Natural Designs chronicles the life and work of the earliest and most influential Spanish historian of the New World, Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo (1478–1557). Through a combination of biography and visual and textual analysis, Elizabeth Gansen explores how Oviedo, in his writings, brought the European Renaissance to bear on his understanding of New World nature. Oviedo learned much from the humanists with whom he came into contact in the courtly circles of Spain and Italy, including Giovanni Battista Ramusio and Pietro Bembo, and witnessed Christopher Columbus regaling Queen Isabel and King Ferdinand with news from his inaugural voyage to the Indies. Fascinated by the Caribbean flora and fauna Oviedo encountered on his arrival to the Caribbean in 1514, he made them the protagonists of his writings on the Indies. From his consumption of the prickly pear cactus, which led him to believe his death was imminent, to the behavior of the iguana, which defied his efforts to determine if the
