'Black but Human'

Fracchia, Carmen

doi:10.1093/oso/9780198767978.001.0001

Cited by 34 publications

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References 13 publications

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“…As Carmen Fracchia writes, the miracle 'allegorizes the violence of the institution of slavery and sets up the iconography of the enslaved Afro-Hispanic subject'. 93 The Ethiopian of the Golden Legend has become the Afro-Hispanic slave of sixteenthcentury Spain. However, these conclusions do not seem valid for the preceding period, before Europeans came to associate black Africans with slavery.…”

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Fra Angelico's The Miracle of the Black Leg: Skin Colour and the Perception of Ethiopians in Florence before 1450

Nethersole¹

2022

Art History

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A photograph by Zanele Muholi sets up a triangular relationship between skin colour, race and identity (plate 1). The artist, who identifies as non-binary, stares out at the viewer: a visual activist challenging their spectator. A white stripe painted down Muholi's nose calls for comparison with Matisse's portrait of his wife with a green stripe down hers (plate 2), such that Muholi not only reworks the image of a woman objectified by a man, but critiques one of the canonical figures of the Western tradition, celebrated for his non-representational colour. When developing this photograph, Muholi brought up the contrast with the effect that highlights approach pure white and the deeper tones, especially that of their skin, are deepened, blackened. Muholi makes skin colour, then, especially binary colour difference, the issue at stake. Skin colour plays a key role in defining identity for them, in a country (South Africa) in which it is explicitly racialized and where it once defined a system of extreme racism, whose legacy is still keenly felt. Skin colour, here, is a determining characteristic of race. Its ability to give rise to meaning, to identity and to prejudice is inseparable from gender and other issues with which it intersects, such as social class. The contrast of black and white signals difference.The purpose of this article is to examine skin colour in a place and at a time different from Muholi's and to question whether that triangular set of associations, which are so pertinent to our time, were equally present. 1 Fra Angelico's Miracle of the Black Leg, painted before 1443 in Florence, provides a compelling case study (plate 3), both because the arresting combination of a black and a white leg on a single individual cannot but prompt a consideration of skin colour, but also because it was painted before the first west African slaves arrived in Europe through the activities of Portuguese traders. Interpretation of this imagery requires the art historian to ask about contingency in the perception of skin colour: what associations did black skin colour carry for the entirely white audience of Fra Angelico's panel and how was it inflected by their religion, by Christianity?My focus on skin colour, rather than on the larger category of race, requires justification. Scholars have been engaged by questions of race in premodernity since the 1980s, especially in literary studies, but the last decade or so has witnessed a marked shift in scholarship over whether race was operative in premodern European societies. 2 The issue hinges on definition and periodization, as well as on distinctions between histories of race and of racism. 3 It also depends on whether race is approached as a 'period' idea or as a conceptual framework for critical analysis. On one side of the argument are those who argue that ideas of difference and ethnicity in premodern

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Fra Angelico's The Miracle of the Black Leg: Skin Colour and the Perception of Ethiopians in Florence before 1450

Nethersole¹

2022

Art History

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Beyond Babel

Brewer-García

2020

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During an ocean voyage from Panama to Lima in December 1618, young Jesuit student Gerónymo Pallas's party reached shore at the port of San Mateo, on the coast of contemporary Ecuador, after surviving a menacing storm. According to his account, upon arrival in San Mateo, Pallas and his weary fellow travelers encountered a community of indios mulatos inhabiting the area. By speaking to one who knew Spanish, the Jesuit pilgrims learned the history of the community. According to the informant, more than a generation earlier, African survivors of a shipwrecked slave ship founded the community after swimming ashore and fighting against the men of the indigenous community inhabiting the coast at the time. The new community consisted of the children born to the indigenous women of the area and the African castaways: "Los hijos pues destos negros conquistadores y de aquellas indias son los que hasta oy duran y se llaman indios mulatos" [The children of these black conquistadors and those indigenous women who live there today and are called indios mulatos]. 1 Throughout the rest of his description of the inhabitants of the area near San Mateo, Pallas variably refers to the members of this community as negros, mulatos, and indios mulatos. 2 Algunos ay que saben hablar en lengua española porque van y vienen a la ciudad de Quito, que dista pocas leguas, y destos era uno el que habló con los padres en la plaia. Los otros hablarán un lenguage que no avrá calepino que lo interprete, porque será mesclado y corrompido de una lengua india y de treynta differencias de Guineo, porque cuantas castas vienen de negros tantas son las diversidades de lenguas que ay entre ellos, y por esto se dize todos somos negros y no nos entendemos.[There are some who know how to speak the Spanish language, because they come and go from the City of Quito, which is only a few days' travel away. And one of those spoke with the fathers on the beach. The others spoke a language that no dictionary could interpret, as it is a mixture and corruption of one indigenous tongue and thirty different kinds of Guinean, because there are as many different languages among blacks as there are castas among them. And that is why it is said: we are all blacks, and we do not understand each other.] 3By invoking the adage "todos somos negros y no nos entendemos" [we are all blacks, and we do not understand each other], Pallas associates blackness with diverse, corrupt, and incomprehensible speech and implies that all black men and women are bozales. 4 First used in the mid-fifteenth century as a term for an undomesticated horse, bozal emerged soon afterward as a label for black men or women

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Introduction

2020

Beyond Babel

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'Black but Human'

Cited by 34 publications

References 13 publications

Fra Angelico's The Miracle of the Black Leg: Skin Colour and the Perception of Ethiopians in Florence before 1450

Fra Angelico's The Miracle of the Black Leg: Skin Colour and the Perception of Ethiopians in Florence before 1450

Beyond Babel

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