The common black-eared opossum in the symbolic and iconographic universe. From the effigy ornaments in the lesser Antilles to the European graphics of Simivulpa and its variants in the 16th – 17th centuries

Abstract

This study focuses on the aesthetic analysis, iconographic variants, and symbolism of the common black-eared opossum (Didelphis marsupialis Linnaeus 1758) in ceramic ornaments of agro-ceramic origin of the Saladoid tradition with Barrancoid influence, located in the south of the Lesser Antilles arc and Venezuela, currently held in different collections, scientific academies, and museums around the world, particularly in the Caribbean and United States. Likewise, it will study an entire corpus of prints with descriptions and illustrations of the marsupial, the latter being elaborated by European artists through wood engravings or etchings. For this purpose, chroniclers and artists often relied on the analogical outline of Aristotle, disarticulating the didelphidae into anatomic parts to later compare them with those of other animals according to their degree of similarity, usually being with species of the so-called Old World, in order to create a ‘new’ concept, in reality, an anomalous creature, resulting from the juxtaposition of images of the ‘old’ over the ‘new’, in order to show the intelligible and unknown of the Caribbean world in a way that is comprehensible and accessible to the human mind, with the objective of providing zoological continuity and closing the gaps that once separated both ‘worlds’, in other words, the semiosis of Charles Sanders Peirce.

Keywords

• common opossum
• marsupial
• Didelphis marsupialis
• simivulpa
• Lesser Antilles
• ornament