European Perceptions of Blackness as Reflected in the Visual Arts joaneath spicer
My color does not disfigure my honor or my wit. —afonso álvares And if my black face displeases your ministers, O King A white one is not pleasing to the people of Ethiopia There, the white man visiting the East is the sullied one Officials are black and the king there too is dark. —j uan lati n o
These declarations were written in the 1500s by two writers who were both former slaves,1 Afonso Álvares, a Portuguese mixed-blood poet and playwright of noble lineage on his father’s side, and Juan Latino, a black poet and professor of Latin at Granada’s Cathedral School. As writers and persons of some public standing, Álvares and Latino had opportunity and the wherewithal to express their feelings. But this also underscores how little is known of the reaction of Africans in Europe and their immediate descendants to the prejudice associated with the color of their skin, and how complicated the semantics of skin color could be.2 As in the polarities of night and day/ dark and light, black or tawny skin was generally, though not always, a negative and a basis for prejudice, specifically for those from the sub-Sahara. An obvious visual attribute of otherness, it was far more often remarked than facial features and hair. This essay addresses the perception of blackness in the Renaissance, both as a skin color and as a
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