Introduction to the First Edition

Bindman, David; Gates Jr., Henry Louis

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Preface to the First Edition: Introduction to the First Edition

David Bindman (Editor), Henry Louis Gates Jr. (Editor)

Description: The Image of the Black in Western Art, Volume I: From the Pharaohs to the Fall of...

The Image of the Black in Western Art, Volume I: From the Pharaohs to the Fall of the Roman Empire

Turned inward upon itself, cut off from the Mediterranean basin by the Sahara desert and from Europe for hundreds of years by the barrier of Islam, and in more recent centuries isolated by the system of the Triangular Trade, black Africa was an unknown land until the end of the nineteenth century. When an evaluation of the place of the black in Occidental art in general is undertaken, one is...

Author

David Bindman (Editor), Henry Louis Gates Jr. (Editor)

PublisherHarvard University Press

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-19829

Introduction to the First Edition

LADISLAS BUGNER

Turned inward upon itself, cut off from the Mediterranean basin by the Sahara desert and from Europe for hundreds of years by the barrier of Islam, and in more recent centuries isolated by the system of the Triangular Trade, black Africa was an unknown land until the end of the nineteenth century. When an evaluation of the place of the black in Occidental art in general is undertaken, one is forced to conclude that his role is marginal. One is tempted to regard this low status as the sign of an unreasoned but deep-seated aversion toward the African on the part of the white. What we are about here is not only to review this summary interpretation but to show that the problem should be stated in quite different terms.

Works of art depicting the black are rare, and, generally speaking, not of high quality, and the insertion of a black image within a given theme was entirely optional. Hence we are always compelled to evaluate the relativity of his representation; taken in isolation, its unusual appearance might seem to have an originality or a significance which in fact it does not have. The representation of black torturers and executioners in scenes of the Passion is so frequent as to illustrate, by spectacular examples, a long period of xenophobia—as long as we disregard the still more frequent appearance of white headsmen. The evocation of Christ’s sufferings had such appeal, and the taste for realism and the picturesque was so strong, that little room is left for the interpretation of the figure of the African himself. Speaking more generally, a history of art would not be written exclusively on the basis of works related to this theme. On the other hand, one written without mentioning them would leave out a nuance, although it would not constitute a serious omission.

So much being said, we must emphasize the remarkable permanence of the subject through five millennia rather than limit its scope. Themes have taken form with a consistency such that the image of the African, though not obligatory, came to be normal and expected. Some of these even confer a specific role on this image and integrate it into the iconography of the Occident. Examples are the St. Maurice of the Holy Roman Empire, the Baptism of the Eunuch, the Miracle of the Black Leg, St. Benedict of Palermo, and, above all, the black Wise Man, the diffusion and durability of which cannot be minimized.

In the Occident the description of the Negro inevitably involved a certain realism: he was a particular type. Most often this differentiation was excluded as a matter of course from the most ambitious works, which aimed, through a certain degree of idealization, to express the human condition in general. We will not look for the black in the pediment of the Parthenon, but we find him in the main portal of the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris and in the cathedral of Magdeburg, invested with the highest spiritual significance that realism could confer. His importance was recognized by Maecenases as prominent as Emperor Charles IV of Luxembourg, the Duke of Berry, and Cardinal Albert of Brandenburg. We might cite great artists’ names: the Limbourgs, Grünewald, Dürer, Memling and Hieronymus Bosch, Mantegna and Veronese, Velázquez, Rubens, Rembrandt, Watteau, Pigalle, Houdon, Géricault, Delacroix, Turner, Cézanne … the roll would make a “pantheon,” which proves at least that the image of the black was not without interest to European artists of the highest distinction. Despite the fact that the Occident knew so little about the African continent, despite the weight of pejorative themes which Africa inspired, this image was able to take its place in a gallery of European masterpieces.

Should we wish to press the analysis further and take the frequency and distribution of the works into account, it would be possible to establish a curve of the variations of interest aroused by the African over the centuries, to set forth a topography of his presence and influence, and to compare these patterns with what history additionally attests regarding the waxing and waning of relations with Africa. But how are we to decide whether there was not more contact with Africans in the periods when art had only a limited “figurative” significance—for instance, in the ninth and eighth centuries of ancient Greece? What shall we say about the European idea of the Negro as expressed in Romanesque art? The fickle chance that governs the preservation or discovery of the testimonies often makes such comparisons illusory. Exceptional cases of preservation (Pompeii), of destruction (the Lisbon earthquake), or of periods of iconoclasm (the Reformation, the French Revolution) are of less importance here than the normal situation of regions subject to cycles of regeneration. Loss or destruction of works in the busiest centers of communication (where traditionally artistic production is most active), while not so readily perceived, is often all the more sweeping. In Paris, for example, not a Romanesque, nor even a fourteenth-century stained-glass window left, nor a fresco earlier than the seventeenth century… the losses are immeasurable.

The identification of the black in a work of art is possible only when the design or the modeling is executed with a certain degree of precision. Generally this is not verified in the case of archaic art forms, nor of works that are badly preserved, eroded, broken, or restored. We would hesitate to make so banal a statement if we were not aware that its obviousness is not always perceived. The fact that the work is “readable” often rules the efforts made to isolate the oldest known example of the appearance of a theme. This kind of mention is then none other than a disguised case of frequency interpretation: the single example surviving from a given period can seldom be precisely situated within a continuum of development in accordance with the conditions of formation and appearance of the theme, conditions which are deduced afterward. Did the black Wise Man first appear in the twelfth century, as a certain number of literary sources would suggest? All examples of this figure from before 1400 fall short stylistically of a decisive individualization, or else may well be repaints. In the fifteenth century, when the theme reached its greatest popularity, or again in the nineteenth, when large programs of restoration were undertaken, three white Magi might have seemed an anomaly. We know of several instances where the people responsible for the protection of artworks gave the restorers the job of removing a coat of paint from a statue; but can it be said that the “whitened” Balthazar has recovered his original appearance? Is it not a mistake to wipe away an alteration which, even though today it is regarded as an abuse of the original, has its own historic authenticity?

Once these reservations are noted, it is interesting to observe the absence of the black in the major works produced in periods of high-level artistic activity—e.g., by Raphael in Renaissance Italy or by Poussin in seventeenth-century France—whereas he is present in secondary works, and the most insignificant images, such as that of the little servant, increase in number. In this regard it might be asked whether, and to what extent, the black’s reduction to these minor themes may reflect the effects of slavery, which developed in this period. It would be risky to say. The progress and ultimate success of abolitionist propaganda were echoed hardly at all in “Great Art” and found their most fertile ground and another medium of diffusion in popular engravings and prints.

Only objects cast in the same mold, taken from the same model, copies, and replicas add up. Those things give us useful indications of the success of a motif or the propagation of a theme, but they have nothing to do with artistic creation. For a given period, the difference between a large bronze and a small terracotta, both Hellenistic, is not simply a matter of size, but, more precisely, bears on the nature of the testimony. In a given category of objects, a statue will not have equal importance in the Sixth Dynasty and in the Eighteenth, or in a Gothic portal and a baroque decoration. The artist turns progressively away from what a work signifies and toward formal considerations. Therefore, from its purely material and technical aspect to the factor of inventiveness and even of spirituality discerned in its production, every work constitutes a unique moment and an original equilibrium which demand recognition.

The importance of the evidence depends also on the place assigned to the black within a representation. If he is there only as an “extra” in a scene in which the white man is the principal actor, it is clear that his part is secondary. Even if his role is not degrading, and he is not added simply for contrast, his insertion in a composition shows that his image is subordinate to other factors in which he is only indirectly concerned. It may be thought that the periods during which such insertions occur most frequently thus seem the most unfavorable to the image of the black: instances would be the art of pharaonic Egypt and Christian Europe before the fifteenth century.

On the other hand, the representation of the black may be isolated and stand alone as a consummate artistic form. This formal isolation seems to correspond to a more direct approach to the African. Contrast does not play a deciding role: attention is given first to the peculiarities of the type, and then of the individual. There is a large proportion of isolated figures in Greco-Roman art. The hazards of preservation may be in large part responsible for this, yet the major examples left by Hellenistic, Alexandrian, and Roman art give eloquent testimony to the favor in which the image of the black was held. In one case the isolation of the figure amounts, in all probability, to the identification of an individual. The Berlin museum has a marble head from the second century A.D. which portrays a black, noble of visage, calm, marvelously expressive. There is no question of the individuality of the figure. It was discovered among several busts with bases intact, and these give us the names of the models—Herodes Atticus, the wealthy Sophist and patron of the arts, and two of his disciples. These are mentioned by Philostratus along with the name of a third, Memnon—the name recalls the legendary king of Ethiopia. Thus everything seems to prove that this reference gives us the key to the identity of the personage portrayed by the sculptor. But for one fortunate find, how many names lost!

The problem of the portrait was elaborated in Western art from the fifteenth century onward with the more precise and limitative notion of genre. The privilege of having one’s portrait “done” was certainly extended beyond the upper social classes. The impression created by the samples which have come down to us is a deceptive one. Doubtless an individual did not need to be rich or prominent to have his likeness done, but the same cannot be said of the reasons for preserving it. Who can carry around a family tree? Because Dürer was celebrated even during his lifetime and his least work sought after by his contemporaries, and because he made notes during his sojourn in the Low Countries, we can determine the decisive moment when he became interested in a black person, individualized and named: this was the serving maid of an agent of the king of Portugal. On the drawing that fortunately has been saved for us, the artist inscribed the name and the age of the model. In 1521, Catherine was twenty years old.

Between the isolation of the form and the individuality of the portrait there is at times a basic gap. Certain figures do indeed present the black as he was but are intended only as a representative, general type—witness the polychrome marble busts and the porte-flambeaux of the eighteenth century. Frequently the representation is coupled with a utilitarian object in which its isolation—due to the function of the object—loses its main importance and becomes, in fact, the pseudo-isolation of the Negro accessory.

For the most part, the representations of blacks made in the Roman period of antiquity are found in small handheld objects such as tableware, lamps, and various utensils. Despite the quality of some of them, these pieces put the theme in the category of “minor” arts and limit its significance, but it is this lowering of status—no feeling of being threatened or of xenophobia, no reaction of fear vis-à-vis the unknown—that makes the approach to the image easier, more relaxed, amounting to a certain anecdotal familiarity.

There are times when art consents to take anecdote and raise it to the level of style; at other times concern for style excludes the anecdote, and the theme has to have receded into history before the black is represented. The passing of generations can lead to sudden changes. Thus Rogier van der Weyden did not portray a black in any of his known compositions. In his great Adoration of the Magi in the St. Columba triptych, painted about 1460, the Three Kings are white, although the work was destined for Cologne, where the theme of the black King was first propagated. In 1464, the year of Rogier’s death, his pupils, beginning with Memling, adopted the black Wise Man with a sort of predilection and put him in large compositions which must have been painted in the master’s studio. It is also possible that the desire to manifest a newly awakened sensibility partly explains the popularity of the Negro image among the mannerists, among the painters of the third generation after Caravaggio, or among the romantic artists who turned against neoclassicism. Such reactions are less easily discernible in antiquity when, taking longer to develop, they spread over several generations. Yet by analogy we can identify periods that were more favorable than others to exotic, or simply unusual, inspiration. Such trends appear in the art of the end of the Eighteenth Dynasty, in Hellenistic art (in which Alexandria played a central part), or again in the Roman art of the second and third centuries of our era. Decreases of creative tension may have the effect of favoring an eclectic approach, which, in turn, clears the way for exoticism. The disciple turns toward novelties in order to prolong for his own advantage the masterpiece he cannot surpass, by bringing in what is singular and strange.

Faced with the complexity of a decorative system or the endless resources that allow two figures to be placed in relation to each other, the spectator himself introduces the notion of isolation, which is simply a convention, a way of seeing. Once out of the artist’s hands the work lives its own life, and a new setting creates or destroys relationships that modify its pristine situation. Yet isolation can be considered from another point of view, valid for all works of art, which takes us back to the moment when the form emerges, guided and controlled by its creator. Then we are aware of a kind of attention, of observation—we might say simply of effort and time the artist devotes to this figure in particular. We must be careful to avoid an anachronistic subjectivity which would read into this a personal, favored relationship to the model, but the understanding of the theme of the black in Occidental art is essentially based on an intuitive grasp of the dialogue.

The meaning of this dialogue interests us here insofar as it concerns a black model before a white artist. Furthermore, this black model is chosen from among a number of white models. His image is more than a contrast: it represents the dissonant minority. Hence in Europe the relation between white man and black man cannot be communicated as it would be in African societies. On the other hand, the dividing lines appear less clearly. Egypt was the first to give expression to a sense of the antagonism inherent in ethnic difference: there can be no doubt that Egypt saw a distinction between her own people and the black populations farther south, quite as much as Ethiopia did. Yet the “dwarf-Pygmies,” the Nubians, and the Cushites pose the problem of the presence, in greater or lesser numbers, of Negroid elements in these regions. In fact, this question concerns all of North Africa, the Nile Valley as far as Meroë, and the northeastern horn of the continent; but admittedly it belongs to another set of problems, and we touch upon it very indirectly. In the Christian era Ethiopian and Coptic art do not seem to furnish guidelines that would allow us to judge whether black-white contrasts followed from particular, consistent attitudes at the ethnic or symbolic level.

To make the representation of the black man an index of ethnic differentiation is to put it into a much wider scope of meanings, these being determined by the symbolism inherent in blackness itself. The opposition involves not only the color white but light and brightness, and it does not exclude the positive aspect of a real valuation. We shall deal only partially with this question, through art and in function of some of the most telling effects of the symbol upon the image of the African.

In ancient Egypt blackness was a sign of fecundity, related to the color of the fertilizing silt. Certain allegorical representations of the Nile carved in dark or black stone induce us to recognize, in the choice of the material, an allusion to the Ethiopian source of the river, although the figure has no Negroid traits. The same method of treatment applies to “Isis the Black,” and careful studies should be made regarding its probable application to other divinities, where the notion of fertility is again associated with black color, both in Egypt and in Greece. The European Black Madonnas and alchemical symbolism are connected with the same kind of positive evaluation.

The Christian metaphor of the Ethiopian as a symbol of sin certainly established a relationship between the image of the African and that of the Devil, and the association of blackness with death and hell followed from the repulsion aroused by the blackness of Evil independently of any direct reference to concrete experience. It is nevertheless beyond question that this pejorative extension of the symbolism of black color reflected unfavorably on the person of the African. How far is this responsible for the degradation of his image? In this regard it seems to us that art may not have played a determinative role. The symbolism of blackness was generally used without calling upon Negroid features to represent the demon. A remarkable thing about this iconography is that we find so few demons with the features of a black, whereas from the earliest times of the Church the texts make such abundant use of this comparison. It would be an exaggeration to say that blackness constituted the demoniac attribute par excellence; the infernal world appears in all the colors of the rainbow. Sometimes violent hostility led to the blackening of the Jewish torturer, but such examples are not numerous. The same process was used more widely to caricature the Saracen, but in this case the artist also based his portrayal on features he had observed.

Another theme in which art followed literature only sporadically and in minor variations is that of Night. The terrors awakened by obscurity, the phantasms emerging from darkness, nocturnal themes in general, are mostly literary. The Byzantine personification of Night is white, with the attributes of the moon and the stars: only exceptionally do we find her represented as black or blue with a veil over her head. In Occidental art the black Night—the night of sin—appears in a rare thirteenth-century document, where it illustrates the liturgy of the Easter vigil. Otherwise it is hardly ever present until the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in allegorical themes of an erudite, scholarly character.

From another point of view, art constantly made use of black without the slightest ethnic or symbolic significance. Before it is seen as a color, it is simply the obvious response to a piece of white paper. In black, the distinction between the two basic elements of painting, tone and color, fades in and out, allowing an interplay of subtle resonance. Materials present their own properties from which artists seek to produce the best result. Works can be adapted to bitumen, black glaze, basalt, or dark marble without constraint. The sculptor makes brilliant use of the limitless metamorphoses of black: shadow to substance; light gently absorbed or harshly reflected.

By the deliberate exploitation of a kind of “elective affinity” between medium and motif, the artist aims to convey the illusion that the material “summons forth” the image. When this image is as strange and exotic as that of an African, the meeting is all the more appealing. Greek head vases and Alexandrian and Roman statues provide many examples of this appearance of a preestablished harmony. The possibilities of the charcoal pencil in the hand of Dürer or Watteau give their portraits of blacks the charm of a rich counterpoint between medium and style.

Pictorial illusion is obtained by the use of gradations of masses and colors, superimposed planes, spatial depth conveyed by modeling light and shadow. In all these instances the use of black pigment is necessary. The figure of the African can even come in directly. May not the main reason for painting so many little black serving boys into pictures, around the eighteenth century, have been to create a dark area which is not a shadow?

The diffusion of our theme is linked to times and places in which a certain consensus on the three points we have been making is historically conceivable: we refer to the black-white contrast as a sign of ethnic differentiation, the extension by which this sign assumed symbolic significance, and the relative freedom of plastic expression from external constraint. The adoption of these points makes it possible to reduce the African to a conventional pattern that calls upon only a limited group of distinguishing signs. The convergence of a number, deemed sufficient, of the elements commonly called “Negroid features” is enough to identify the figure, at times with the help of a context that emphasized the differences and contrasts.

In fact, the coordinates which dictate the image of the black are extremely malleable and unstable. Each element, taken separately, assumes meanings which go beyond simple racial characterization. On the other hand, one element can be suppressed or transformed within the system of representation without causing the identification of the black to be questioned.

By representing him with broad nose and everted lips, Egypto-Roman art recalled the African origins of the god Bes while giving him the form of a grotesque, comic dwarf quite different from the Ethiopian type. This same kind of approximation is often used in the representation of satyrs, and, like the god Bes, these may show white or black coloration, as well as others. Lastly, in the numerous Nilotic scenes of Alexandrian origin, Pygmies, despite their dark skin, generally show only slightly Negroid features.

In the margins of manuscripts, in the profusion of sculpture in cathedrals, and in countless decorative patterns, the artist liberated, juxtaposed, or crossed forms accepted but turned from their ordinary function. Then the use of Negroid features takes on a playful aspect; precise reference to the African is absent or is recalled incidentally, as an added touch. These features are often gathered together in what are called the “grotesques”: what we must see there is mostly a gesture of homage to the plasticity of their forms. Or the artist, inspired by entirely different motives, could use the flat nose, thick lips, and sometimes an exaggerated prognathism, without black color, as a conventional vocabulary for expressing instinctive brutality in contrast to “noble” spiritualization or “feminine” grace. The realistic figure of the black already served this purpose. But it was not necessary to go so far. The snub, turned-up nose suited any figure, white or black, that the artist wanted to vilify. Rabelais called this the “ace-of-clubs” nose.

The element of color has always been used as the principal sign of differentiation, yet it is the most superficial and the one that can be most readily omitted. Pure, opaque black color, resistant as it is to modeling or shading, is seldom used excepting for two special applications, namely the shiny glaze on Greek vases and the black paint on fifteenth- and sixteenth-century polychrome statues in wood. In these objects, the conventional use of an artificial equivalent for the black man’s skin color is allowed, whereas such equivalents are generally rejected for the white man, who was never represented as pure white.

Transposition of color probably disturbs least the identification of the subject. Rubens, in his famous study in Brussels, used modulations of silvery blue, brown, and red to render the color of four heads of blacks, producing, as it were, an inversion of a grisaille. Before and after him many artists, in painting the African, found opportunities for displaying the rich, vibrant tonalities of their palettes.

Ordinarily the black man is brown, most often dark, although a swarthy tone is sometimes hard to distinguish from a ruddy suntan. According to technical demands or the artist’s fantasy the African can be red, green, or blue. No single color belies the black. Indeed, the convention of the complete elimination of color can be observed without creating the impression that the work is unfinished: neither white marble nor ivory nor line drawings detract from the reality of the identification. In these cases, as in that of stone statues which have lost their polychrome, the absence of the too obvious sign of color is felt as a better approximation of the true appearance of the individual, as though he is no longer seen through a mask.

No one Negroid feature is in itself sufficient or indispensable to the identification of the black. Plastic characteristics, however, are far more clearly indicative than color. Long, wavy strands of hair, replacing the usual tightly curled crop, basically change the representation. The same can be said of any other feature: a relatively small modification is enough to render it incompatible with the other signs, although these are still clearly recognizable. Furthermore, the signs will be deemed strong or weak to the degree they can throw the image of the black out of balance if they are altered. Woolly hair thus counts among the strongest elements. Its absence does not affect the image—the black need not be bareheaded—but change it, and the image is destroyed. This is the process that makes it so easy to adapt Negroid features to “grotesques” and other “expressive” figures. Inversely, the nose and lips are less telling but cannot be suppressed. Moreover, they read as different, stronger signs when they are shown in profile, not frontally, partly because of the more distinctive contour, partly also thanks to the possibilities offered by changing the facial expression, which process attenuates the peculiarity of features seen full-face. A broad smile stretches the lips, flares the nostrils, and accentuates the prominence of the cheekbones. The artist grasps these subterfuges by which he can assimilate the black type to the white. Considerations of style complement the choice of a model amid the real variety of ethnic types, pure or mixed-breed. A straight, slender nose and thin lips either describe the Nilotic type or conform to the rejection of realism in favor of formalization of the sign or idealization of the figure.

Each plastic element demands an effort of analysis on the artist’s part and sets up a problem of formal transposition. We can watch the creative imagination at work as it makes its way through the various treatments of the black’s hair in Greco-Roman art, where we find incised diamond shapes in relief, little “peppercorn” lumps, spiral cones, tight ridged curls, or vermiculate grooves. Frizzy hair challenges the sculptor’s chisel. Prognathism, however, is most often forgotten. When it is rendered faithfully it manifests a sharpness of observation that is out of the ordinary because it necessitates departing from the “canons” usually adhered to, in order to reconstruct the architecture of the face completely. This is why we find that trait more often in Egypt than in Rome, Egypt having been more familiar with the appearance of the black.

The ways artists worked to bring realistic representation of the African into harmony with their style or with the public’s taste imply a veritable doling out of Negroid features. Throughout the second half of the fifteenth century we often find series of representations of the Adoration of the Magi, some of them quite long, stemming from the same composition and produced in studios that worked for a variety of publics. Their diffusion called for variations dictated by regionalisms, which might take the form of resistance to innovation or to the strangeness of the black Wise Man. To establish the necessary distance from the prototype, the evocation of the black conformed to a precise approximation; the lightening of the color and the attenuation of racial characteristics are school traits that correct the model. This reticence is noted even when in the same picture a serving man in the retinue of the Magi must be the portrait of an African carefully characterized—so much so that in certain cases one suspects that the figures are played off against each other in compensation. On the other hand, the reduction of racial peculiarities may simply be due to the deterioration of a provincial style that drew upon an already stereo-typed model without renewed observation of its source; in a word, the bankruptcy of the image.

We see, therefore, how the notion of artistic representation of the black goes beyond an approach to the African inspired by ethnology both as to symbolism of color and as to form. A Greek plastic vase from the fifth century B.C. illustrates this point perfectly, presenting back-to-back two contrasting heads, one of a white man, the other of a black. The contrast is achieved by coloration, incisions, and other surface applications; underneath this dressing the two heads are identical, cast from the same mold. Between analogy and similarity, the mirror of resemblance projects its reflections ad infinitum.

The constancy of the representations of the black in the civilizations that developed around the Mediterranean basin is inescapable. When the nineteenth-century explorers made their way into the heart of Africa, the expression “the Virgin Forest,” which stirred the dreams of the children of Europe, gave rise to the idea that relations between Africa and the Western world were at their beginnings. The so-called New World of the fifteenth-century navigators had created the same impression. But these explorers and navigators were latecomers. Artistic evidence shows that the appearance of the African dates from no one event or time; his image is present in the continuous history of the Occident from the remotest legacy of Egypt onward.

Two fundamental aspects of the black man’s status emerge from the variety of the themes of art and reveal the concrete relationships established with the whites: the man-at-arms, image of his status as a warrior, and the servitor, image of his servile or domestic status. The two images are already present in Egypt. The Asyut bowmen (Eleventh Dynasty) confirm the traditional employment of Nubian mercenaries, but these direct testimonies are rare. It is the image of the conquered warrior, the foreigner overpowered by Egyptian arms, which recurs most frequently. On the other hand, statuettes of concubines, toilet articles, and tomb paintings provided many opportunities to reflect the charm of serving maids or the tall stature of men carrying offerings. In the Greco-Roman world there existed above all a black labor force made up mostly of young men whose task it was to follow the master to banquets or to the baths, and of dancers, musicians, acrobats, and jugglers for his entertainment; fairly numerous representations of grooms and chariot drivers seem to prove some specialization in circus performances and also in the care and training of animals. In the art of the Christian Occident, beginning in the twelfth century, the image of the man-at-arms predominates. Representations of St. Maurice, of executioners, of black “Saracens,” and later of the black Wise Man belong in this category. The servitor appears in the same period as a member of the caravan escort or the retinue, or as exhibitor of exotic or familiar animals. The image of the servant becomes more and more frequent after the fifteenth century: his integration into European society propagated the type of the young lad which was characteristic of Alexandrian art. In the eighteenth century this was diversified with the figure of the adult manservant whose devotion to his master is evident, and that of the faithful maidservant whom the colonials brought back with them to the home country.

Yet even when it is rounded out and its nuances are taken into account, this overall image of warlike and servile status remains a bare outline. Above all, it leaves out the originality of the artistic evidence. Always keeping in mind the precautions to be exercised in estimating the value of a work, we must go further and try to determine the accomplishments and stimulations in function of which the production of this image took an active role in history. Let us then pose this question: “Why the Negro?”

No one will doubt that the question calls for more than one answer; even to attempt this approach may be thought foolhardy. Anyway, we shall not try to outline a general interpretation of the theme; we shall be satisfied to offer one thread which, among many others, may lead us through its successive phases.

We have been considering the black man in Occidental art as a figure that most distinctly and clearly expresses the differentiation of the foreigner. By his presence he brings in a relationship with a far-off land, an origin so remote that it poses a problem of reception and assimilation. Situated in an exotic setting, he transports one toward an “elsewhere,” stirs a dream of accessibility and, by that fact, a dynamism of expansion and retreat. Let us pose as a premise that the black is other, that the black is space. These two terms will perhaps help us to evaluate better the significance of his representation.

These images—warlike or domestic—insert the black in the neighborhood of the white and therefore denote a way of experiencing nearness. In Egypt we have a subject matter of defensive polemic against the invaders. To express his power, the pharaoh awarded himself the titles of chief of the north country and chief of the south country. The Cushite, broken and in chains, was the one who was trodden underfoot, like the Syrian, the captive from the north; but the fact that the Cushites adopted for their own use the Egyptian theme material of the fallen black captive shows perfectly the autonomy of the symbol. On the enclosures of temples and palaces and on the bases of statues, the north and the south, crushed prisoners of war, support the glorious king—a throbbing, rhythmic litany, like the sudden alternations of light and shadow at the sharp edges of the colossal walls. The symbolism of color, the opposition of black and white, and exoticism play only a minor part in the decorative aspects of the theme; the effigy is accompanied by a cartouche indicating the homeland of the conquered, like a placard of infamy cut deep into the stone.

The frequency of representations of prisoners and the constancy of their pejorative significance in pharaonic Egypt naturally lead us to see in them a manifestation of the fear aroused by pressure from the peoples to the south, as well as a proof of their strength and their organization, verified in time by their successful invasion and the establishment of the Twenty-fifth, or “Ethiopian,” Dynasty. Much later also, in the thirteenth century of our era, the blackness of the headsman and the Saracen recalls, through the image of hatred, the power of the warrior, and the iconographic testimonies confirm the presence of black Africans in the Muslim armies. Christian Spain, which kept alive the fear of the invader, spontaneously retrieved the figure of the victorious king grinding down his enemies, so widespread in Egypt. From the pharaoh carved upon a pylon of the Great Temple at Medinet Habu to the archangel Michael painted on a fifteenth-century Catalan retable, the symbol has lost none of its reassuring eloquence. There is scarcely any need to modify the belligerent gesture. The painter has once again made use of the plastic effectiveness of the tense body solidly planted on spread legs, slashing through the mass of caricatured Saracens and blacks trodden underfoot, thrust down into the army of Satan.

The Medicis assured the fortune in the Occident of Cosmas and Damian, two saints of Oriental origin who worked miraculous cures. A legend attributes to them the Miracle of the Black Leg: they graft this leg onto a sick man while he sleeps, in place of his gangrenous limb. He awakens to discover the miracle, strange alchemy by which the blackness of the gangrene is regenerated thanks to the sound member of a dead Negro! The theme did not spread much in Italy: Fra Angelico saw only its pictorial novelty and serenely depicted the engrafted leg, half white, half black. In Spain, on the contrary, representations of the miracle abound: could it be that blacks were mingled with the population in greater numbers? The image of “domestic” polemics emerges when the cadaver from which the sound limb was taken is brought into the foreground of the scene instead of being sketched summarily in the background. With the aid of realism and a sense of the pathetic, this inspiration is pushed to the limit in an example in which the black, in the foreground, has had his leg amputated but is still alive.

When the threat turns to calamity and the blame is put on fate rather than on men, it becomes possible, in the same regions and the same period, to encounter the expression of a feeling of solidarity among all those faced with death. The diversity of races is sometimes joined with the difference of social status in a theme which can be regarded as one of the most beautiful illustrations of nearness; and even if there are no masterpieces to point to, it is remarkable to recognize the head of a black man among the figures huddled together beneath the mantle of Our Lady of Mercy.

Because for the Occident Africa was always the Unknown Land and constituted, so to speak, the inaccessible mystery closest at hand, the meaning of the image of the black in opposition to the white will to some extent be determined by a dialectic of distance, of which nearness is only a particular term. By the representation of the black the Occidental also expresses his situation as he perceives it: he places himself in a mental space which is subject to considerable variations both on the level of reality and in the realm of the imagination. The nature of the image is also a symptom of a way of coming to terms with this dimension and reveals the conditions under which the Occidental determines his own situation. The memory of Egypt can always be recalled when the black is introduced in a polemical illustration of nearness. On the other hand, one must turn to the heritage of classical antiquity to find prototypes of the black image that transport toward an “elsewhere” and translate otherness by a distance which is at the same time remoteness.

First, absolute distance: the impassable. The ancient world did not lack these marvelous projections into the Elysian fields which allowed the imagination to go beyond the norms of experience. Homer makes Ethiopia the ideal place for the banquets of the gods. Thus he confers on the black a power of evocation that prompts the embellishment of an “inaccessible” accepted as such. Between gods and men there is indeed a relation, a bond, but as though inverted—a bond of separation. The black, the pious guardian of the gods’ retreat, stands for the contrary equivalent of the white man in a place to which the white will never have access.

The image the Greeks formed of the black has in it as much of the “Egyptian mirage” as of the “Ethiopian mirage.” In it the inaccessible is replaced by a distance bridged, the black representing both the forbidden crossing and the terminus. The most derogatory iconography to be found in the decoration of sixth- and fifth-century ceramics has as its theme the expedition of Heracles against Busiris the man-eating pharaoh. At times the painters pictured the episode without including the figure of the king and showing opposite the hero only the wretched Egyptian servants in flight. Their Negroid features emphasize the pejorative image so strongly stamped upon the black in Egypt itself, an image separated in a way from its origin by the distance introduced by the Greeks. The crocodile is so closely connected with the Nile that we cannot help seeing the same sort of opposition used by the potter Sotades (with the distance of parody perhaps added?). He depicts a reptile so unrealistic that it suggests a figure in a pantomime, and a black urchin in a pitiable situation (the figure might also be a Pygmy), held in an “amorous” grip by the crocodile before the beast devours him. The Egyptian motif of the trampled black comes to mind before this Attic adaptation of a Nilotic theme, blending the lachrymose and the fantastic in an object which itself is so improbably “barbarous” in form.

The theme is renewed in depth in Alexandrian art. The black is sharply distinguished from the Pygmy and presented in the widest variety of forms, from terracotta figurines of the famished servant to large statuary in black marble. Once more the Nile Delta became the center of the world, but this time of a Hellenized world laid out on an east-west axis: Alexander’s conquests thus led to seeing the black in a distance encompassed within a united and governed whole, at the farthest limits of an extended neighborhood. In Lower Egypt his features were repeated into the Christian era: the medallion stamped on the St. Menas phials is evidence of the strength and durability of this relationship. When Rome became the new center of empire, the Alexandrian themes underwent an important prolongation that amounted to a new flowering of exoticism: the image of the black, diverted anew from Africa, continued to spread a reminder of Egypt, but the reappearing mirage was now that of the Orient.

Classical antiquity treated the subject of the Ethiopian as “the different,” utilizing the contrasts of near and distant, large and small, black and white, but not giving them an overt value of opposition or attaching a univocal symbolism to blackness. When we follow the successive dynamics of distantiation and of envelopment, we perceive that the inaccessible occupied a place restricted on the whole but still eminently favorable. On the contrary, the Occident readily invested the black with a “mobilizing” function, thus to some extent continuing the polemical tradition of Egypt. But there were no longer any precise geographical boundaries to limit the extension of the poles of opposition. Black and white were fitted into a cosmological dualism, conveying not only contrast but fundamental antagonism—hell versus paradise. The flaw is in the world and in the heart of man: nearness and inaccessibility merge together. The inaccessible brightness is experienced as an aspiration and, as a consequence, blackness as a rejection. Recalling the African supports the metaphor. The black man—reality, color, symbol—comes into the dialectic of the repulsive, the repugnant, and arouses against him an instinctive urge for self-justification. Aversion toward the black purifies and whitens. The inaccessible, now “moralized” and blackened, thus became a preponderant element in the inspiration of the Christian Occident, to which it appeared as the world of the nonhuman.

Yet every man, however black he may be, always keeps a certain whiteness, for he is called to salvation. Only the Devil is totally black. The whole dialectic of the black-white symbolism was developed out of an unrealism based upon the sense of salvation which allowed the possibility of passing from black to white as well as that of falling back from white to black. The black Ethiopian illustrated the state of sin insofar as the literary metaphor supported the image of an Ethiopian turned white by the grace of repentance and baptism. Could art follow the concept? Could the metaphor become metamorphosis? Was not the only way to render the image of the black Ethiopian, the figure of sin, to deny him any sort of human face in order to recognize in him the horned, fantastic creature of the Devil? On the other hand, an Ethiopian purified by conversion and relieved of his blackness would no longer be distinguished from a white man. The sarcophagi of the early Christian centuries show us the Ethiopian eunuch converted by Philip without any distinctive ethnic feature, whereas, in a parallel way, the images of demons eliminate all precise reference to a particular human type. In this case we would have the invisible “Negro” at the center of the debate but passed over and denied from either side by the white man, in function of his idealized image on the one hand and his phantasmal image on the other.

The Muslim expansion cut down the Byzantine Empire step by step. The threatening wall raised by Islam in Africa reinforced the barrier of the Sahara desert and inevitably screened any knowledge of the depths of the continent that might get through to the Mediterranean basin. An assimilation like the one that connected the black with Egypt in antiquity now associated him closely with Islam. The transfer of the symbolism of the black demon to the infidel set Occidental imagery on an unfavorable path. Over a long period black Saracens and torturers prolonged the repulsive image of the demon in more or less stereotyped forms. However, this “specialization” in excess did not prevent the African from playing a positive role, no longer based on a process of abusive assimilation but on a creative effort to differentiate.

As soon as the Christian Occident broke with Byzantium and assumed the autonomous and irreducible traits of its own personality, the Bible became a permanent encouragement to exoticism, although this was not always felt to the same degree. In any case, the distance from Rome to Jerusalem stood as a fundamental separation deeply impressed upon the collective consciousness by the Crusades, an ideal dimension expressing the tension between Good and Evil. Here the image of the African played no part at the outset, either to sustain the polemical mobilization of feeling or to signify the opposition of the East.

Although anti-Jewish iconography made its appearance in the year of the first Crusade, the real insertion of the African image only occurred a century later, about 1180, with the Queen of Sheba, who figures in the typological retable at Klosterneuburg; of course, the black kingdom is depicted among the Old Testament types and prefigures the Adoration of the Magi, where the Three Kings are white. The symbolic structure is maintained, since the blackness that marked the Old Law is whitened in the New, but the concrete manifestation of the symbolism is no longer the absolute alternative of rejection by damnation or election by grace. Now it expresses the difference between the gropings of the man in search of the truth and the happy state of him who bows before the Revelation. The line of demarcation has shifted: it no longer separates the human from the nonhuman, but true goods from false. Man is posted on either side: a ford crosses the brook Kedron. It might be thought that the distance has been embellished to suggest the deceptive charms of the world not yet touched by the word of God, but such is not the fact. On the contrary, distance here serves to deny the very existence of this other world since the apostles have been called to preach the Gospel to the ends of the earth. The Pala d’Oro in the basilica of St. Mark, Venice, is approximately contemporary with the Klosterneuburg retable: its enameled Byzantine plaques present an equally erudite iconography. The Pentecost scene is repeated twice. The apostles are ranged around a horseshoe table, inside of which are two men, one white, the other black. By this simple pictorial contrast the totality and diversity of the world’s peoples are summed up. The black man also symbolizes the ends of the earth, the limit considered as a goal. St. Thomas preached to the Indies, St. Matthew converted Ethiopia: according to this logic, only distance and the Muslim barrier make it impossible to come upon the descendants of the people the apostles evangelized. Bonds were woven between the legends of the Magi and of Thomas the apostle at the same time as the rise of the myth of Prester John, guardian of the gates of paradise, the sovereign ruling beyond the frontiers of the known world, in whom all the virtues of priesthood and empire were united. The mysteries of Africa were so deep that that ideal figure for the medieval Occident, after a long series of tentative localizations, was finally drawn toward the fabled regions of the sources of the Nile. In spite of its failures, the Occident did not give up its crusade dimension and continued to cast its eye beyond the lines which the driving force of its faith had not succeeded in breaching.

On the main portal of the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris the symbolism of the nonhuman black was refuted. In a setting admirable in its grandeur, the idea of a threshold replaced that of distance. The threshold is the ultimate one, that of the Last Judgment, and the Ethiopian fits perfectly into the dialectic of sin and salvation: summoned by the angels before the Judgment, the African, his features nobly idealized but with clearly recognizable ethnic traits, is at this moment neither white nor black, and he can be redeemed just as any other man can.

The development continues with the creation of the St. Maurice of Magdeburg, about 1245. This is a local type but a prestigious one, which results from a complete reversal of the dialectic of repulsion. Magdeburg represents the fortress of Christianity at the border of the eastern marches. Symbol of the crusade mounted against the Slavs, white and pagan, the sainted black knight of the Theban Legion presents an image precisely the inverse of that of his opponents. The fright that the representation of the black might arouse in these regions, where he probably had never been seen, may well have heightened the effectiveness of this remarkable adaptation of the patron saint of Agaune. The cult of St. Maurice, it is true, had spread throughout Europe, and his iconography was abundant, but the black St. Maurice is found only in the lands of the empire.

About the year 1268 Nicola Pisano finished the marble reliefs on the pulpit in the cathedral of Siena. He sculpted two blacks perched on camels in the cortege of the Three Kings, giving them a modest place but one perhaps not devoid of hidden intentions. The artist was breaking with the classicizing style of the studio that had a few years earlier produced the sober pulpit in the Baptistery of Pisa. Is there a desire to include something picturesque and exotic? To accentuate the rustic character of the escort in order to focus attention on the noble bearing of the Wise Men? Even so, the importance of another aspect of the work would be undiminished: for the first time we see the black integrated into a New Testament scene without a trace of hostility, whereas previously his role had been exclusively that of the executioner.

The latter role was not abandoned forthwith, however, and even took on an increasing brutality; but in the figures of this whole period, at Rouen, at Chartres, at Strasbourg, quality of observation and nobility of style are always in evidence. The distance suggested by the representation is also a kind of drawing together, thanks to the progressive humanization of the black: nothing points up this ambiguity between the degradation of the role and the grandeur of the figure better than Giotto’s executioner in the Arena Chapel of Padua, painted at the beginning of the fourteenth century.

Removed little by little from the polemical images of the Crusades and aided by the tortuous evolution of the Prester John legend, the black had a part in illustrating a reevaluation of the diversity of nations and of the knowledge of mankind. Between 1360 and 1420 the flowering of the court art of International Gothic placed him in one of his richest iconographies. It was in those years that one of the Three Kings was first represented as a black, but it took a half century for his image to be accepted and commonly used. The beginning of its period of wide diffusion coincided with the painting of the Last Judgment triptych in Rogier van der Weyden’s studio (most art historians agree that Memling participated in its execution). In this triptych blackness was not reserved for the demons: it also identified, this time after the sentence, an African among the elect and another among the accursed. At that date, about 1464, the Occident had achieved its “Great Discovery” with regards to black people, and this means that, in the period which elapsed from the opposition of the angel and the demon to the equal distribution of Africans among the saved and the damned, the widest leap from one to another of the diverse conceptions of the black in the West had probably occurred.

The distance spanned denotes the success of the attempt made to overcome, without ever eliminating it, the tension inherent in the polemic of nearness and the myth of inaccessibility. This bridge legitimized the black man’s place both under the mantle of Mercy and at the right hand of God. On the rare occasions when the Occident was not involved in a theme of domination but aimed at a broader, more political expression of universality, it was by the rejection of any exclusion of other peoples, in the name of human solidarity, that it conferred the deepest significance upon its encounter with the black. As for the Holy Roman Empire, it found there material to illustrate the true dimension of its temporal vocation, and this in various forms, of which some, notably the St. Maurice of Magdeburg, are rooted in the oldest traditions of chivalry. For this purpose the empire did not need to wait upon the progress of the maritime voyages, which at first led only to the multiplication of concrete images for the renewal of old symbols.

The black King has been interpreted in many ways. One of the very earliest, developed around Cologne, was to suggest the universal import of the message of “peace on earth to men of good will.” In the course of its development the theme of the Adoration of the Magi brought together the Virgin and the aged King kneeling at her feet in a single formal unit. Thus the group composed of the other two Kings, the white and the black, is set apart and makes a new use of the most ancient symbol of the diversity of peoples, already found in Byzantine representations of Pentecost.

The as yet implied universality which defines one aspect of the Adoration of the Magi adds only a specific element to the much more general and traditional meaning of the act of allegiance. The linking of homage with signs denoting the range and outreach of a center of power constitutes one of the oldest and most widespread dialectics. In this sense the Egyptian scenes of tribute prefigure the gifts offered by the Magi. In particular, this interpretation relates less to the symbolic import than to the tangible value of the offerings, including an accumulation of goldsmithery and heaps of precious stones, as seen in the Manueline art of Portugal. Among these “tributaries” we find some of the most sumptuous figures of blacks, their importance enhanced at times with a real sense of nobility and elegance, or, more often, with a factitious overload that slips into the extravagant. But the ornaments of the Magi always heighten the glory of the one they come to adore. In the dialectic of All and Nothing, the magnificence of the King, contrasted with the poverty of the infant in the crib, creates a counterevidence which immediately implies the superlative opposition between the “more than all” and the “less than nothing,” and here the role of the black fits in easily. But an excessive homage may well be crushing, and, despite the tricks of composition, the transfer of importance and value will be all the more difficult as, for its part, the image of the “sovereign” is impoverished in order to emphasize the contrast. In the end the antithesis as used in art is seen to be relatively ambiguous and suitable only for a very limited range of applications.

When Africa had been rounded and its physiognomy recognized, Europe entered into direct contact with Ethiopia and the Congo. For the first time the traditional route of approach from the east was seen in relation to the newly discovered western route, and the continent was placed in the perspective of its true coordinates. This unique occurrence explains the remarkable popularity of the black Wise Man until the beginning of the sixteenth century.

Such excellent opportunities for encounter with Africans were compromised by the momentum of success as the Europeans saw it. The circumnavigation of Africa was in reality a trial run for the immense expansion both toward the Indian Ocean and toward the Atlantic. The extended thrust of the Great Discoveries went far beyond the African continent, whose image was dissipated between the poles of the glory of the maritime empire and the exploitation of the slave trade. Africa was marooned and lost for exoticism, and the American Indian took over the black man’s role in feeding the themes of “primitivism,” the nostalgia of the golden age, the praise of the noble savage, and the myths of Eldorado.

Thereafter America took over a prominent place in exotic imagery and held it for a long time. Moreover, Europe was unable to carry its exploration of the African interior beyond a few coastal enclaves. These two facts sharply limited the effects of the discovery of the black continent. Yet a new era opened in the history of its relations with Europe. Continuous contacts, though mostly connected with the growing importance of the slave trade, created a new framework that had only few analogies with the traditional space of the eastern Mediterranean. Art adopted the figure of a Western black which represented distance spanned within the framework of a modern world.

In the wake of European expansionism the expression of the Church’s spiritual radiation and the exaltation of its missionary role called for the creation of themes more directly connected with current developments. The Jesuits fostered the image of St. Francis Xavier baptizing in India and Japan. So far as Africa is concerned, the most remarkable testimony is the tomb of Antonio Nigrita, ambassador of the Congo, in the church of Santa Maria Maggiore; a fresco showing the pope at the bedside of the dying man is still to be seen in the Vatican. But the case remained unique. In fact, the continent gave rise to the creation of no original themes, and its penetration by the West had practically no direct reflection in religious iconography. The crisis that shook Europe during the Reformation and the orientations dictated by the Council of Trent explain in large part this loss of interest. The slave trade gave the Church no occasion to play an important role. The Trinitarian Order did indeed devote itself to the ransoming of captives, and its emblem, as seen by the founder in an apparition, shows an angel between two prisoners. An important early example (beginning of the thirteenth century) already depicts the two as a black and a white. The angel of the Trinitarians reappears in seventeenth-century examples, with or without the contrast between the rescued men. In fact, the order worked not on the Guinea coast but in North Africa, negotiating the ransom of Christians carried off by the Barbary pirates.

There is no evidence of triumphalism in the iconography of St. Benedict of Palermo, a black and the son of freed slaves, who lived in Sicily in the sixteenth century. His cult spread somewhat due to the existence of confraternities of blacks in Spain and Portugal. There is still a local devotion to him in our time.

It is in nonreligious art that we find the major appearances of this new figure of the Western African, unburdened of the weight of old myths and removed from behind the distorting screens interposed by conflation with Eastern types. Velázquez’s Mulata and the musician in Matthieu Le Nain’s Leçon de Danse show an astonishing new frankness of imagery. Rubens and Rembrandt prove that these masterpieces are no exception. Others were painted in France and Italy, and, along with the work of lesser artists in which studies and portraits are numerous, they exemplify a mainstream that persisted into the 1660s and 1670s.

The heightened interest extended to viewing the African in his own milieu, in his nudity, with his customs, amid his luxuriant natural surroundings whose age-old reputation for exoticism is confirmed. This discovery, which heralded the philosophers’ anthropological concerns in the following century, began with accounts of travel: those by Theodor de Bry and Dapper were the most widely read, and their illustrations the most often copied. The new view came into art because Maurice of Nassau took a group of painters with him on his expeditions against the commercial settlements the Portuguese had established at São Jorge da Mina on the Gold Coast and in Brazil. Their task was to reproduce in detail the flora and fauna and the landscape they encountered. Two of these painters, Frans Post and Albert Eckhout, have been especially remembered.

Among the pictures brought back by Maurice of Nassau, the Portrait of a Congolese dressed in European fashion—lace, rich doublet, huge felt hat with a red feather—and the Negro from the Gold Coast— nude, muscular, armed with assegais and arrows—represented the two types most sought after by Europeans: the noble presence of Othello and the naturalness of the “Savage.” But already the eight pictures which Maurice presented to Louis XIV direct the viewer’s interest to Brazil itself, and the black appears simply as an appropriate exotic element in the decorative scheme later exploited in the famous Gobelin series, the Tentures des Indes.

Maurice of Nassau recommended Albert Eckhout to Frederick William of Brandenburg, and the painter spent from 1653 to 1663 at the court at Dresden. On the banks of the Oder, he laid out his Brazilian scenes “taken from nature,” without changing them much, as decoration for the prince-elector’s two residences.

Following Frederick Augustus’s accession to the throne of Poland, Dresden enjoyed a period of magnificence in the early eighteenth century. One of its most original achievements in the realm of art is the Grüne Gewölbe, a treasure so rich and various that it claims to withstand any comparison. The chief pieces, in which rare materials and precious stones are combined, were the fruit of close collaboration between the goldsmith Dinglinger and Permoser the sculptor—a sumptuous display of “curiosities” which conjured up China and Egypt as well as Africa. Here, then, in the heart of the European continent, much more than in Venice, the infatuation excited by the exoticism of the black man, now associated with the New World, reached its most extraordinary expression. This same region had been the area where the black St. Maurice was most favorably received. Thus two of the most representative adaptations of the black image to the European mentality took shape in the same milieu, far from the maritime routes and without direct contact with Africa or the slave trade.

Permoser’s exoticism had nothing in it of the black saint. Yet the heaping up of riches at the Dresden court and the unbridled prodigality of Cardinal Albert of Brandenburg, with his enormous collection of relics at Halle, manifest the same style of patronage of art. Both princes strove to tie Saxony more closely to western Europe. They imposed a new scale of distance by producing out of this remote province a ne plus ultra that could neither be ignored nor bypassed and would thereafter necessarily be reckoned within the compass of the achievements of European culture. But Cardinal Albert drew upon a tradition borrowed from the spiritual values of the empire and the Crusades; even though it was near the end of its decline, this tradition endowed the black image with a wealth of significance. On the contrary, Augustus II merely seized upon the trends of fashion.

In Permoser’s scintillating theater the black’s role is clearly that of a bit player. The artist uses him to transpose to this fairyland world the fashion of the little black page, popular in all the princely courts of the time: so he turns up, gorgeously attired, in innumerable state portraits. In other pictures he introduces a note of strangeness intended to add piquancy to scenes of daily life, highlighting the rarity of exotic products or animals—coffee or chocolate, monkeys and parrots. Then the theme develops to contrast the woman and her Moor, the one as white and beautiful as the other is black and ugly. In this period of masques and court ballets the burning heat of the African sun, the even brighter gleam in the eyes of Beauty, the fires of Love, and the burns of Passion are woven into a tissue of courtly metaphors. In Carmontelle’s exact sketches we see the black as an object of amusement for the society of the ancien régime: Messieurs de Caumartin, artists to the best people, posed their Negro Telemachus. The facetious choice of names—Narcisse, Auguste—and the eccentricity of the costuming situate the little plumed hussar between the buffoon and the clown. We find the phenomenon everywhere, from Madrid to Stockholm, from London to St. Petersburg.

Toward the end of the eighteenth century, the arrival in Europe of a growing number of servants accompanying their masters home from the colonies, and the gradual perception of a more human psychological reality as rendered by Watteau, Quentin de La Tour, and some others, helped to lessen the popularity of this fashion without undermining it altogether. Drawings, pastels, and paintings, from Rigaud’s to Madame Benoist’s, display a mounting and varied gamut of sensitive portraits. In this series Pigalle’s terracotta bust of Le Nègre Paul, serving man to Desfriches the colonial administrator, deserves special notice. The features are marked with a subtle nobility and vivacity, the model still being dressed in a picturesquely exotic style with a plumed turban on his head. Among portraits of blacks in the round, this figure is the third one to bear a name. Memnon, Nigrita, Paul, three names that are anything but African … a certain kind of baptism is always required.

The new, Occidental figure of the black corresponds to the rising importance of the Atlantic and the far-reaching routes of modern maritime trade. It is part of a truly world-embracing geographical vision. The notion of universality comes out clearly and distinctly. The expression of homage by the oblique device of recalling the diversity of peoples reached its fullest development during the sixteenth century in the Allegory of the Four Continents. This turning point is important and in a way indicates the autonomy of distance.

The traditional notions of catholicity and empire are related to the unity of the Creation and constitute the affirmation of a preestablished cosmological order, refuting in advance any circumscription and, by right, annihilating any extension. The image of the variety of nations and classes represents a common human nature, in a collective rather than generic way: it is associated with an already explicit symbol in such a way that the two terms mutually illustrate and determine the generalization of their import. To assure its autonomy, the artistic representation of universality must no longer draw its meaning from the symbol to which it is applied; in other words, its form must be independent of the nature of the power whose outreach it indicates. Moreover, it must rid itself of the accidental character of realistic detail, which an effect of accumulation only tends to stress; from this point of view the picturesque details of exoticism introduce a determination which is always too precise. With the allegory, universality is dealt with directly in its abstractness, outside of any concrete situation, instead of being suggested as a simple presentation of variety, and so is made available for an indeterminate series of applications, like a part of speech. The personification of Africa, filling the role of an ideogram, is integrated into a purely Occidental formal system—the last great structured and homogeneous theme in which the image of the black finds its regular place.

As it was codified by Ripa, about the year 1600, allegory establishes a system of conventional interpretations which transposes the evidence of direct observation to the level of abstraction but avoids contradicting the same evidence at the level of the elaboration of the sign. Ripa justifies the choice of attributes by a disingenuously naive appeal to common sense and tradition. The flowering branch and the urn overturned should be self-explanatory. The Iconologie presents itself as a “dictionary of accepted ideas.” When the human figure personifies an abstract idea it shares in the nobility of the concept and supports the attributes, but initially it must not have individual peculiarities. In principle the female figure had to be as idealized as, for instance, the personification of Strength, which was never portrayed with the muscular physique implied by the title. But how could blackness be omitted? If we continue our analysis, blackness is a mask, the most external of the Negroid features, and so is all the more appropriate as an attribute. Very quickly the figure of an African woman came to be used as the personification of Africa. The figure has a function which is the exact opposite of that of the portrait. The image of the African woman in the allegory often shows a high degree of observation and a precise rendering of features and expression; it is obvious that the artist used a model. But the truth of the figure is negated by the signification it is meant to transmit, and its merit is in direct proportion to the degree to which it does not draw attention to itself.

Several of the factors that contributed so much to the popularity of the Adoration of the Magi, and assured the spread of the black King, exhausted their effectiveness toward the end of the sixteenth century. The picturesque tended to be used less in the treatment of religious subjects; the homage rendered by the Four Continents replaced the implicit universality of the Magi with the more versatile, more up-to-date allegory. The Church, of course, made use of it, even giving it its broadest and richest sense. Bernini’s Fountain of the Four Rivers expressed the radiation of the power of the popes: the Jesuit Andrea Pozzo spread a vertiginous apotheosis of his order across the vaults of the Church of St. Ignatius in Rome. Yet the black King kept his place in Western iconography. But if we pay strict attention to the quality of the distance he embodies and the nature of the sense of danger he conjures up, we find him caught in a new dialectic which puts him between two neighboring but opposed forces. After the fall of Constantinople, the image that Europe formed of the Orient was dominated by the Turk—or at least this was one of the Orients, because imagination vested the East in different colors depending on whether it appeared near, middle, or far. The Turkish East, moreover, was subject to the fluctuations of a distance felt, from the too-near to the too-far. Its wealth and prestige were on display, while its menace was one of the great constants of the period: the Orient of costumes and arms, with the turban as the distinguishing sign. The Adoration of the Magi became one of the privileged themes of this exoticism. But was it solely a matter of exoticism?

The frequency of the theme falls in regularly with the rhythm of European concern as the Ottoman peril rose and subsided. If this parallelism has meaning, it may be thought that the Three Kings illustrate, or at least serve to evoke, the aspiration toward an ideal of unity put above the rivalry of particular interests. Except for a few times of crisis, the Eastern frontier was, in fact, the only one really exposed, and amid their intrigues the Occidental nations were content to see the Hapsburgs bear that pressure alone. But it was always regarded as proper to proclaim the solidarity of Christendom facing the hereditary enemy. Thus the black King confirms his place as the turban on his head gets larger and larger.

A return to the oldest orientation of Africa as the traditional land of evangelization is revealed, however, by the renewed popularity of the biblical episode of the Baptism of the Eunuch. The theme was widespread in the seventeenth century, particularly in the Low Countries: it was used in the decoration of baptismal chapels, including the one in St. Peter’s in Rome. The maritime expansion indirectly linked it to the present, and the Eunuch often becomes a pendant of St. Francis Xavier. One of its first appearances in the Occident is in a Book of Hours made for Emperor Charles V, in which the servitor of the mysterious Candace is shown standing and bowing, clad only in a loincloth. Obviously it is the Africa of the Discoveries that was taking its place in Christendom. Orientalism rapidly recovered its rights, whereupon cortège, costumes, and landscape came, as usual, to be pretexts for transposition, and exoticism lost all its precision. Artists like Blomaert, Cuyp, and Rembrandt made much of the fervent piety of the black who was touched by the Revelation. Above all they glorify the sacrament in the name of which Christians were called to convert the world. The theme hardly outlived the ancien régime. We would be tempted to rediscover the Eunuch, as the distant continuation of an art pattern, in the image of the “grateful” kneeling black, when slavery was abolished.

Once the Turkish danger was dispelled and the themes of Christian unity stifled by nationalistic progress, the Magi themselves began to look like lost tributaries. The splendor of their multicolored costumes, the gold of their gifts, the pomp of their entourage, all were drawn into the crèches of Bavaria and Naples; the meaning of their homage became less and less distinguishable from the joyous celebration of the Christmas feast, at which time the world laid aside its everyday garb and put on its make-believe finery. What did the black then evoke, unless it was the improbable transformation by which for one night the slave could be a king?

If we borrow the perspectives of exoticism and look eastward or westward, we find, at the end of the eighteenth century, an image of the black, infinitely available, but which no cause any longer had need of. The role of art in society no longer supported the grand iconographic themes that had kept the image so vigorously alive. Neither the Wise Man nor the Ethiopian Eunuch nor the allegory of Africa henceforth inspired real creative effort. The Orientalism which in many ways was a deeper probing of exoticism—a quest for values to complement European aspirations—brought forth nothing particularly new so far as the black was concerned. His last transformation put him to use as heightening “local color.” The attraction of the Orient was revived, but also modified, by Bonaparte’s campaign in Egypt. The mere fact that the Nile thus became a goal of conquest is in itself extremely significant, without precedent since St. Louis’s siege of Damietta. Moreover, the new ambition took satisfaction in marching in the traces of the empires of Augustus and Alexander. Finally, recalling the ancient glory of the land of the pharaohs brings us back to the origins of our theme. In his picture commemorating the Battle of the Pyramids, Gros put in the foreground the body of a fallen black trampled under the horses’ hooves, as on Tutankhamen’s painted box. How could we do better, after contemplating forty centuries of history!

The only concrete, familiar image surviving at the end of the ancien régime is that of the black domestic, who is connected with life in the colonies, and even this reflects the end of the journey, the reassuring return to the home country. He makes it possible to evoke the distances traversed and the tangible bonds between the fatherland and the lands across the sea. But the bonds were beginning to wear out, and with American independence all bridges were in danger of being destroyed. As for Europe, the slave trade remained the only important business in which it was involved with Africa, and the abolitionists were attacking the trade and scoring their first successes.

We must clearly understand this decline in the evocative power of the black if we are to gauge the efforts the abolitionists had to put forth in order to awaken public opinion to the realities of slavery. Their testimony took the form of a bill of particulars presented in the metropolis, the arena where the trial was unfolding. The description of the cruel treatment inflicted on the slaves had the countereffect of radically altering the current idea of the black—not necessarily to his advantage.

The fight was waged in the name of principle—of a restoration of the moral values of Western society. Oppression and tyranny were the big words against which the ideal of Liberty was raised in the French Revolution. Slavery was a last Bastille, but its dismantlement in no way authorized the rebellion in Santo Domingo. Toussaint-Louverture’s success considerably slowed the progress of abolitionist ideas in France; the movement got under way again only after Toussaint died. From Egypt to Santo Domingo Bonaparte sensed that the value of the Empire-Liberty couplet depended on the existence of the couplet Negro-Slave. What could not be allowed was that the black man be free and the author of his own freedom.

Most of the black images that the Occident had developed had become obsolete. Those not in accord with the argument fell into oblivion; only the most pejorative were revived. The fusion of the terms Negro and slave resulted in reducing the age-old relations of the black with the Occident by placing prime importance on the relatively short period during which the Triangular Trade was thriving. A sort of backdrop was thus draped across the sixteenth century and disguised the more distant past. It is understandable enough that the abolitionist propaganda should have imposed this double limitation, both of nature and of duration, on the European image of the black; the propagandists had to stick to their immediate objective. But they had not foreseen that the realization of their humanitarian ideas would lead to the continuance of these narrowed perspectives. The trial ended with the victory. Time stood still at the “supreme” moment when the black had only to chant his deliverance. His image was confused with that of the slave; once slavery was abolished, he saw his past, his future, his very person enveloped in a single negation. On this negation white supremacy was erected.

An uneasy conscience is, for Occidental images of the black, the chief source of their energy. The serene appreciation that marks both the zone of equilibrium of the dialogue, from exchanges to fusion, and the measured, geometric distance which is related simply to travel, is rarely illustrated in a significant way in the subject matter of the black, particularly since the equilibrium (when it is achieved at all) is quickly called in question. Exoticism is evasion, and man, besieged, discovers that he is his own assailant. Does he not need to set the reassuring image of exteriorized terror over against the hidden threats he carries in himself? According to the strength or fragility of the sentiment of internal cohesion, individual or collective, all the variations on this theme of otherness present themselves. One of the major interpretations of the theme developed by the Occident is that of the black man who acknowledges neither faith nor law nor king. This would explain how the black image attained such complete availability before the abolitionist debate began. We do indeed see sanctity and majesty and justice embodied in the Theban knight, the Eunuch of Ethiopia, or the king “of Tarshish and the Isles.” But more usually the black, as symbol of the forbidden, of transgression, or as the object of terror or nostalgia, has presented himself as the figure chosen for transposition—demon, hereditary enemy, good savage or bad. Whether he is portrayed as Egyptian, Saracen, Turk, or Indian, he is torn away, figuratively and then literally, from his south, where in the beginning the Occident found him.

The most evident transposition is that of blackness. The image becomes exemplar by its eclipses: eclipse of the Ethiopian between the angel and the demon; eclipse of Africa between Liberty and slavery. The obliterated image comes out in full sharpness when it is turned over: Pharaoh, Hero, Angel, Saint, Emperor, all then appear in relief—an image gloriously enhanced, deserter from the depths in which it is rooted. As Africa surreptitiously conceals itself behind the mask of the Negro, the white man senses his own secret blackness and exalts its apotheosis through a black more black than the Black.

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