Notice to the First Edition

Devisse, Jean; Mollat, Michel; Courtes, Jean Marie

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Jean Devisse and Michel Mollat and Jean Marie Courtes

Description: The Image of the Black in Western Art, Volume II: From the Early Christian Era to...

The Image of the Black in Western Art, Volume II: From the Early Christian Era to the “Age of Discovery”, Part 1: From the Demonic Threat to the Incarnation of Sainthood

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...

Author

Jean Devisse and Michel Mollat and Jean Marie Courtes

PublisherHarvard University Press

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00139.008

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-17120

Notice to the First Edition

JEAN DEVISSE, MICHEL MOLLAT, AND JEAN MARIE COURTÈS

Translated by William Granger Ryan

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 reading the text we have built around the illustrations, one’s dominant impression would be the lack of coherence of the material.

As soon, however, as one looks at these iconographic documents not only as works of art but as cultural signals that must be classified, decoded, and arranged in logical sequences, the information they contain appears extremely rich and often very new. Who would have suspected that St. Maurice could turn black in the middle of the thirteenth century? Who would have imagined how long it took for the black King to be accepted among the Magi? Who would have supposed that the Cántigas of Alfonso X (the Wise) would supply a series of illustrations so indicative of the preconceptions and phantasms of a society? Surprise awaited us at every turn. A new image modified our understanding of ten others previously brought together; a text threw light on the image, and this, in turn, clarified the meaning of another text. The force of circumstances launched us upon a historical inquiry, although at the start our intention was simply to comment on a selection of interesting images: the images themselves often constituted historical series.

We want to say here how valuable, unhesitating, and painstaking has been the collaboration of those who gathered and classified the documents and of all the others whom the Foundation engaged to aid us. And we cannot fail to note how much our discussions with Monique and Ladislas Bugner, a thousand times renewed, have helped us to enrich and give depth to this text.

The study, ten times rewritten and restructured, still fails to satisfy those who have conducted it, because at every step secondary investigations seemed needed in order to understand images that proved to be more significant than we had suspected at the outset. One simple example: in the second part of this volume will be found a brief discussion of paintings relating to medieval astrology. We know very little about them, and months of patient work would have been necessary to interpret them and make them intelligible to the reader. In cases like this we often felt discouraged. If we were ever to get the book out, then many details had to be left unexamined. Such further studies are indispensable to the pursuit of the inquiry into the reasons that impelled the peoples of the West to look upon blacks and their color as they did for so many centuries.

May readers and researchers not forget this Notice, which is in effect a warning and which applies to both parts of the second volume. Indeed, Jean Devisse, Michel Mollat, and Jean Marie Courtès wish to state clearly that this book is a beginning, a groundbreaking, an invitation to look further, to be curious; it is not the soft pillow on which the hasty certitudes of hurried civilizations too often fall asleep.

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