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left fig. 24 Workshop of Girolamo Miseroni (Italian, 1522–after 1584), Bust of a Black African Woman, 1575–1600, setting 1602–1608 by Hans Vermeyen. Agate, enameled gold, 6.4 × 5.3 cm. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna (ansa xii 806) center fig. 25 Workshop of Girolamo Miseroni (Italian, 1522–after 1584), Cameo of a Black Woman, ca. 1600. 4.1 × 3.1 cm. Staatliche Münzsammlung, Munich right fig. 26 Workshop of Girolamo Miseroni (Italian, 1522–after 1584), Cameo of a Black Woman, ca. 1560. Agate, gold, enamel, 5.7 × 4.3 cm. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna (ansa xii 121)
by others on a larger scale. An exceptional work in many ways, the Garden underscores the absence of black nudes elsewhere in paintings of the period. Black stone, principally marble and onyx, became increasingly popular in the 1500s in part as a function of the interest in Roman tastes in colored stone for sculpture, carved gems, and architectural decoration. Semiprecious stones carved in relief (cameos) or engraved (intaglios) were popular in antiquity, a head of an African with conventional or exaggerated features being one of the
vast array of subjects.54 In the 1500s both ancient and modern carved semiprecious hardstone gems were collected and enjoyed simply as small works of art or incorporated into something else, perhaps an elaborate pendant “jewel,” ring, hat badge, or a vessel also of semiprecious hardstone, sometimes in a later application by a different, distant workshop. The gems selected for carving could be a single color (no. 50) or banded, that is with straight (no. 51) or wavy (figs. 24–26) strata of different colors. The most popular subject for cameos carved in the 1500s was a human head, not only commissioned portraits but interesting types both mythological and exotic. Technically the simplest format is represented by a Head of a Black Youth (no. 50) carved in luminous brown sardonyx so the soft brown fuses with the youth’s own brown profile. While many of the cruder cameos with heads of Africans from this period, as those from antiquity, are conventional types, the sense of naturalism is so strong here and in so many of these tiny representations that one must wonder whether this image is not based on a likeness of a real model, not to produce a formal portrait per se, but nevertheless drawing our attention to the use