Imagine Magritte (b. 1898) as a child leafing through Jules Verne's Histoires des Grands Voyages et des Grand Voyageurs (1878). He comes upon the illustration of the assassination of Pizarro taken from an engraving published by Theodore de Bry in his America (1594). When Magritte returned to this print in 1927 he disarmed the figures, linked them like acrobats, and rendered their faces invisible, a motif that appears here for the first (but not the last) time in his work. His visual

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... n of the historical gaps between Verne, de Bry, and Pizarro helped me to embark on this project. A web of colleagues, classrooms, and funding institutions gave me courage to continue. First, my loyal "referees,"