General Editor’s Introduction

Bindman, David

Save Cite Share

Free

Description: The Image of the Black in Western Art, Volume III: From the “Age of...

The Image of the Black in Western Art, Volume III: From the “Age of Discovery” to the Age of Abolition, Part 2: Europe and the World Beyond

This book, the second part of Volume III of The Image of the Black in Western Art, covers the same period as the first part—the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—but it deals largely with different areas and takes a different approach to the subject. Volume III, Part 1 covers the art of Europe from Italy and Spain to Great Britain, with the general exception of Flanders...

Author

David Bindman

PublisherHarvard University Press

Related print edition pages: pp.xxi-xxiv

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00141.003

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-17634

Chapter subject tags:Art, DutchAfrica--Discovery and explorationPrints, DutchAfrica--Relations--EuropeIndigenous peoples--Africa

General Editor’s Introduction

DAVID BINDMAN

This book, the second part of Volume III of The Image of the Black in Western Art, covers the same period as the first part—the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—but it deals largely with different areas and takes a different approach to the subject. Volume III, Part 1 covers the art of Europe from Italy and Spain to Great Britain, with the general exception of Flanders and Holland, though those countries are represented in studies of the imagery of the black Magus in early Netherlandish art, of Rembrandt’s representation of blacks, and of paintings on the theme of Heliodorus’s Aethiopika. The present volume concentrates more on the art of Flanders and Holland, especially that of Rubens and his associates; though other European countries are considered, it is focused geographically and conceptually on Africa, South America, and the Mediterranean. Whereas Part 1 looks at the representation of Africans primarily through artists and artistic images of high quality, the present volume is more concerned with the European visual construction and perception of Africa and Africans. There is, however, no hard-and-fast methodological difference between the approaches of the two parts of Volume III, though this part is more anthropological and historical in emphasis, seeing objects as mediating between Europe and an Africa that is far away yet that impinges ever more closely on European daily life, especially in cities and ports.

In some cases the same or similar groups of objects are treated in both parts but from different points of view. One of the most striking and widespread features of the period is the ubiquity of the black Magus in the popular subject in churches of the Adoration of the Magi. In Part 1 this subject is dealt with by Joseph Koerner largely in terms of its Christian meaning and the idea of Christianity as a universal religion that would in time be adopted by all the Gentiles in the world. The African Magus thus represents some or all of those peoples who have yet to receive the message of the Gospel, unlike the Jews, who rejected it from the beginning. In Part 2 the emphasis is more on the black Magus as a representative of Africa and what that means for European perception of the continent. In this book Massing deals with the geographical implications of the subject’s representation, writing, for example, about the fascinating painting by the Master of the St. Batholomew Altarpiece of the meeting of the Three Kings with David and Isaiah in the Getty Museum, in which the Magi are shown on separate mountaintops that represent the continents from which they have come. (see 76)

Africa, despite popular views to the contrary, was not in this period terra incognita, though very few Europeans before the mid-nineteenth century traveled inward from coastal settlements. One can see from Massing’s thorough investigation of engravings in travel books the growing knowledge of the variety and complexity of African life, but also the repetitive nature of so many of those images. As he is able to demonstrate time and time again, images that might or might not offer a fanciful and tendentious picture of African life can reappear sometimes for over a century in varied forms, from engravings to paintings to tapestries, and even to advertisements and packaging, transforming actual or fictional observation into a myth that governs all European perceptions of the continent and its many peoples.

By focusing initially on exploration and its source in great ports like Lisbon and Venice, Massing is able to place the image of the black in the period within a dynamic movement based on trade, slavery, and conquest between Europe and Africa, but also involving the Spanish (and for a brief period Dutch) colonization of South America. The Portuguese were the first to take over the slave trade from Arabs in the fifteenth century, but in the next two centuries the dynamic European economies moved into it as a way of controlling and increasing production of various goods desirable to European consumers. Though the main activities of slavery took place on distant continents, one result was the growing presence in cities and ports of small numbers of Africans, some of whom were household slaves but others of whom were free individuals who might move into certain trades, like that of gondolier in Venice or court musician.

Europeans’ often tangential contact with Africans bred a certain curiosity, and this was to some extent satisfied by such images as Hans Burgkmair’s great woodcuts of Africans, Arabs, and Indians, which reappear in and on all kinds of objects, as do Melchior Lorck’s costume studies. There was also much curiosity about the Ottoman Empire, the great adversary but also the home of a court of legendary splendor and eroticism, in which Africans played a part as slaves of all ranks and as eunuchs who guarded the harem. People were also curious about the nature and extent of Africa itself, and there were many attempts, both scientific and fictional, to map Africa and give a sense of its different peoples and their distinctive customs. A large number of expeditions (and travel books based on them) investigated the inhabitants of different parts of the continent and brought back images of a whole variety of customs of largely prurient interest to European readers. Some writers, like Olfert Dapper, who was only a compiler of information, claimed a comprehensive view of the whole continent. Mapping and illustration went on, sometimes together and at other times separately, always representing Africans as strange and primitive beings, despite the increasing contact with Christian communities in Ethiopia and Congo.

Africa, of course, did not divide neatly into black and white peoples, and there was the perennially complex and still unresolved question of the ethnic identity of North Africans, some of whom, like Mulay Ahmed, bey of Tunis, the subject of an etching by Jan Cornelisz Vermeyen and a much later painting by Peter Paul Rubens, were clearly seen as black; other North African rulers were often depicted in the same series as African rulers from south of the Sahara (see 83, 85).

South America was the site of what was essentially the first African diaspora. Interestingly, though the continent was predominantly ruled by Spain, the vast majority of visual representations of those who had come from Africa were made in connection with the relatively brief Dutch occupation of Brazil by Johan Maurits van Nassau. This brings home the important point that the representation of Africa and Africans did not follow European contact but rather depended on the existence and capacity of the professions involved in image-making, painting, and engraving, which were, in the seventeenth century at least, predominantly based in Holland. It was the Dutch mastery of the representational mode in painting and engraving that dominated the production of images of distant lands; hence the Dutch occupation of Brazil was responsible for more images of blacks than in all of Spanish-ruled South America.

Ports were liminal places in the constant transactions between Europe, Africa, and South America. Artists often represented ports like Livorno, where the transient population might consist of African slaves and freemen, liberated white slaves, and traders of all nationalities. As Massing demonstrates, this led to a whole genre of painting, the Italianate harbor scene, usually practiced by Dutch artists in Italy, in which blacks play a part in the erotic life of an exotic place connected to Africa by a relatively short stretch of the Mediterranean.

In the second part of this volume, Massing changes perspective to look toward Africa from Europe, broadly considering the presence of Africans who had immigrated, freely or under duress. Among the former are the Abissini, Ethiopian Christians who went to Rome as converts to the Roman Church, and among the latter are black children, selected for their beauty and agreeable disposition to be pages and grooms, who were depicted by court portraitists from Titian all the way through the eighteenth century. Though such paintings, particularly Titians portrait of Laura Dianti, are discussed extensively in Volume III, Part 1, here Massing is able to emphasize their pan-European presence, pointing to the way in which such subject types were able to cross borders with ease, as did courtiers themselves, and how blacks could also be present in different, usually menial roles in the kitchen or in the hunt.

While this book as part of Volume III is largely concerned with actual Africans, however much mediated and fictionalized in representation, many representations of blacks in the period belong within the context of religious and mythological imagery. Black Africans, as discussed in the Preface, were mentioned variously, though sometimes in ways that are vague about their actual identity, in the Old Testament. In painting, from Hieronymus Bosch onward, they can represent “black” vices, but they can also have a more positive role as a Magus in Adorations, and very occasionally the Queen of Sheba is represented as black (though more often she is white, with black attendants). The tradition of the black Magus continues from the fifteenth century, reaching a kind of apotheosis in the many portrayals by Rubens, clearly based on studies of the physiognomy of real Africans, of which the Four Studies of a Black Man in Brussels is a singularly luminous example. Other subjects involving Africans come to the fore, like the baptism of the eunuch, the currency of which in the period derives in Protestant countries, as Massing demonstrates, from the Calvinist sacrament of baptism as a kind of whitening of the soul (see I.1). Black figures also appear in Last Judgments, and black saints make a tentative appearance for the first time since the Middle Ages.

Such representations are always tied, as we have seen in the case of the black Magus, to the idea of the conversion of Africa, and by the seventeenth century that was no longer an aspiration but had become a formal objective of papal policy. The key figure in the visual representation of the missionary impulse is the deeply touching figure of Antonio Manuel, Marquis of Ne Vunda, the Kongolese ambassador who died shortly after he arrived in Rome and who was the subject of a monument, a wall painting, and other objects. He is extensively discussed in Volume III, Part 1 by Paul Kaplan, but here he is approached from a different direction, as an African who played a role in the attempts of the papacy, and of the Jesuits in particular, to build on the Christian communities of Ethiopia and Kongo to spread Christianity throughout the continent.

The final two sections of this book turn toward a different Africa, a continent associated with fantasies of pleasure, of unimaginable riches and exotic pursuits. This is expressed in mythological scenes in paintings and tapestries which have a sometimes vague African setting, but also in the delights of tobacco, which produced its own demotic imagery. Finally, the exoticism of remarkable luxury objects produced for rulers and wealthy courtiers—cameos, rings, automatons, and mounted coconut, nautilus, and ostrich-egg shells—was heightened by the incorporation of African heads or bodies.

Taken together, this book and Volume III, Part 1 give a full and rich picture of the European image of Africans in the two centuries they cover, from the artistic, historical, and anthropological points of view. The two parts bring to the fore the greatest and most moving artistic representations of Africans, but they also show in considerable depth the efforts that Europeans made to understand the peoples of Africa, whom they frequently exploited so cruelly. Together the books provoke reflection on the nature of visual imagery—how it can reveal a strong and warm sense of the individual humanity of Africans which goes far beyond traditional stereotypes, as in paintings by Rembrandt and Rubens, but also how it can perpetuate and reinforce reductive and demeaning images of people usually treated with little human sympathy in this phase of Europe’s history.

Previous chapter Next chapter

Base text size -

Chapter images ()