blog.arthistoricum.net: "SEEING SLAVES: Warburgiana"

Charles Davis 07.08.2012 12:22

SEEING SLAVES: Warburgiana

Although highly visible, Malcom X and even Barack Obama have been seen as versions of Ralph Ellison’s ‘Invisible Man’, but, in the course of time, artists’s eyes have been intensely attracted to the ‘exotic’ appearance of blacks.

An important new British study in the fields of image studies and visual culture (Bildwissenschaft) – and one which examines the history of images in a Warburgian context – has been issued by the London institute that bears Aby Warburg’s name. Edited by Jean Michel Massing and by Elizabeth McGrath (an early graduate of the Warburg Institute`s doctoral programme, established in the mid-1960’s), the book, The Slave in European Art: From Renaissance Trophy to Abolitionist Emblem (Warburg Institute Colloquia; published July 2012), contains twelve studies by so many authors. Both editors have written previously about the image of the black in western art.

The violation of the humanity of mankind through the traditional socio-economic institution of slavery constitutes one of the gravest historical infringements upon human rights. The abolition of large-scale slavery in the Americas may be counted as one of the most dramatic conquests in the freeing of man, although it is claimed that the absolute number of slaves today is higher than at any point in history (Wikipedia). Where Max Weber argued that slavery was responsible for the fall of Rome, for Karl Marx modern slavery was the fruit of a first wave of capitalist globalisation, an essential element in the primitive accumulation of capital and in the birth of a new capitalist world.

Slavery was an ancient institution, and it was continued by Muslims and Christians, albeit on a fairly small scale in Europe before her transatlantic expansion. In the sixteenth century the revival of slavery on a large scale (and entailing the enslavement of native American Indians as well as black Africans) was owed to the emergence of a plantation system in the new colonial societies of North and South America. Unsurprisingly, the trading of slaves in pictorial representations was nearly as invisible as Ellison’s ‘Man’ (see infra).

The Slave in European Art: From Renaissance Trophy to Abolitionist Emblem

Edited by Elizabeth McGrath and Jean Michel Massing

Warburg Institute Colloquia, 20 (Editors: Jill Kraye and Charles Burnett)

The Warburg Institute – Nino Aragno Editore (London and Turin, 2012)

The Slave in European Art explores the imagery of slaves and enslavement – white as well as black – in early modern Europe. Long before the abolitionist movement took up the theme, European art abounded in images of slaves – chained, subjected, subdued figures. Often these enslaved figures were meant to be symbolic, for slavery was widely invoked as a metaphor in both religious and secular contexts. The ancient Roman iconography of triumphalism, with its trophies and caryatids, provided a crucial impetus to this imagery, particularly for Renaissance artists who developed their own variations. Here the use of classical models had a peculiar force, since nudity, the attribute of antique heroes and idealized abstractions, was the mark of the Mediterranean galley slave. It was also to become the condition of the enslaved and transported African.

The poignant sculptures of naked black Africans on Italian monuments of the seventeenth century are Ottoman galley slaves, representatives of the Islamic enemy along with their Turkish companions. But with the expansion and extension of the trade in enslaved Africans among the nations of Europe, African blackness became in itself a sign of slavery in European art. Fashionable portraits increasingly showed young and servile blacks, sometimes wearing silver slave collars, paying tribute to the status or supposed beauty of their masters and mistresses. This imagery often presents itself as playfully metaphorical, even though the slavery of Africans so portrayed could be literal enough. Unsurprisingly, there was little demand for representations of the slave trade. In the few cases in which African slaves in colonial situations became the subject-matter of paintings, they were generally depicted as part of an imperialist and ‘civilizing’ mission, or accommodated to picturesque formulae, distant from the uncomfortable realities of life on the plantation. Indeed – as the case of Spain especially demonstrates – the representation of slaves in art is never proportionate to their numerical presence in slave-owning societies. It is only with abolitionism that the slave trade and its injustices becomes an artistic theme, provoking the visual counter-propaganda that is charted in the coda to this collection.

Contents

Introduction – Reality and Metaphor:
Elizabeth McGrath, Caryatids, Page Boys, and African Fetters: Themes of Slavery in European art
Charles Robertson, Allegory and Ambiguity in Michelangelo’s ‘Slaves’
Jean-Luc Liez, L'esclavage comme métaphore religieuse dans l'iconographie de l'ordre des Trinitaires

Galley Slaves and Moorish Captives:
Jean Michel Massing, The Iconography of Mediterranean Slavery in the Seventeenth Century
Rick Scorza, Messina 1535 to Lepanto 1571. Vasari, Borghini and the Imagery of Moors, Barbarians and Turks
Anthea Brook, From Borgo Pinti to Doccia: The Afterlife of Pietro Tacca’s Moors for Livorno

Europe, the Americas and the Slave Trade:
Carmen Fracchia, The Urban Slave in Spain and New Spain
Ernst van den Boogaart, Black Slavery and the 'Mulatto Escape Hatch' in the Brazilian Ensembles of Frans Post and Albert Eckhout
Elmer Kolfin, Becoming Human. The Iconography of Black Slavery in French, British and Dutch Book Illustrations c. 1600-c. 1800

Abolitionism and its Critics:
Meredith Gamer, George Morland’s 'Slave Trade' and 'African Hospitality': Slavery, Sentiment and the Limits of the Abolitionist Image'
David Bindman, 'They are a Happy People’: Some Newly Identified Pro-slavery Caricatures from the Age of Abolition
Temi Odumosu, Abolitionists, African Diplomats and ‘the Black Joke’ in George Cruikshank’s 'New Union Club'

396 pages, 161 black and white illustrations and 15 plates, 13 in colour. Price: £55. ISBN 978-1-908590-43-5; ISSN 1352-9986.

The Warburg Institute, London – Nino Aragno Editore,Turin
Telephone: +44 (0)20 7862-8949 Fax: +44 (0)20 7862-8955
e-mail: warburg.books (at) sas.ac.uk

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