Contact Information
Biography Information
Paul Kaplan is Professor of Art History in the School of Humanities at Purchase College, SUNY, where he joined the faculty in 1988. He is a graduate of Hampshire College and Boston University, where he received his doctorate in 1983. He has also taught at Wake Forest University. He is the author of The Rise of the Black Magus in Western Art (Ann Arbor, 1985) and of numerous essays on European images of black Africans and Jews, and on political, military and feasting imagery in Venetian art, especially in the work of Giorgione, Titian and Veronese. He held a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship in 1993-1994. In 2002-2003 he served as Project Scholar for the artist Fred Wilson’s “Speak of Me as I Am,” an installation in the American Pavilion at the 2003 Venice Biennale, and contributed to the catalogue for that exhibition. In 2008 he was a fellow of the Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University. He is a major contributor to volumes 2, 3 and 4 of Harvard University Press’s new edition of The Image of the Black in Western Art (2010-2012). He is one of the consultants and catalogue essayists for the Walters Art Museum’s exhibition on images of Africa and Africans in sixteenth-century European art, opening in the fall of 2012. His current work includes research on the role of black Africans in Venetian art and society, the changes in European images of black Africans around 1600, and the intersections of race and art in the writings of nineteenth-century American and British visitors to Italy.
Project Description
My project aims to explore and explain a substantial group of rich and often surprising European images of black Africans from the first third of the seventeenth century, produced by Italians as well as artists from other European regions (Germany, France, the Low Countries, Britain, Spain) who had been influenced, both directly and indirectly, by Italian visual and literary culture. This is, of course, the era of Othello (first performed 1604), an English play based on an Italian short story, but there is a case to be made that visual images produce an even more complex array of black African characters than do the texts of this period. I will argue that visual depictions of black Africans appear with special frequency and ideological and aesthetic power during these decades, and play a leading role in European constructions of difference at a highly charged moment when both colonialism and Catholic evangelization begin to assume more familiarly modern forms. This wave of innovative and interconnected representations emphasizes both black authority and servility. On the one hand, there are several key images which articulate the spiritual and political authority of particular black Africans (real and imagined) who nevertheless endorse Western norms and venerate Western leaders; on the other hand, there is a rapidly expanding set of images of black Africans as subsidiary figures in portraiture, which nevertheless testify to the increasingly important role of black African slaves and free servants in European court culture.
The central set of images in my study are those which record – in sculpture, painting and prints – the much anticipated arrival in Rome and sudden demise of the ambassador of the Christian kingdom of Kongo (Antonio Manuel, marquis of Ne Vunda) during the first days of 1608. This event brought together a growing body of evangelical aspirations and expectations which had begun to flourish in Rome already in the 1590s. The story of the Magi provided the most important conceptual framework for this visit; as the Wise Men had visited Christ in Bethlehem, Ne Vunda had come to venerate the pope in Rome. Though one of the Magi had come to be regarded as a black African throughout European art by the end of the 1400s, Ne Vunda’s visit gave this iconographic convention a new importance and vitality, manifested not only in Rome but also in the Catholic Low Countries in the works of Rubens. Ne Vunda’s visit also precipitated the foundation of a new institution, the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith (Propaganda Fide), the Roman Church’s most focused response to the challenge of evangelization, which was founded on the Feast of the Magi (Epiphany, Jan. 6), 1622. By 1635 the Propaganda had built a massive headquarters in Piazza di Spagna, with an internal church dedicated, unusually, to the Three Magi; on its high altar was installed a grand image of the Adoration of the Magi, by Giacomo Gimignani, dominated by a massive figure of a black African Wise Man and King. This pious ruler and his two black African attendants remain, even today, the only explicit representatives of the non-European world in the artistic decoration of the Palazzo di Propaganda Fide, which has long been the center of the Catholic mission to evangelize the globe.
Meanwhile, between 1608 and 1629, Ne Vunda himself was memorialized in a striking funerary portrait in S. Maria Maggiore (by Caporale), in narrative frescoes in the Vatican (by G. B. Ricci), in a medal, in two elaborate engravings (which alternately show him in the dress of his native Kongo and in European costume), and perhaps most remarkably in the frescoes of the Sala Regia in Pope Paul V’s summer palace on the Quirinal hill (by Lanfranco and Tassi). Here Ne Vunda, with an Ethiopian envoy and six other sets of extra-European diplomats, demonstrates his enthusiastic endorsement of papal sovereignty.
I hope to demonstrate that Ne Vunda’s visit was connected to a number of other important social phenomena and images involving black Africans. These include the rise of the cult of St. Benedict the Moor (d. 1589), whose first effective depiction in the visual arts dates to the mid-1630s; the rapid growth of portraits of members of Italian and other European elites attended by black African court servants, in works by van Dyck, van Deynen, Suttermans and many others; and the appearance around 1610 of hardstone statues of black Africans, by the Rome-based Nicholas Cordier and others. Many of these works emphasize the humility and obedience (to white masters) of black Africans, but the dark figures are nevertheless usually presented as strikingly beautiful, and sometimes endowed with a real sense of agency. The tension in these works between condescension and admiration helps to clarify some of the assumptions embedded in the images of Ne Vunda.