Reframing
Art History
The interest towards this topic has spread continuously over
the past century, starting from a restricted circle of academic scholars and spreading globally over the years due to the boom of social media, through the pages and platforms of digital activists
In the 1960s, as a response to segregation in the United States, the influential art patron Dominique de Menil began a research project and photo archive called The Image of the Black in Western Art. In 1994 their project was handed over to the Du Bois Institute of Harvard University which archives 26,000 photographs of artworks in all media, and offers expanded access to outside researchers with the publication of the Harvard University complete ten books series “The Image of the Black in Western Art”.
In 2013, “Revealing the African Presence in Renaissance Europe” has been an exhibition featuring over 65 paintings organized by the Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, in collaboration with the Princeton University Art Museum, with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
In 2015, Black Portraitures[S] became an international conference series organized by New York University and Harvard University in different cities: New York, Cambridge, Paris, Lisbon, Florence, Toronto, Newark, Havana.
In 2020 Uffizi Gallery in Florence launched On Being Present-Recovering Blackness in the Uffizi Galleries a virtual gallery of African presences in the world-famous masterpieces exhibited in both the Statue and Painting Gallery in the Uffizi and in the Palatine Gallery in the Pitti Palace. In the same year The Rembrandt House Museum in Amsterdam organized "Black in Rembrandt's Time". Guest-curated by Stephanie Archangel and Elmer Kolfin, the exhibition unites artworks from all over Europe.
In the same year The Rembrandt House Museum in Amsterdam organized "Black in Rembrandt's Time". Guest-curated by Stephanie Archangel and Elmer Kolfin, the exhibition unites artworks from all over Europe.
RaceB4Race, supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and Arizona State University, is an ongoing conference series and professional network community by and for scholars of color working on issues of race in premodern literature, history, and culture.
In 2021 the King’s College in London hosted the exhibition ‘Visible Skin: Rediscovering the Renaissance Through Black Portraiture. “Renaissance Skin" is a 5-year research project funded by a Wellcome Trust Senior Investigator Award. Based at King’s College London, the project is led by Professor Evelyn Welch.
In 2023, the Metropolitan Museum in New York hosted an exhibition which offers an unprecedented look at the life and artistic achievements of Afro-Hispanic painter Juan de Pareja.
a list of books
Bibliography and Suggestions for Further Reading
Bennett, H. L. (2018). African Kings and Black Slaves: Sovereignty and Dispossession in the Early Modern Atlantic. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Bethencourt, F. (2014). Racisms: From the Crusades to the Twentieth Century. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Blackburn, R. (1997). The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492-1800. London: Verso.
Brahm, F. & Rosenhaft E. (2016). Slavery Hinterland: Transatlantic Slavery and Continental Europe, 1680-1850. London: Boydell and Brewer.
Cañizares-Esguerra, J. (2018) Entangled Empires: The Anglo-Iberian Atlantic 1500-1830. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Carrera, M. M. (2003). Imagining Identity in New Spain: Race Lineage and the Colonial Body in Portraiture and Casta Paintings. Austin TX: University of Texas Press.
Fracchia, C. (2019). Black but Human: Slavery and the Visual Arts in Habsburg Spain, 1480-1700. Oxford; Oxford University Press.
Fromont, C. (2014). The Art of Conversion: Christian Visual Culture in the Kingdom of Kongo. North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press.
Goslinga, C. C. (1971). The Dutch in the Caribbean and in the Guianas. Maastricht: Van Gorcum.
Green, T. (2019). A Fistful of Shells; West Africa from the Rise of the Slave Trade to the Age of Revolution. London: Allen Lane.
Habib, I. (2007). Black Lives in the English Archives, 1500-1677. Imprints of the Invisible. London: Routledge.Hall, K. F. (1995). Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Hendriks M. & Parker, P. (1994). Women, ‘Race’ and Writing in the Early Modern Period. London: Routledge.
Ireton, C. (2017). "'They are Blacks of the Cast of Black Christians': Old Christian Black Blood in the Sixteenth-and Early Seventeenth-Century Iberian Atlantic." Hispanic American Historical Review, 97, 579-612. doi 10.1215/00182168-4214303
Iyengar, S. (2005). Shades of Difference: Mythologies of Skin Colour in Early Modern England. Philadelphia: Pennsylvania University Press.
Johnson, C. (2011). Cultural Hierarchy in Sixteenth-Century Europe: The Ottomans and Mexicans. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Johnson C. L and Molineux C (2018). "Putting Europe in Its Place: Material Traces, Interdisciplinarity, and the Recuperation of the Early Modern Extra-European Subject." Radical History Review, 130, 62-99.
Kaplan, Paul. (1979). The Image of the Black in Western Art, Vol. II: From the Early Christian Era to the "Age of Discovery". Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.
Kolfin E. & E. Runia, E. (2020). Black in Rembrandt’s Time. Amsterdam: The Rembrandt House Museum.
Kaufmann, M. (2017). Black Tudors: The Untold Story. London: Oneworld.
Lowe, K. (2013) "Visible Lives: Black Gondoliers and Other Black Africans in Renaissance Venice." Renaissance Quarterly, 66, 412-452.
Lowe, K. & Earle, W. (2005). Black Africans in Renaissance Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Otele, O. (2020). African Europeans: An Untold History. London: Hurst.
Parker, P., Erickson P. & Hulse C. (2000). Early Modern Visual Culture: Representation, Race and Empire in Renaissance England. Philadelphia: Pennsylvania University Press.
Ponte, M. (2020). "Black in Amsterdam around 1650." In E. Kolfin & E. Runia (Eds.) Black in Rembrandt’s Time. (pp. 44-59). Amsterdam: The Rembrandt House Museum.
Potma, J. M (1990). The Dutch in the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1600-1815. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Rowe, E. (2019). Black Saints in Early Modern Global Catholicism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Spicer, J. (2013). Revealing the African Presence in Renaissance Europe. Baltimore: Walters Art Museum.
Thomas, H. (1998). The Slave Trade; The History of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1440-1870. Oxford & Basingstoke: Macmillan.
Tiffany, T. (2008). "Light, Darkness, and African Salvation: Velàzquez’s Supper at Emmaus." Art History, 31, 33-65.