the hair very red, and the face somewhat ruddy and freckled ...."

Another historian of the day, Bartolome de las Casas, the "Historian of the Indies," knew Columbus quite well after his return from the New World. His description agrees with the other accounts except for the inclusion of a beard. He writes that "His form was tall, above the medium: his face long and his countenance imposing: his nose aquiline: his eyes clear blue: his complexion light, tending toward a decided red, his beard and hair were red when he was young, but which cares then had early turned white." Las Casas' journal, however, did not get published until 1875

        

Despite the minor inconsistences in the above descriptions, it can be stated that most likely Columbus was a man who was tall, had a long face, a long nose, with clear eyes, and with either blond, red, or white hair.

It is indeed curious that if Columbus were a man so attuned to his own reputation he would not have sat for an artist to have his image forever captured for all the world to view after his death. Genoa was not considered to be an artistic city. The people of Genoa had mainly commercial interests. Art was exclusively reserved for the Church. Since Columbus was a product of that city, it might not have occurred to him to sit for a portrait. Furthermore, the great age of Spanish portrait painting was yet to come to that country.

No less than 71 alleged original portraits of Columbus or copies were exhibited at the Chicago Exposition of 1893. They showed lean-faced, long-jowled Columbuses and fatfaced, pudgy Columbuses; blond Columbuses and swarthy, olive-tinted Columbuses; smooth-visaged Columbuses and Columbuses variously mustached, bearded and whiskered; Columbuses garbed in all manner of costume, lay and ecclesiastical, noble and vulgar, from the Franciscan robe to the courtier's dress, and in styles ranging over three centuries. Most of them tallied in no way with the contemporary descriptions, and the jury who examined them could find no satisfactory evidence that any one was authentic.

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