Exhibit of the week: Revealing the African Presence in Renaissance Europe

Look closely at the art of the European Renaissance and you’ll find Africans hidden in plain sight, said Robin Cembalest in ARTnews.com. The 1539 painting that inspired this inventive show once featured a lone noblewoman whose hands rested awkwardly before her. Yet when art restorers of the 1930s removed a layer of overpainting, they uncovered a surprise: One of Maria Salviate de’ Medici’s hands was grasped by a second figure—a young girl with African features. The child, later identified as Giulia de’ Medici, was the daughter of a Medici duke whose own mother was probably a mixed-race servant. At the Walters, her early likeness, long since restored, serves as an emblem of an era when people of African descent occupied various rungs in European society, yet at times were unseen.

Many viewers will probably be surprised to survey a Renaissance Europe that’s far from all white, said Evan Serpick in the Baltimore City Paper. Yet the African presence in Europe dates back thousands of years, and during the 15th and 16th centuries, maritime trade was bringing Africans to Europe not just as servants, but as sailors, church leaders, and diplomats. One painting of 1570s Lisbon, by an unknown artist, shows a bustling city square that includes Africans of various social types, including a man wearing a cape. But Europeans seem to have regarded Africans with a mix of “fear and fascination.” In some Christian images, dark-skinned figures appear to have been included to underscore the universality of God’s love. Elsewhere, all the sinners in hell, and even Satan himself, have black skin.

It can be “unsettling” to view art the way this show asks us to, said Philip Kennicott in The Washington Post. You become “a race detective” around these paintings and other objects, scrutinizing every face for signs of blackness. Yet the curators have worked hard to inform us about the individuals depicted, and the experience becomes an enlightening lesson in the complexities of race. The Renaissance period was “by no means a golden age for African-European relations,” but it was at least a time when “ignorance and curiosity co-existed,” and there remained the possibility that racism would not take such a brutal, exploitative turn.

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Correction: A caption in our Nov. 9 issue mislabeled a painting by Pablo Picasso. The image shown was The Charnel House (1944–1945).