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Excuse me for noticing, but haven't we been commemorating Columbus's quincentennial in the wrong year? I know that dates and math aren't America's strong suit right now, but it doesn't take advanced calculus to figure that 1492 plus 500 equals 1992.
What is it about Columbus that makes for botched commemoration? The Quatercentennial Columbian Exposition opened a year late, in 1893, delayed by the enormous scale of the show and by the protesting groups (yes, even then) who saw themselves more as victims than as beneficiaries of 1492. A century later, in a culture notorious for its brutally short attention span, the clock has been advanced a year. The predictable events--the PBS series, the special issue of Newsweek, an enormous autumnal harvest of biographies, the museum exhibitions--have all come and nearly gone, making it virtually impossible to avoid a feeling of anticlimax when October 12, 1992, finally rolls around.
There is the possibility, of course, that fooling around with the date may represent some learned allusion to the replacement of the Julian calendar by the Gregorian calendar, but perhaps not. More likely, advancing the timetable of commemoration was the impulse of publishers, producers, and curators who worried that they would be overtaken by a jaded public and a short shelf life for Columbiana. Then again, with the multicultural wind blowing strong offshore, there is certainly some nervousness about focusing too precisely on a particular date, a particular person, a particular historical moment; a nagging anxiety that bothersome ghosts might be disturbed. Better to take refuge in cosily inclusive generalizations.
For anniversaries can be risky business. In 1688 the centenary of the defeat of the Spanish Armada helped to crystallize hostility to the Catholic Stuart King James II, and legitimized an appeal to Dutch William in the name of imperiled English liberties. A century later the centennial of that Glorious Revolution in 1788 seemed to Friends of Liberty on both sides of the English Channel to herald a new crisis for absolutism. And in 1989, Chinese students erected a Goddess of Liberty in Tiananmen Square modeled on both French and American iconographic types.
There may indeed be Some Unpleasantness in the offing. On the First day of 1992, for example, a lineal descendent of the Admiral of the Ocean Seas is to act as marshal at the Rose Bowl parade in Pasadena; but angry Native American activists have already ensured that there are likely to be thorns among the petals. So was it a sense of pre-emptive prudence that moved the National Gallery to call its megashow "Circa 1492" and to exhibit it circa 1991? In am case, the notion of simultaneously specifying a date and generalizing it is self-defeating, rather as if one made an appointment for approximately 3:21 p.m.
What we have at the National Gallery, in fact, is the Blockbuster That Lost Its Nerve: an exhibition that manages to be both astonishingly bold and depressingly pusillanimous, not least in its studied refusal to consider head-on the phenomenon of Columbus himself and the historical experience of his four voyages. Only one of the 569 objects in the exhibition relates directly to the Admiral. It is the woodcut-illustrated Basel edition of his famous letter written on the homeward journey and published just fifty-four days after his return, one of the most astonishing moments in the history of Renaissance publishing and heroic self-promotion. Not that one would know this from the dry caption on the wall; but then Columbus appears only twice in the wall captions (once as Columbus, Ohio).
He does a little better in the extraordinary catalog, which is a major contribution to the historical literature of the European encounter with other cultures, especially in the cartographic articles by David Woodward and Francis Maddison. But even in the book Columbus features more prominently as a counterfactual case. Thus, dense articles on Asian art and culture, in keeping with the considerable space given to them in the show, present what Columbus would have seen had he actually made landfall in Japan, or in Korea, or in China, or in India.
Not only has the Admiral gone missing, so has 1492. For it is precisely the Iberian cultures that had their most traumatic moments in that year--the cultures of Moorish Granada and Hispanic Judaism--that are most scantily represented. There are a score or more objects (all of stunning quality) from Ottoman Turkey, Mamluk Egypt, and Iran, but only two items, including the so-called sword of Boabdil, the last ruler of the shrunken Moorish state, from Granada. Jewish Spain is also represented by just two objects, a Passover dish and the exquisitely illuminated Lisbon Bible from the British Library, inexplicably opened (in its reproduction in the catalog, too) to a sampling of the laws of leprosy.
Still, if there are glaring absences in "Circa 1492," there are also extraordinary presences. By globally contextualizing the Columbian moment, the show has succeeded in suggesting, through thoughtfully chosen and ravishingly beautiful examples, alternative cultural encounters to the one that actually took place on Guanahani on October 12. Chinese figures carrying Ming blue and white porcelain appear in an Iranian silk scroll. A spectacular Bini ivory saltcellar carved in West Africa for the export trade to Europe features figures of the fearsomely whiskery Portuguese. Christopher Weiditz's sympathetic drawings of the Aztecs, brought back to Spain by Hernán Cortés, depict the natives playing their wonderful version of tlachtli, or buttockball, in which the solid rubber ball could only be struck with the elbow or the rump.
Frederick Mote's fine essay on Ming China, moreover, draws attention to the ambitious western voyages of the imperial eunuch-admiral (a wonderful concept, unlikely to win favor at Annapolis) Zheng-he. The comparison with European exploration is indeed instructive. For although the Chinese preferred a massive display of authority (hundreds of junks, and 20,000 or more soldiers and sailors) to conversion by fire and sword, they were hardly models of multicultural pluralism. Their explorers assumed that barbarian cultures would be so awed by the omnipotence of the Middle Kingdom that they would gladly submit to a tributary relationship as the price of being admitted to its imperium.
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