When we embarked, years ago, on this investigation of the iconography of the black in Western medieval art, we had no idea of the unforeseen byways and unexpected depths to which it would lead us. The abundance and diversity of themes encountered necessitated the presentation of this volume in two parts. Were one to leaf through this book and sample the rich harvest of images without carefully...

Africa and the Africans have not, until very recently, been in the forefront of Western man’s concerns. The study which is here brought to a close—incomplete as it still is—has revealed neither a real interest in the black world and its cultures nor an effort to capitalize on the knowledge gained of that world. One must look to reasons other than Africa’s existence as a...

The last quarter of the fifteenth century witnessed a fresh outbreak of representations of Africans. From then on the black is really “seen” and “translated” in various ways. This variety reflects the contradictions in which Europe was living. Except for the highly localized example of St. Maurice, the most traditional theme and the one most closely connected with the...

The second half of the fifteenth century saw the world change in several ways. Some of these changes were spectacular; others, deeper though less visible, foreshadowed economic, social, and political upheavals whose aftershock would be felt clear into the twentieth century. European relations with Africa and Africans became closer and more complex than anything known in the previous ten centuries....

The development of the image of the black in nonimperial Europe differed from the evolution we have so far studied. We have seen that in the empire the image developed mainly within the confines of heraldry and typology. The rest of Europe was traversed by two conflicting currents—the one traditional, with its stereotypes, the other realistic, with its concrete images derived from contact...

The first part of this volume devoted a good deal of attention to the imperial areas of Europe, a procedure dictated by the iconographic evidences found both in the Carolingian sphere and in the Germanic Empire that followed. We have seen that a wealth of themes and myths grew up around the color black, the Aethiops, Prester John, the Queen of Sheba, and the Magi, and we followed the emergence and...