“The Three Mulattoes
of Esmereldas” (1599), by Andrés Sánchez Gallque, depicts a father and his two
sons, descendants of African plantation slaves and New World natives, who were
leaders of an Afro-Indian community. This is one of the works in “Revealing the African Presence in
Renaissance Europe," at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore. (From: Museo
Nacional del Prado, Madrid)
This exhibit “African Presence in Renaissance Europe”
appears to be a very interesting visual depiction of 15th and 16th
century European perceptions on race and “otherness,” in a time before plantation
slavery in the New World forever altered Western views of race and white
superiority. New Yorkers – you are only
2 ½ hours from Baltimore by Amtrak train, so if you are looking for something
to do over the Thanksgiving break, this might be just the ticket!
I am copying below the article (a review of the exhibit) from
The New York Times in its
entirety.
A Spectrum From Slaves to Saints
‘African Presence in Renaissance
Europe,’ at Walters Museum
Published:
November 8, 2012
BALTIMORE
— In a fall art season distinguished, so far, largely by a bland, no-brainer
diet served up by Manhattan’s major museums, you have to hit the road for
grittier fare. And the Walters Art Museum here is not too far to go to find it
in a high-fiber, convention-rattling show with the unglamorous title of “Revealing the African Presence in Renaissance
Europe.”
Visually the exhibition is a gift, with marvelous things
by artists familiar and revered — Dürer, Rubens, Veronese — along with images
most of us never knew existed. Together they map a history of art, politics and
race that scholars have begun to pay attention to — notably through “The Image
of the Black in Western Art,” a multivolume book project edited by David
Bindman and Henry Louis Gates Jr. — but that few museums have addressed in
full-dress style.
Like the best scholarship, the Walters show, organized by
Joaneath Spicer, the museum’s curator of Renaissance and Baroque art, is as
much about questions as answers, and makes no bones about that. Many wall
labels begin with an interrogative, suggesting that a museum visitor’s reading
of a particular image carries as much weight as the curator’s.
And, like most ambitious but risky undertakings, it has
flaws. There is evidence of budget limitations. Although no corners were cut in
getting crucial European loans, the catalog — a good one — has come in a third
smaller in size than planned and with signs of changes-at-the-last-minute
production.
The presence of a chatty “resource center” midway through
the show, with gamelike audience-participation activities on offer, will rile
museum purists. (I have no problem with it.) And, in a show that tackles the
issue of race head-on, the line between an objective view of the past taken on
its own terms and interpretation of it in light of the present can sometimes
feel precariously drawn.
But in the end none of this matters. The show is so
interesting to look at and so fresh with historical news as to override
reservations. It does what few museum shows ever do: It takes a prized piece of
art history, one polished to a glow by generations of attention, and turns it
in an unexpected direction, so it catches the searching, scouring rays of new
investigative light.
Europe’s ties to Africa were ancient but sporadic.
Particularly strong bonds were forged during the heyday of the Roman Empire.
And in the 15th and 16th centuries, the period covered by the Walters show,
they were renewed. True, as early the eighth century a pocket of
intercontinental culture had sprung up in Muslim-occupied southern Spain. But
it wasn’t until that occupation was coming to a close that a broader exchange
began.
By the mid-1400s an expansionist Europe was hungry for
new materials and markets, and a globally minded Roman Catholic Church sought
new members. Well before Vasco da Gama first sailed around Africa, Portuguese
merchants had opened trading depots along its west coast. And enterprising
Africans were coming to Europe.
In 1484 a Congolese delegation visited Lisbon on a
diplomatic mission, and Ethiopian Christian pilgrims were establishing
permanent communities in Rome.
Superficially Africa and Europe had embarked on an age of
cosmopolitan rapport, an idea promoted in art. It was during this period that
the convention was introduced of including a black African as one of the three
foreign kings in images of the Adoration of the Magi. A beautiful
early-16th-century Flemish example and one with, exceptionally, two black
figures, tenderly particularized, opens the Walters show on a utopian note,
with a vision of multicultural harmony.
In reality harmony was rarely associated with Africa in
the European mind. Known primarily secondhand from sensationalizing ancient
texts, the African continent was often depicted in the Renaissance as a place
of freakish beasts and bestial, violence-prone, naturally subject peoples. The
attitude found its place in Renaissance decorative objects like oil lamps and
door pulls cast in the shape of African heads, and in paintings that routinely
included dark-skinned figures as servants or slaves.
Slavery
had a long institutional history in Europe, and for centuries most slaves were
white, from the eastern Mediterranean and Russia. The source changed with the
beginnings of an African slave trade in Europe in the mid-1400s. And the
complexion of European art, subtly but surely, changed with it.
We
find a hint of this in a minutely detailed late-16th-century painting of a city
square in Lisbon bustling with black- and white-skinned figures from across the
social spectrum. We find it again in an exquisite drawing by Dürer of a demure
20-year-old black woman named Katharina, a slave in the household of a Portuguese
patron the artist visited in Antwerp in 1521. And we find it once more in a
fragmentary painting by Annibale Carracci. The original picture seems to have
been a portrait of an aristocratic woman accompanied by her female slave. But
only the likeness of the slave survives, and her face, with its simmering,
level-eyed gaze, is unforgettable.
Being a domestic slave in urban Europe was not
necessarily a lifelong condition. (The situation was very different on New
World plantations.) Slaves could be freed by owners and take up independent
professions. The two black men, one young, one older, in a pair of fleet chalk
drawings from around 1580 by Paolo Veronese might have worked as his assistants
or apprentices, much as the former slave and mixed-race painter Juan de Pareja
did in Velázquez’s studio in Madrid.
De Pareja went on to have a painting career of his own,
though he is largely remembered as the subject of one of Velázquez’s most
magnificent portraits. But in general the names of black sitters in Renaissance
paintings — and, no doubt, of black artists — are lost.
Who is, or was, the slightly stunned-looking man wearing
drop earrings, a gold chain and pearl-encrusted cap in “Portrait of a Wealthy
African,” by an unknown 16th-century German or Flemish artist? Or the
regal-looking personage, head swathed in a milk-white turban, in an oil sketch
whipped up on a sheet of repurposed accounting paper by Peter Paul Rubens?
Portrait of a Wealthy African, Flemish or German, ca. 1540, Private
Collection, Antwerp
Rubens’s sitter is so attractive, we’d love to know his
story. And we’d especially love to know the story — the true, gossip-free story
— behind the sitter in an Agnolo Bronzino portrait whose name has survived.
He’s Alessandro de’ Medici, who ruled Florence for seven years before being
assassinated in 1537, and who is thought by historians to have been the
illegitimate child of a pope-to-be, Clement VII, and a black or biracial woman.
Alessandro’s dark skin was remarked on by contemporaries,
who nicknamed him Il Moro (the Moor), a generic term for African in
16th-century Italy. In Bronzino’s painting the subject’s complexion is
inconclusively ruddy. But another portrait, this one of the ruler’s young
daughter Giulia, has been cited by some scholars, who point to the child’s
black facial features, as confirmation of Alessandro’s ethnic heritage.
Together these portraits probably attest to the reality
of African DNA flowing through Medici blood, and through the very center of the
European High Renaissance. But they are at least as interesting for the reactions
they have provoked. Until recently art history has ignored, denied or at best
tiptoed around their racial content, just as it has skimmed over the black
presence in Europe as a whole. The Walters exhibition not only asserts that
presence, but positions it as a contributing factor to a crucial moment in the
forming of European cultural identity.
By the early 17th century that moment seemed to have
passed. Europe’s attention turned to the Americas and to Asia. Africa became
what it had started out being for Europe: a supply center for natural resources
and cheap labor. Old attitudes of fear and disdain toward Africa — still the
dominant view in the West — returned and hardened.
So: Renaissance followed by regression is the show’s
bottom-line theme. Or is it? One of the saving graces of art — what keeps you
coming back to it — is that it isn’t a bottom-line business. You think you’ve
come to an end, a conclusion, and there’s always more: the exception, the
extension. And so it is in this case: African Europe lived on, in new places,
and in new guises.
Toward the end of the show, in a 1599 painting called
“The Three Mulattoes of Esmereldas,” we see three dark-skinned men in European
court attire but also wearing large gold nose ornaments and holding spears. The
painting, now in the Prado, was done in Spanish colonial Ecuador. It depicts a
father and his two sons, descendants of African plantation slaves and New World
natives, who were leaders of an Afro-Indian community. In this painting,
commissioned from an Ecuadorean artist as a gift to Philip III of Spain, they
present to Europe as what they are: related, different, equal.
African Europe also continued to flourish on home turf
in, among other places, popular religion. The exhibition’s final image is a resplendent
18th-century carved wood sculpture of a Roman Catholic saint, Benedict of
Palermo (1526-89), who was born into a family of African slaves in Sicily, led
an exemplary life as a Franciscan monk there, and was canonized in 1807.
This saint is sometimes referred to as Benedict the Moor
or Benedict the African, and in the sculpture his racial identity is
emphatically conveyed: his grave face and extended hand are a rich ebony black,
their darkness framed and amplified by the brilliant gilding of his robe.
By the
time this sculpture was carved around 1734, Benedict had long since attracted
an ardent following, in Europe, in the colonial Americas and in Africa. Today
he’s the official patron saint of African-America, with churches in his honor
from Bahia to the Bronx. And images of him, no matter how stylistically varied,
continue to combine traces of Renaissance Europe and of Africa. In him the two
are inseparable, are one.
Slide show:
Article:
Walters Art
Museum Website about the exhibit:
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