A subtle bulwark of canvas: ‘THE IMAGE OF THE BLACK IN WESTERN ART, VOLS. I-III, ed. David Bindman, Henry Louis Gates et. al.’ Review, TLS, 23 March 2012, pp. 8-9.
Don Miguel de Castro, by Jasper Becx, c.1643.
The editors of these monumental and groundbreaking volumes have been through a “journey of exhilaration and pain” to bring these beautifully reproduced and thought-provoking images to our attention. The project began in 1960 when the French-Texan art collectors John and Dominique de Menil commissioned the research that resulted in a photographic catalogue containing over 30,000 images, which now survive in duplicate at the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard and the Warburg Institute in London.
Although the first two volumes, covering the Ancient and Medieval periods, were published in 1976 and 1979 and were followed by Volume Four, From The American Revolution to World War I, in 1989, the projected third volume, discussing the intervening period, which saw the rise and fall of the transatlantic slave trade, never emerged, and publishing was discontinued after the death of Dominique de Menil in 1997. Now, with $3.6 million having been raised to endow the archive at Harvard, the series is being reissued under the aegis of David Bindman and Henry Louis Gates, Jr, and the third volume, From the “Age of Discovery” to the Age of Abolition, has been published for the first time, in three parts (“Artists of the Renaissance and Baroque”, “Europe and the World Beyond” and “The Eighteenth Century”).
The images reveal some amazing stories. Gazing at Johann Nepomuk Steiner’s noble portrait of Angelo Soliman, the Viennese courtier and Hofneger (high-status black), with his open expression and fashionable clothes, it is hard to believe that after Soliman died, Emperor Joseph II had his skin stripped from his corpse, draped over a wooden model and bedecked with a “savage” costume complete with feathered headdress for exhibition in the Court Naturaliensammlung (Natural History Museum), where it stayed until it was destroyed during the 1848 Revolution. In late twelfth-century Palermo, Bishop Peter of Eboli sought to “blacken” the name of his enemy Chancellor Matthew of Ajello by accusing him, in a graphic illustration of his Liber ad honorem augusti, of seeking to cure himself of gout by bathing his feet in the blood of a freshly decapitated black man. On a similar note, there is the strange story of the Miracle of the Black Leg, which was widely illustrated across Europe after its first depiction in Tuscany around 1370, in which the Greek saints Cosmas and Damian amputated a white man’s gangrenous leg and replaced it with that of a black man who had recently died. In 1694 a painting was commissioned to commemorate the first black child born in Sweden. David Klocker Ehrenstrahl, feeling that simply portraying a naked black child would make a “bad picture”, resorted to “washing the blackamoor white”, painting a black child being washed by six white putti. He called his picture “Vanus Labor” (to labour in vain). Another strange image is the pastel drawing “Woman Holding a Mask of a Black Man” by John Raphael Smith, c.1797. The woman is preparing for a masquerade and the caricatured dark features of the mask were intended to provide a foil to her fair beauty. By contrast, Francis Williams, a Jamaican scholar and poet educated in England of whom an anonymous portrait was painted in Jamaica around 1735, welcomed each new governor to his island with a Latin ode.
A vast array of different “Images of the Black” appear in these volumes, from statues of black saints such as St Maurice or St Benedict the Moor, to portraits of notable African ambassadors and kings, poets and musicians, or drawings of literary characters such as Shakespeare’s Othello, Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko, or Yarico from George Colman’s Inkle and Yarico. The use of a black figure to depict “Africa” in allegorical schemes of the four Continents was also common from the sixteenth century onwards in mural decorations of European palaces and churches, engravings and map decorations, on ornamental objects and ceremonial tableaux vivants. However, the most prevalent “Image of the Black” to be found in this period of Western art was the black king or Magus in depictions of the Adoration of the Magi. There are thirty folders of photographs in the Menil archive devoted to this alone. Although the Bible does not describe the Magi in any detail, later scholars sought to flesh out their characters, give them names and associate them with the three ages of man and the three continents. One was described as black by pseudo-Bede in the eighth century, but the first indisputable depiction of the Magus with dark skin only appeared in 1437, in Germany in the Wurzach altarpiece by Hans Multscher. Thereafter the trend spread widely across Europe and black kings appeared decked in richly coloured robes, gold jewellery and pearl earrings. One fascinating anomaly to this appeared in Viseu cathedral in Portugal, where in 1501–02, Vasco Fernandes depicted his Balthazar as a Brazilian Tupinambá tribesman, of the sort recently encountered by the Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama.
It also became common for powerful people to be portrayed with a black page boy or girl. The first known image of this sort is the “Portrait of Laura Dianti” by Titian, c.1523–9. Some of the attendants depicted are named, such as Jersey, who was painted with the naval officer Paul Henry Ourry around 1748 by Joshua Reynolds. Many more remain nameless and may not have been servants to the sitter but to the artist: Watteau, Hogarth, Reynolds and Richard Cosway all had black studio assistants, whom they used as models and included in portraits as fashionable symbols of wealth or in accordance with the motto that “black best sets forth the white”.
Prominent Africans also appeared in portraits in their own right. Some remain unidentified, such as the mysterious image (c.1520–30) painted in the Netherlands by Jan Mostaert of an evidently high-status African, possibly Christophle le More, a courtier of Charles V. An eighteenth-century portrait of a black man in a red coat and tail wig, previously thought to be Olaudah Equiano, also remains tantalizingly anonymous. Equiano, Job ben Solomon, William Sessarakoo, Ignatius Sancho, Phillis Wheatley and Ottobah Cugoano were all portrayed in eighteenth-century Britain as a result of their noteworthy status and achievements. The images vary in quality of execution: Sancho was painted by Gainsborough, Wheatley by a little-known Boston artist named Scipio Moorhead.
The volumes certainly include some of these “positive images to counteract racist stereotypes” that de Menil was looking for when she and her husband began the collection, aiming to build a “subtle bulwark and a living testimony against anti-black racism”. Africans have been painted and sculpted by some of the most eminent artists in the Western tradition, including Titian, Tiepolo, Rubens, Rembrandt, Van Dyck, Reynolds, Hogarth, Watteau and Gainsborough. More importantly, they have not been caricatured, but sensitively portrayed by these masters, their humanity captured on canvas for all to see. Many lesser-known artists also created positive images. Among the most arresting of these are the c.1643 portraits of Don Miguel de Castro, ambassador of the court of Soyo (in modern-day Angola), and his two servants, by Jasper Becx. Their faces are full of character and their ebony skin contrasts strikingly with the broad white collars of their smart Dutch clothes. In the foreground of his “Ecce Homo” of 1671 Aert de Gelder produced what the art historian Elmer Kolfin has described as “one of the most touching scenes with a black person in Dutch art” – in which an African man leads a trusting child away from an aggressive dog. Francesco Capella’s “The Geography Lesson” (c.1760), provides a courtship scene with strong echoes of Othello and Desdemona, in which “‘difference’ becomes an aphrodisiac rather than a curse”.
On the other hand, many of the blacks are portrayed in subservient roles, such as the servants in classical or biblical scenes, or the adoring pages in aristocratic portraits, some of whom were depicted with silver slave collars from the first half of the seventeenth century. The allegorical depictions of Africa alongside the other continents are rarely flattering. The figures intended to personify the continent were placed in submissive poses in relation to triumphalist Europe, and drawn almost naked, sometimes even wearing chains of bondage. The drawings of the “Hottentot Venus”, a Khoikhoi woman from South Africa named Saartjie Baartman, who was placed on public show in Piccadilly in 1810, were prurient, focusing on her voluptuous curves and prominent buttocks. James Gillray’s depiction of two black women in the company of Wilberforce and the Bishop of Rochester in his “Philanthropic Consolations After the Loss of the Slave Trade Bill” (1796) was no better: one is shown smoking tobacco with her breasts exposed, the other sitting on the Bishop’s knee, glass in hand. However, in placing such a vast variety of different images together, both positive and negative, these volumes show that the “Image of the Black” was not at all homogenous but rather reflected the wide range of the Western response to the “other”.
Visual material has some drawbacks as historical evidence. It can deteriorate, or disappear, like the face of the African page in the portrait of Anne of Denmark (1617) by Paul van Somer, which is now scarcely visible, or the twelfth-century Catalan manuscript drawing of the Adoration of the Magi, which was destroyed in the Second World War. Some images are only revealed after cleaning, such as the frescoes from the monastery of San Zeno in Verona, while others have become darker with age or dirt. Other images, such as the seductive pre-1405 drawing of the Queen of Sheba by Konrad Kyeser which now adorns the front cover of Volume Two, Part Two, have been deliberately blackened by a later hand. As with all sources, the reasons behind the production of an image must be interrogated. A Giotto painting showing a black executioner does not prove that black Africans were commonly employed as executioners in late medieval Europe. Neither were all significant individuals portrayed: both the poet Juan Latino (c.1516–c.1597), who became a professor at the University of Granada, and Hausa Christian Gottlieb (d. 1690), a court musician in Germany, went unrecorded in portraiture.
In a study of this scale, difficult decisions must inevitably be made as to what to include and what to omit. The editors have openly chosen depth over breadth, and there is an inevitable preponderance of art from Italy, France and Germany. A chapter by David Bindman provides some treatment of Britain, which was omitted from the original plan. The sheer number of images of Africans in Western art becomes apparent as the essayists in these volumes regularly refer to works of art that are not in fact illustrated. While the portrait of Cromwell with a black page by Thomas Wyck, c.1655–8 can be found easily enough online, other equally intriguing images, such as Antoine Coypel’s “Angola”, the black trumpeter of King Louis XIV, with his mistress, are not so readily accessible. This can prove frustrating, especially when the image is discussed in detail. In some cases, for example in the chapter devoted to Rembrandt, it is unclear whether the images merit such an in-depth analysis since, apart from the 1661 “Study of Two Africans”, which “render the spiritual and moral feeling” of these anonymous men, Rembrandt’s blacks are mostly peripheral figures, literally in the shadows. It seems that the reputation of the artist or perhaps the area of expertise of the scholars involved may have affected the focus of coverage.
Seen through the prism of “Western art”, these “Images of the Black” often tell us more about the Europeans and their agendas than the Africans they portray. Nonetheless, the cumulative effect of the images is to demonstrate a continuous black presence in the Western imagination and experience. Despite their grand size and scope, these volumes are by no means definitive, but rather provide a fascinating starting point for discussion and further research. With Volume Four, From the American Revolution to World War I, due to be reissued in May 2012 and a fifth volume, The Twentieth Century and Beyond, in two parts, entitled From the Artistic Discovery of Africa to the Jazz Age and From the Harlem Renaissance to the Age of Obama, planned for autumn 2014 and spring 2015, this series will pose new questions to scholars of art, history and literature and provoke us all to reconsider the role of “the Black” in Western civilization.
You can read my review of the same books for the BASA Newsletter here.
Although the first two volumes, covering the Ancient and Medieval periods, were published in 1976 and 1979 and were followed by Volume Four, From The American Revolution to World War I, in 1989, the projected third volume, discussing the intervening period, which saw the rise and fall of the transatlantic slave trade, never emerged, and publishing was discontinued after the death of Dominique de Menil in 1997. Now, with $3.6 million having been raised to endow the archive at Harvard, the series is being reissued under the aegis of David Bindman and Henry Louis Gates, Jr, and the third volume, From the “Age of Discovery” to the Age of Abolition, has been published for the first time, in three parts (“Artists of the Renaissance and Baroque”, “Europe and the World Beyond” and “The Eighteenth Century”).
The images reveal some amazing stories. Gazing at Johann Nepomuk Steiner’s noble portrait of Angelo Soliman, the Viennese courtier and Hofneger (high-status black), with his open expression and fashionable clothes, it is hard to believe that after Soliman died, Emperor Joseph II had his skin stripped from his corpse, draped over a wooden model and bedecked with a “savage” costume complete with feathered headdress for exhibition in the Court Naturaliensammlung (Natural History Museum), where it stayed until it was destroyed during the 1848 Revolution. In late twelfth-century Palermo, Bishop Peter of Eboli sought to “blacken” the name of his enemy Chancellor Matthew of Ajello by accusing him, in a graphic illustration of his Liber ad honorem augusti, of seeking to cure himself of gout by bathing his feet in the blood of a freshly decapitated black man. On a similar note, there is the strange story of the Miracle of the Black Leg, which was widely illustrated across Europe after its first depiction in Tuscany around 1370, in which the Greek saints Cosmas and Damian amputated a white man’s gangrenous leg and replaced it with that of a black man who had recently died. In 1694 a painting was commissioned to commemorate the first black child born in Sweden. David Klocker Ehrenstrahl, feeling that simply portraying a naked black child would make a “bad picture”, resorted to “washing the blackamoor white”, painting a black child being washed by six white putti. He called his picture “Vanus Labor” (to labour in vain). Another strange image is the pastel drawing “Woman Holding a Mask of a Black Man” by John Raphael Smith, c.1797. The woman is preparing for a masquerade and the caricatured dark features of the mask were intended to provide a foil to her fair beauty. By contrast, Francis Williams, a Jamaican scholar and poet educated in England of whom an anonymous portrait was painted in Jamaica around 1735, welcomed each new governor to his island with a Latin ode.
A vast array of different “Images of the Black” appear in these volumes, from statues of black saints such as St Maurice or St Benedict the Moor, to portraits of notable African ambassadors and kings, poets and musicians, or drawings of literary characters such as Shakespeare’s Othello, Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko, or Yarico from George Colman’s Inkle and Yarico. The use of a black figure to depict “Africa” in allegorical schemes of the four Continents was also common from the sixteenth century onwards in mural decorations of European palaces and churches, engravings and map decorations, on ornamental objects and ceremonial tableaux vivants. However, the most prevalent “Image of the Black” to be found in this period of Western art was the black king or Magus in depictions of the Adoration of the Magi. There are thirty folders of photographs in the Menil archive devoted to this alone. Although the Bible does not describe the Magi in any detail, later scholars sought to flesh out their characters, give them names and associate them with the three ages of man and the three continents. One was described as black by pseudo-Bede in the eighth century, but the first indisputable depiction of the Magus with dark skin only appeared in 1437, in Germany in the Wurzach altarpiece by Hans Multscher. Thereafter the trend spread widely across Europe and black kings appeared decked in richly coloured robes, gold jewellery and pearl earrings. One fascinating anomaly to this appeared in Viseu cathedral in Portugal, where in 1501–02, Vasco Fernandes depicted his Balthazar as a Brazilian Tupinambá tribesman, of the sort recently encountered by the Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama.
It also became common for powerful people to be portrayed with a black page boy or girl. The first known image of this sort is the “Portrait of Laura Dianti” by Titian, c.1523–9. Some of the attendants depicted are named, such as Jersey, who was painted with the naval officer Paul Henry Ourry around 1748 by Joshua Reynolds. Many more remain nameless and may not have been servants to the sitter but to the artist: Watteau, Hogarth, Reynolds and Richard Cosway all had black studio assistants, whom they used as models and included in portraits as fashionable symbols of wealth or in accordance with the motto that “black best sets forth the white”.
Prominent Africans also appeared in portraits in their own right. Some remain unidentified, such as the mysterious image (c.1520–30) painted in the Netherlands by Jan Mostaert of an evidently high-status African, possibly Christophle le More, a courtier of Charles V. An eighteenth-century portrait of a black man in a red coat and tail wig, previously thought to be Olaudah Equiano, also remains tantalizingly anonymous. Equiano, Job ben Solomon, William Sessarakoo, Ignatius Sancho, Phillis Wheatley and Ottobah Cugoano were all portrayed in eighteenth-century Britain as a result of their noteworthy status and achievements. The images vary in quality of execution: Sancho was painted by Gainsborough, Wheatley by a little-known Boston artist named Scipio Moorhead.
The volumes certainly include some of these “positive images to counteract racist stereotypes” that de Menil was looking for when she and her husband began the collection, aiming to build a “subtle bulwark and a living testimony against anti-black racism”. Africans have been painted and sculpted by some of the most eminent artists in the Western tradition, including Titian, Tiepolo, Rubens, Rembrandt, Van Dyck, Reynolds, Hogarth, Watteau and Gainsborough. More importantly, they have not been caricatured, but sensitively portrayed by these masters, their humanity captured on canvas for all to see. Many lesser-known artists also created positive images. Among the most arresting of these are the c.1643 portraits of Don Miguel de Castro, ambassador of the court of Soyo (in modern-day Angola), and his two servants, by Jasper Becx. Their faces are full of character and their ebony skin contrasts strikingly with the broad white collars of their smart Dutch clothes. In the foreground of his “Ecce Homo” of 1671 Aert de Gelder produced what the art historian Elmer Kolfin has described as “one of the most touching scenes with a black person in Dutch art” – in which an African man leads a trusting child away from an aggressive dog. Francesco Capella’s “The Geography Lesson” (c.1760), provides a courtship scene with strong echoes of Othello and Desdemona, in which “‘difference’ becomes an aphrodisiac rather than a curse”.
On the other hand, many of the blacks are portrayed in subservient roles, such as the servants in classical or biblical scenes, or the adoring pages in aristocratic portraits, some of whom were depicted with silver slave collars from the first half of the seventeenth century. The allegorical depictions of Africa alongside the other continents are rarely flattering. The figures intended to personify the continent were placed in submissive poses in relation to triumphalist Europe, and drawn almost naked, sometimes even wearing chains of bondage. The drawings of the “Hottentot Venus”, a Khoikhoi woman from South Africa named Saartjie Baartman, who was placed on public show in Piccadilly in 1810, were prurient, focusing on her voluptuous curves and prominent buttocks. James Gillray’s depiction of two black women in the company of Wilberforce and the Bishop of Rochester in his “Philanthropic Consolations After the Loss of the Slave Trade Bill” (1796) was no better: one is shown smoking tobacco with her breasts exposed, the other sitting on the Bishop’s knee, glass in hand. However, in placing such a vast variety of different images together, both positive and negative, these volumes show that the “Image of the Black” was not at all homogenous but rather reflected the wide range of the Western response to the “other”.
Visual material has some drawbacks as historical evidence. It can deteriorate, or disappear, like the face of the African page in the portrait of Anne of Denmark (1617) by Paul van Somer, which is now scarcely visible, or the twelfth-century Catalan manuscript drawing of the Adoration of the Magi, which was destroyed in the Second World War. Some images are only revealed after cleaning, such as the frescoes from the monastery of San Zeno in Verona, while others have become darker with age or dirt. Other images, such as the seductive pre-1405 drawing of the Queen of Sheba by Konrad Kyeser which now adorns the front cover of Volume Two, Part Two, have been deliberately blackened by a later hand. As with all sources, the reasons behind the production of an image must be interrogated. A Giotto painting showing a black executioner does not prove that black Africans were commonly employed as executioners in late medieval Europe. Neither were all significant individuals portrayed: both the poet Juan Latino (c.1516–c.1597), who became a professor at the University of Granada, and Hausa Christian Gottlieb (d. 1690), a court musician in Germany, went unrecorded in portraiture.
In a study of this scale, difficult decisions must inevitably be made as to what to include and what to omit. The editors have openly chosen depth over breadth, and there is an inevitable preponderance of art from Italy, France and Germany. A chapter by David Bindman provides some treatment of Britain, which was omitted from the original plan. The sheer number of images of Africans in Western art becomes apparent as the essayists in these volumes regularly refer to works of art that are not in fact illustrated. While the portrait of Cromwell with a black page by Thomas Wyck, c.1655–8 can be found easily enough online, other equally intriguing images, such as Antoine Coypel’s “Angola”, the black trumpeter of King Louis XIV, with his mistress, are not so readily accessible. This can prove frustrating, especially when the image is discussed in detail. In some cases, for example in the chapter devoted to Rembrandt, it is unclear whether the images merit such an in-depth analysis since, apart from the 1661 “Study of Two Africans”, which “render the spiritual and moral feeling” of these anonymous men, Rembrandt’s blacks are mostly peripheral figures, literally in the shadows. It seems that the reputation of the artist or perhaps the area of expertise of the scholars involved may have affected the focus of coverage.
Seen through the prism of “Western art”, these “Images of the Black” often tell us more about the Europeans and their agendas than the Africans they portray. Nonetheless, the cumulative effect of the images is to demonstrate a continuous black presence in the Western imagination and experience. Despite their grand size and scope, these volumes are by no means definitive, but rather provide a fascinating starting point for discussion and further research. With Volume Four, From the American Revolution to World War I, due to be reissued in May 2012 and a fifth volume, The Twentieth Century and Beyond, in two parts, entitled From the Artistic Discovery of Africa to the Jazz Age and From the Harlem Renaissance to the Age of Obama, planned for autumn 2014 and spring 2015, this series will pose new questions to scholars of art, history and literature and provoke us all to reconsider the role of “the Black” in Western civilization.
You can read my review of the same books for the BASA Newsletter here.
