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Being Venus
I have seen some amongst them whose whole bodies have been so well-built and handsome that I never beheld finer figures, nor can I conceive how they might be bettered, so excellent were their arms, and all their limbs.
—Albrecht Dürer on the African physique, 1528
Her name was Katharina. In her portrait, drawn in 1521, she wears a simple headdress with a single jewel in the center. Her youth is skillfully captured in the roundness and fullness of her cheeks. Her plump body is covered by an unadorned V-neck shirt and a modest, high-collared frock. The entire effect is one of demure and unassuming beauty. Katharina’s eyes are downcast, giving the twenty-year-old an air of solemnity and gravity that might have seemed out of place were she not a slave.1
Katharina lived in Antwerp, Belgium. She was one of two slaves owned by João Brandão, the trade representative to the king of Portugal. Albrecht Dürer, the renowned Renaissance artist, happened to be passing through Antwerp in 1521, creating sketches and woodcuts that he sold around the city. On a brief visit with the Brandão family, he encountered Katharina, and was sufficiently moved by her comeliness to immortalize her in silverpoint.
The artist’s decision to draw the young African woman may have seemed inconsequential at the time. Hers was one of many sketches of Africans that Dürer completed during his lifetime. Nevertheless, his depiction of Katharina was a momentous event. Portrait of an African Woman, Katharina became the first known portrait of a black person in Antwerp. And it was produced at a time in Dürer’s illustrious career during which, after years of studying the human form, he had come to the conclusion that what made something beautiful could never be fully comprehended or definitively laid out. For reasons he could not describe, Katharina too was a beauty.2
Figure 1.1. Albrecht Dürer, Portrait of an African Woman, Katharina, 1521. Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence.
A great deal has been written about the aesthetic standards for women that prevailed during the Renaissance. While much of this literature shows that larger, fleshier physiques were prized, it also shows that what was considered attractive was not just about the size of the body, but also its shape. Proportionate and well-rounded physiques were revered, as they were believed to reveal something of the beauty and mystery of divinity. A woman might find herself being considered “too thin” or “too fat,” given the prevailing preference for proportionate—often implying “medium”—physiques. But if a lady had to err on one side of the scale, a fat woman was generally preferred to one who might be derisively labeled “lean” or “bony.”
Comparatively fewer works, however, have explored how the growing population of black women who came to Europe as part of the slave trade affected representations of female beauty during the High Renaissance (late fifteenth to mid-sixteenth centuries). This is not a minor oversight; the most famous artistic expressions of female beauty during this period derived from northern and western Italy and the Low Countries. The major cities in these regions simultaneously served as key ports of the expanding slave trade. Consequently, black women often appear in meditations on beauty by the era’s most important artists.
The burgeoning population of African women as slaves and domestic servants in northern and western Europe between 1490 and 1590 frequently led to the incorporation of black women into the lexicon of what was defined as “perfect female beauty.” The inclusion of black women as beautiful in both high art and aesthetic discourse was neither simple nor without problems. African women were described as well-proportioned and plump, and consequently viewed as physically appealing. Yet the burgeoning discourse about Africans suggested that their purported distinctive facial features made them facially unattractive. Black women were further denigrated due to their servile status. Therefore, despite black women’s reputation as well-formed beauties, their purported African physiognomy and status as slaves became the early basis of “social distinctions” between low-status African women and their high-status European counterparts.3
What follows is a discussion of notions of perfect female beauty in three of the most trafficked centers of artistic ingenuity: western Italy, northern Italy, and the Low Countries. In all three, the correct model of female beauty was a central topic of conversation. Well-apportioned female figures were venerated throughout these areas. However, in two locations—Antwerp, Belgium, and Venice, Italy—the mushrooming population of black women led to their inclusion as beauties of low status and questionable facial allure, but having the right proportions and just enough embonpoint to titillate European sensibilities.
* * *
Katharina was known by Dürer simply as the “Mooress.”4 His journal tells us almost nothing about what motivated him to sketch the young African woman, nor do we learn about the duration or substance of their encounter. What we do learn from the journal is that Dürer regarded himself as an artist and philosopher of the human form. As such, he took an exceptional interest in the growing numbers of Africans arriving in northern Europe as part of the slave trade.5
By the mid-fifteenth century, African slaves were being shuttled to European ports by the hundreds. The Portuguese, who in the 1440s became the first European nation to enter the African slave trade, maintained a dominant position until 1492, when Columbus made contact with the Americas.6 Although Spanish and Flemish traders mounted a challenge to the Portuguese slave-trading monopoly between the 1450s and 1470s, by the end of the century most of the Africans making their way into Europe did so in the holds of vessels manned by Portuguese traders. The Portuguese were thus largely responsible for introducing African slaves into northern Europe, and some of the earliest Africans to be seen in the Low Countries arrived as slaves to Portuguese merchants.7 This appeared to be the case with Katharina and her owner, João Brandão. Antwerp, where they were settled, had been a key trading hub in the fifteenth century. By the sixteenth century, the city became “the center of a new global economy of luxury goods.”8 Slaves themselves were an important form of luxury commodity in the new economy and were common among wealthy merchants.
Dürer’s interest in Katharina within this sociocultural milieu was galvanized by his long-professed desire to understand the contours of human beauty. By the time he visited Antwerp in the early sixteenth century, Dürer had abandoned the idea of locating a singular ideal, concluding that beauty was found in the differences between the various peoples of the world. This conception of beauty-in-difference was inspired, in part, by the gospel. In Dürer’s reading of the scripture, God had made all of mankind equal. And yet the Creator produced a tremendous amount of human biodiversity. The task of the portraitist, Dürer believed, was to identify the “big differences” between the various nations of mankind. Doing this would help the artist grasp the beauty of humanity in all its fullness and richness. According to Dürer, “The Creator fashioned men once and for all as they must [sic] be, and I hold that the perfection of form and beauty is contained in the sum of all men.”9
These sentiments were articulated about the time that Dürer wrote what was titled an “Aesthetic Excursus” detailing the major difference between Africans and Europeans. This document, written sometime between 1512 and 1515, was eventually tacked on to the end of the third book of his Four Books on Human Proportion, published posthumously in 1528. At that time, the artist claimed that the major difference between blacks and whites was to be found in the features and attractiveness of the face.
Thus thou findest two families of mankind, white and black; and a difference between them is to be marked.… Negro faces are seldom beautiful because of their very flat noses and thick lips.10
This tract was written before Dürer’s encounter with Katharina in Antwerp. It is likely that the artist relied on stereotypical accounts of “African physiognomy” that were in circulation during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.11 These accounts served to underscore the African’s inferior social position as the slave trade expanded.12
Indeed, there is reason to believe that Dürer’s disdain for African features in the “Aesthetic Excursus” was at least partly motivated by the general tone of European high art and philosophy at the time. In another of his sketches, the Berlin Study Sheet, made during the same period, Dürer drafted a row of humanity that shows “prototypical” faces of the various nations of mankind. The artist placed his version of the “ideal” or “normative” European face at the forefront of humanity.13 The final “African” visage with its exaggerated features, which some scholars argue represented a cross between a Negro and an ape, looks back warily at the rest of humanity. Historians suggest that Dürer was likely inspired by Leonardo’s and other artists’ haunting renderings of grotesque wild men.14
After his visit to Antwerp, however, Dürer appeared to revise this position. In his Portrait of Katharina and his sketch of Rodrigo, a black man and another of João Brandão’s slaves, the artist portrayed the models’ faces with dignity and solemnity. They also held a type of beauty that the artist suggested he couldn’t quite specify.15
If Dürer wavered on the question of the black face, he was resolute when it came to the beauty of the black body. Like many artists, Dürer believed that God had bestowed upon Africans a bevy of physical blessings. The limbs of Africans, he claimed, were shapely and well formed. And there was an elegance to be found in their well-apportioned physiques. In the “Aesthetic Excursus,” alongside his derision of the African face, the artist intoned,
Howbeit I have seen some amongst them whose whole bodies have been so well-built and handsome that I never beheld finer figures, nor can I conceive how they might be bettered, so excellent were their arms, and all their limbs.16
Figure 1.2. Albrecht Dürer, Berlin Study Sheet, 1513. Staatliche Museen zu Berlin.
His views on the excellence of the black physique and the disfigurement of the black face were based on the reigning definitions of attractiveness. In other words, rather than reflecting any reality about black people, they reflected what Bourdieu called a “judgment of tastes.”17 This is an aesthetic value system crafted by elites that places qualities symbolizing refinement (and a remove from the vulgar, the common, and the low) atop the aesthetic hierarchy. Within the aesthetic system of the High Renaissance, pointed noses and fine lips were typically associated with a refined facial beauty. At the same time, well-formed, proportionate figures represented the height of bodily beauty. This aesthetic pairing led to the degradation of the African face and the exaltation of the African body. It also contributed to Dürer’s uncertainty, by the time he rendered the lovely Katharina, about the precise contours of true beauty.
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Dürer did not simply inherit the value system that placed black people in aesthetic limbo. He had, in fact, been one of the key architects of this system, which, by the time he met Katharina, he himself had come to view as insufficient. Nevertheless, that reassessment came toward the end of his career. As a young man in the 1490s, Dürer had made the quest for true beauty his holy grail. He had left his native Germany in the 1490s and settled in Venice, the artistic heart of the Renaissance. It was there that he met the well-known painter and draftsman Jacopo de Barbari. Barbari’s exact year and place of birth are unknown, but it is believed that he was born around 1470, making the two artists fairly close in age. They met therefore as peers, rather than as artist and acolyte. But Barbari’s techniques in painting the human form inspired and bedeviled the German artist. As a result, Dürer would chase what he considered to be their perfection for the next two decades.
To Dürer, the genius of Barbari’s work was that he drew male and female physiques using measurements calibrated to produce “perfect” human proportions. Dürer was in awe. Barbari’s approach to beauty had generated images of men and women that were, in Dürer’s opinion, stunning, and they quickly eclipsed his preexisting singular ideal of beauty.18 Bodily beauty, like facial beauty, had a variety of manifestations. But the running theme, the one thing that must be present, Dürer believed, was perfect proportionality.
Dürer’s wide-eyed zeal might have been something of a tip-off for Barbari. The Italian artist, wary that his secret might get out, kept his method closely guarded. He refused to reveal his process to Dürer despite their continued contact and a visit with Dürer in his hometown. Rebuffed, Dürer set himself to developing his own canon of proportions beginning in 1512, and continuing for the next decade.
Following what was standard procedure during that era, Dürer searched for clues to perfect proportions among the ancients. He took to studying the work of the celebrated Roman architect Vitruvius, and from his studies he arrived at the following conclusion: “The head of a man is an eighth part of him.” Further, “one also finds a square from the feet to the crown of the head … the span (of the outstretched arms) is equal to the height (of the body).”19 Using these calculations, he believed, Vitruvius had rendered human perfection: “He has brought human limbs together in a perfect proportion in so satisfactory a manner that neither the ancients nor the moderns are able to overthrow it.”20 Dürer used his adapted Vitruvian standard to create his idea of a “normal” male and female form, as would be described in his Four Books on Human Proportion.
Figure 1.3. Albrecht Dürer, image of “normal” man and woman, Four Books on Human Proportion, 1528.
The intense attention to detail in the precise calculation of the idealized length and breadth of each body part drew the respect of his contemporaries. Dürer, moreover, added something to the equation that Vitruvius had not: variety. After drawing a “normal” man and woman, he sketched several men and women with the necessary and proper proportions but of different body sizes. Among these sketches there were a disproportionate number of images of plump women.
It is unclear from the manuscripts why there was a preponderance of fleshy, rounded women among the artist’s sketches in Four Books on Human Proportion. Surviving reports suggest that Dürer worked with two hundred to three hundred live models in the formulation of his canon of proportions.21 Therefore, it could have been simply that more voluptuous women had made themselves available as models. But that interpretation belies his dedication to the project of empirically fleshing out the parameters of perfect proportionality and thereby beauty. Because he worked on this project for over a decade, a more likely reason was a personal predilection for rounded women. Many of the women he drew, including Katharina and his own wife, Agnes, were fleshy and curvaceous.
Dürer anticipated that his canon of proportions would offer new insights that would separate his work from the canon of perspective current in Italy.22 As it applied to feminine loveliness, this difference was found largely in the means, not the ends. For if Dürer’s mathematical theorizing led him to calculations about perfect proportionality with a seeming predilection for plumpness, a similar standard was in fashion in the most important centers of Renaissance Italy.
Figure 1.4. Albrecht Dürer, image of “normal” woman (front and profile), Four Books on Human Proportion, 1528.
Figure 1.5. Albrecht Dürer, image of “normal” woman (back), Four Books on Human Proportion, 1528.
Urbino is a case in point. A thriving center of the Italian Renaissance, Urbino was distinct from other centers of the Renaissance such as Antwerp and Venice in one critical respect: its involvement in the slave trade was minimal. For this reason, the question of black aesthetics was not a topic that many artists or philosophers considered, and Africans were less commonly represented in art from the region. Urbino was, however, an important place for the discussion and dissemination of ideas about female beauty. It was also the birthplace of Raphael, one of the most influential painters of the High Renaissance. Raphael devoted less energy than did Dürer to waxing intellectual about method. Nevertheless, as an artist, he remained deeply invested in the craft of representing true beauty.
In 1514 Raphael drafted a letter on the topic to his friend Conte Baldassare Castiglione. The letter served as one of the few instances in which the artist delineated, in writing, his approach to portraying feminine loveliness. In it, Raphael confided to Castiglione that “in order to paint one beautiful woman, I’d have to see several beautiful women.”23 The statement was reminiscent of Dürer’s claim that God dispersed beauty over the whole world and that an artist needed a diversity of models to comprehend beauty in all its richness. Indeed, the two artists were colleagues; while the German artist was older and already celebrated by the time of Raphael’s rise to fame, by 1514 the two were part of something of a mutual admiration society, exchanging prints and praising one another’s work.24
To Raphael, as to Dürer, no one woman could have it all. In order to comprehend and later represent beauty in a woman, he needed to work with as many women as possible who were judged to be attractive by the casual male observer. Sadly, due to what Raphael described as a shortage of both beautiful women and competent male judges, he explained that instead he usually relied on his own best judgment: “I make use of a certain idea which comes to my mind.”25 This may have been something of a half-truth. The Renaissance represented a rebirth of ancient Greek and Roman art and philosophy. Italian high society at the time was saturated by a rediscovery of the art and ideas of classical antiquity. Urbino itself was teeming with neoclassicists, many of whom were members of the Florentine Academy, a center for the discussion and dissemination of neoclassical, and especially Neoplatonic, ideas.
The “idea” that came to Raphael’s mind was at least partially inspired by current neoclassical theories about true beauty, which described beauty as requiring symmetry, harmony, and perfect proportionality.26 His own work is extolled in part for its achievements in enlivening these classical ideals, even if he was perhaps unwilling to articulate the extent to which he was conversant with them.
The friend to whom he divulged his process of depicting female beauty, Castiglione, was by contrast an open and ardent Neoplatonist. Nearly fifteen years after Raphael sent him a letter with his mini-treatise on beauty, Castiglione’s tome, The Book of the Courtier, appeared in print. In it, he used fictionalized versions of what he claimed were real conversations to reveal the aristocratic ideal of feminine loveliness at the court of Urbino.
In one conversation, a man by the name of Giuliano de Medici is urged to explain exactly what qualified as “beauty.” Giuliano offers the generally well-respected neoclassical view shot through with Christian idioms, stating that “there are divers [sic] sorts of beauty.”27 When this definition proves unsatisfying, he becomes more specific. Differing from the likes of Dürer, Giuliano betrayed a decided preference for a lady who is neither “too fat” nor “too thin”:
Since women may and ought to take more care for beauty than men—and there are divers sorts of beauty—this Lady ought to have the good sense to discern what those garments are that enhance her grace.… Thus, if she is a little more stout or thin than the medium, or fair or dark, let her seek help from dress, but as covertly as possible.28
Giuliano’s preference for women he describes as “medium,” a term that was seemingly self-evident and yet maddeningly unspecific, was part of the Italian neoclassicists’ understanding of beauty. As with Dürer, harmony and proportionality were integral, a point Giuliano underscores when he states, “If the form of the whole body is fair and well proportioned, it attracts and allures anyone who looks upon it.”29 But whereas Dürer calculated proportionate physiques in a manner that separated the concepts of “proportion” and “size,” the Italian humanists of the Florentine Academy had a slightly more exacting standard of female beauty, one derived from the ancients. Their model was a Roman goddess, resurrected in the Florentine Academy in the late fifteenth century. Her name was Venus.30
Giuliano did not use the name “Venus” in The Book of the Courtier. He didn’t need to. Giuliano de Medici carried the family name that was synonymous with the goddess’s return to glory. His father was Lorenzo de Medici, celebrated fifteenth-century Florentine ruler, patron of the arts, and sponsor of the Florentine Academy. In the 1460s, Lorenzo became friends with a young artist whom his own father (Piero di Cosimo de Medici) had taken in shortly before his death, the famed Alessandro Botticelli.
Figure 1.6. Sandro Botticelli, The Birth of Venus, c. 1482–1485. Image courtesy of Art Resource, New York.
Botticelli’s achievements were sundry, but the artist was best known for his images of Venus, the goddess of love. His first Venus, La Primavera, painted around 1482, shows the goddess standing in a mythically dark forest, surrounded by enticing globes of fruit. She is flanked by gods and nymphs, dancing joyously and reveling in the love inspired by nature’s beauty and bounty. Botticelli’s next Venus was his most iconic painting. The Birth of Venus depicts the goddess naked atop a shell that is gliding into shore. Zephyrs from the left blow her golden hair as she gathers it in her right hand and uses it to conceal her pelvic area. With her left hand she half-heartedly attempts to cover her breasts, coyly leaving one available for the viewer’s gaze. From the right, her handmaiden approaches to provide her with the garments that would be needed to clothe the demure goddess in such a realm.
Botticelli, who was Lorenzo de Medici’s friend and confidant, was a member of the Florentine Academy. He was thus inspired by the poetic works and philosophical tête-à-têtes to which he was privy. The Birth of Venus is often regarded as the earliest Renaissance painting to reimagine a style known as “Venus Pudica,” in which the modest Venus reaches to cover her pubis and often her breasts.31
Figure 1.7. Raphael, La Fornarina, 1518–1520. Image courtesy of Art Resource, New York.
Botticelli would not have been the only artist inspired by the Medicis to paint the goddess of love. Raphael knew the Medicis well, having been commissioned more than once to paint portraits of members of the family. He might not have mentioned a neoclassical influence for his portraits of beautiful women in his letters to Castiglione, a but he painted several Venuses in his lifetime. One of the most mystifying and controversial was a portrait of a nude woman, her hands modestly covering her private parts—said to be his mistress and muse, Margherita Luti.32
The character Giuliano de Medici mentions none of this in his exegesis on beauty in The Book of the Courtier. His family history and their eminence in molding Renaissance aesthetic ideals were left unstated. His contemporaries, however, would have been well aware of the family’s influence on feminine aesthetic standards. This may have been why Castiglione chose to make Giuliano his mouthpiece on the question of feminine loveliness.
Giuliano’s stated preference for women who were both “medium” and “proportionate” was representative of the Italian canon of perspective, as it was embodied by Venus. It is relevant, of course, that this preference was not so rigidly codified that women who were stout or spindly might not be able to make themselves attractive, according to Giuliano, through fashion. If “medium” women were preferred, fat and thin women were not summarily dismissed.
It is equally intriguing that in the same breath in which Giuliano mentions body size, he muses on skin color, suggesting that women who were “fair or dark” might too improve upon their shortcomings through dress. This nod to those of different skin tones may have contained a subtle reference to Africans. Although slavery was not a booming enterprise in Urbino at the time, Africans were not an unknown presence. Giuliano’s own blood relation, Alessandro de Medici, the later Duke of Florence, was also known as il moro—the moor—since his mother was black.33
Figure 1.8. Alessandro de Medici, Duke of Florence, 1535 or later. Image courtesy of Art Resource, New York.
Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier is regarded as a seminal text. An etiquette book of sorts, the work reveals the new rules of conduct at the very moment they were being restated and refined by the Italian upper class. Castiglione’s characters even assume an uncomfortable coyness when it comes to plain speaking about les regoles di bellezza, or the rules of beauty. They tread lightly on topics that the lowly commoner might otherwise pursue with abandon.
Scarcely a whiff of this high-minded affectation is found in Agnolo Firenzuola’s 1541 retort to Castiglione’s work, tellingly titled On the Beauty of Women. Firenzuola was born in Florence in 1493. He traveled to Siena, where he studied law, before heading off to Rome to take holy orders in 1518. In Rome he took vows as a Vallambrosian monk before realizing that the life of the monastic and its attendant celibacy did not really suit him. In 1526, according to contemporary accounts, he was “dispensed from his vows.”34
Firenzuola stayed in Rome, where he entered the shimmering circle of literati that included the distinguished Pietro Bembo. A Catholic cardinal, aristocrat, and student of the works of Plato and Petrarch, Bembo, then in his fifties, had lived in Urbino and was well acquainted with the ruling Medici clan. Along with being known for his own neoclassical poetry, Bembo had famously appeared as an interlocutor in The Book of the Courtier, sparring with Giuliano de Medici on the definition of true beauty.
Inspired by present company, Firenzuola decided to compose his own discourse on beauty. His treatise, like The Book of the Courtier, was written in dialogue form. Firenzuola, however, switched the sexual composition of his group, having four women converse with one man about what precisely constitutes perfect female beauty. In a Christian/neoclassical view that invoked Raphael, he claimed that no one woman had been endowed with all the necessary elements of beauty, but rather that nature had dispersed the good bits here and there. Thus, to animate his vision of perfect female beauty, Firenzuola crafted a montage of body parts taken from the four female conversants in his treatise.35
The first element of true beauty was, of course, proportionality. Clearly inspired by the Neoplatonists such as Bembo, with whom he dined, Celso, the lone male character among his conversants, describes this proportion as “mysterious” and claims that it is “a measure that is not in our books, which we do not know, nor can even imagine.”36 This limitation did not prevent him from trying. For while beauty’s specifications and precise measurements could not be detailed, their intellectual forebears had left them with a vision of feminine perfection: “The Ancients consecrated them to the beautiful Venus.”37 In which case, an important part of Firenzuola’s project is enabling his male mouthpiece, Celso, to sift through the many women he knows, including those present in the dialogues, to identify who has features that approach the exquisite proportions of Venus.
In a nod to both the ancients and Castiglione, Firenzuola writes of his well-proportioned Venus as being medium-sized, but still shapely. Firenzuola conveys this through Celso, who states that the ideal woman is “somewhere between lean and fat, plump and juicy, of the right proportions.”38 That this woman should still remain “plump and juicy” is telling. Evoking others in the Renaissance pantheon, Firenzuola reminds us that even as proportionality is sought, so too is fleshiness. In fact, if one is to drift to one side of the scale, it should be in the direction of voluptuousness, not slimness. Quoting Aristotle, Celso claims, “If the good habits of the body are evident in the firmness and thickness of the flesh, the bad habits must then be evident in its flabbiness and thinness.”39 In other words, “thickness” was a sign of good health, whereas thinness was a signal of poor health and hygiene. In a point-by-point analysis of the figure, Celso informs the women that cleavage should be “plump, so that no sign of bones can be seen,” the hips should be “wide” and “pronounced,” and the arms should be “fleshy and muscular, but with a certain softness.”40
Though thickness had been deemed superior to thinness, the question nevertheless remained: Was it possible that a woman could be considered too fat to be beautiful? When asked this, Celso equivocated momentarily, before responding that even “quite fat” women could achieve the heights of beauty:
CELSO: One likes a robust body, with nimble, capable limbs, well placed and well proportioned. But, I would not want my ideal beauty to be too big or very fat.
SELVAGGIA: Yet, even though Iblea Soporella is quite fat, she is still a very beautiful young lady who carries herself well.…
CELSO: … This young lady has such a majesty in her body, a beauty in her eyes … it seems her fatness has granted her a beauty, that agility.… I judge her to be one of the most beautiful women in these parts of town.41
On the Beauty of Women illustrates the value placed on fleshy feminine forms in Rome, an artistic and intellectual hub of the Renaissance. Its professed preference for plump and proportionate figures echoed the sentiments expressed in The Book of the Courtier. Yet, unlike Castiglione’s masterwork, On the Beauty of Women included a declared preference for fat over thin women. This declaration simultaneously harkened back to Dürer and presaged the growing praise for voluptuous figures that was to come in the world of art and feminine aesthetics.
Though Firenzuola himself mingled with many of the important figures of his time, he never attained the recognition for his work that Castiglione or Raphael had. Still, many twentieth- and twenty-first-century scholars have returned to his work for its insights into sixteenth-century aesthetics.42
Firenzuola shared much with the literati of Rome. While there, he contracted syphilis, the same illness many contemporary scholars believed felled Raphael. His contraction of syphilis had the seeming effect of restoring his devotion to God. He returned to the monastery in 1538, becoming an abbot at the San Salvatore monastery in Prato, where he remained until his death in 1543.
Firenzuola did not make any mention of dark-skinned women in his book. In contrast to the Low Countries (where Dürer had encountered Katharina), African slaves were a minimal presence in Rome and many other major Italian centers. This was not the case, however, in Venice. Dark-skinned captives had been brought to the region since the Crusades.43 The slave-trading enterprise in this way expanded, rather than introduced, the population of forced black laborers in the region.
By 1490, when the trade in captured Africans became a bona fide industry, there was already a visible population of Africans in Italy. Venice, a vital center of the Italian Renaissance, was also a key trading destination. By the late fifteenth century, ships bearing African captives were a common sight in this seaport. And whereas many earlier waves of Africans arriving in the region were largely male, by 1490 a sizeable number of black women could be seen among the newly imported vassals.44
The introduction of a significant population of black women and girls in the city made them in many respects a hot commodity. Their presence signaled both the exotic lands beyond the sea and the European conquest of said lands. For these reasons, black women and girls retained as maidservants became a fashionable accessory for aristocratic Italian women.45 This much was evident in a letter composed by Isabella d’Este in 1491. Isabella, the new Marquise of Mantua, was a respected cultural and political figure. She was also a patron of the arts and a lady of fashion. In her letter, written in May of that year, she badgered her agent in Venice to acquire “una moreta,” a young black girl to serve as her maidservant, emphasizing that the girl should be “as black as possible.”46 A month later, Isabella wrote to her sister-in-law Anna Sforza, revealing that this was to be her second black maidservant. Of her original, slightly older maidservant, she writes, “We couldn’t be more pleased with our black girl, even if she were blacker, because from being at first a little disdainful she has now become pleasing in words and acts, and we think she’ll make the best buffoon in the world.”47
With the growing presence of black girls and women in Italy came a new interest in their artistic portrayal. Black men had been represented in frescoes exalting biblical scenes since the thirteenth century, a black man having been venerated as one of the Three Kings in the Black Magus tradition.48 But representations of black women in religious images had been far fewer. The rise of the slave trade in Venice led to the rapid incorporation of black women into a variety of religious, domestic, and mythological scenes. They were typically rendered as the physically alluring social inferiors to white women, a representation that reified social distinctions.
This was the artistic and cultural milieu into which Titian landed as an adolescent in the early sixteenth century. The actual date of Titian’s birth is unknown. However, scholars believe that he was nearly twelve when he was sent from his hometown in Cadore to the city of Venice to apprentice as a painter.49 From then until 1510, Titian apprenticed with the Bellini family, the city’s best-known painters. Some critics argued that his talent outstripped that of the Bellinis even upon his arrival. But by the time the two most acclaimed painters of the Bellini family, Giorgione and Giovanni, had died, Titian had become the undisputed master of the Venetian school, a title he took with him to his death sixty years later.50
Titian was not to remain untouched by the conspicuous presence of Africans as servants in the region. One of his earliest representations of an African was found in his 1523 portrait Laura Dianti and Her Page. Laura Dianti was known by many as the mistress of Alfonso d’Este, Isabella’s brother.51 Her humble origins and uncertain status in the court made the painting controversial. Yet the work also suggests her evolving social status, as she is shown next to her small black pageboy, who looks up at her admiringly.52 (Even as the growing fashion in the region was to procure black female servants, black male servants were still commonly used to represent black servitude in art.) Laura Dianti and Her Page was one of the earliest paintings to exemplify the domestic intimacy and social distance between Africans and Europeans.
Black women also appeared in Titian’s vast portfolio. Titian pulled these women into the iconography of proportionate and fleshy feminine beauties, making them the aesthetic equals of European women. This was the case in what is considered one of the artist’s greatest works, Diana and Actaeon. In this 1559 painting, Titian reimagines a tale from the Roman poet Ovid’s Metamorphoses. In the myth, Actaeon, a young hunter fresh from the day’s kill, wanders aimlessly through the woods with his hunting dogs. He happens upon the sacred cave of the goddess and virgin huntress Diana while she is bathing. His presence sparks a flurry of activity as nymphs beat their breasts, warning Diana of Actaeon’s violent entry into their hallowed dwelling. Suspicious of his intent and believing that he has penetrated the cave for the express purpose of seeing her undressed, Diana curses him by turning him into a deer. Later, his own dogs devour him, ensuring that he will tell no one what he saw.53
While the tale itself was a well-rehearsed ancient myth, Titian adds a bit of colonial-era titillation by introducing a black female attendant into the story. The attendant is at Diana’s back, helping the goddess lift the cloth that would cover her nude body. The attendant is the only woman who is clothed, her inelegant striped frock an artistic device signaling not her modesty but her status as Other.
Figure 1.9. Titian, Diana and Actaeon, 1556–1559. Image courtesy of Art Resource, New York.
Yet, along with his depiction of the servant’s social status as inferior, Titian depicted her physique as no less alluring than that of the goddess. The attendant’s plain smock slides off one shoulder as she reaches to assist Diana, revealing her own shapely form. The attendant’s toned arm matches those of the nymphs bathing nearby. Indeed, there is a similarity in the silhouettes of the many women present. The forms of the many women drawn—reminiscent of Dürer’s plump, proportionate women, as well as the fleshy Venus of the late Florentine Republic—reveal a congruity in their voluptuousness. Each serves as a representation of the beauty of the female body that apparently transcended both color and social status.54
Titian may have been in a class by himself as an artist. But he had many peers among the Italian Renaissance notables when it came to the convention of reimagining tales from antiquity, and inserting a black woman as the social subordinate and yet physical analog to voluptuous and comely white women. Andrea Mantegna, court artist of Isabella d’Este, reimagined Judith in what many believe to be the first biblical allegory to incorporate a black woman. Judith was a widow depicted in the Old Testament as beautiful and chaste. She uses her considerable womanly charms to gain entrée into the tent of Holofernes, the enemy Assyrian general. When he falls asleep drunk, she beheads him with the aid of her handmaiden.
Betraying the tension over the questionable attractiveness of the African face during the High Renaissance, Mantegna’s first drawing of this biblical narrative, circa 1490, shows Judith grasping the general’s heavy and lolling decapitated head by the hair as an older, wizened black woman stoops down with an empty sack to collect the head. In a second portrayal of this scene, the maidservant is young, perhaps younger than Judith. In this portrait the servant’s facial features are presumptively African, and yet like Katharina, also attractive. In both paintings, the servant is as voluptuous and well-built as Judith.
Mantegna’s use of a black woman as a handmaiden in an iconic Christian story was telling. At once evocative and firmly rooted in the late fifteenth-century cultural scene in which it was drawn, Mantegna’s work reconstituted aristocratic white women’s servants as having always been black.55 But black women’s subjectivity and subordination did not diminish their bodily beauty.
After Mantegna, many other artists reproduced the scene of Judith and Holofernes featuring a winsome black handmaiden. Paolo Veronese produced late sixteenth-century paintings of Judith that evoked Mantegna. One, painted between 1582 and 1585, shows a young, contemplative, and buxom Judith being assisted by her seemingly black servant. The servant’s face is careworn, which may be an indication of her age, or alternatively an attempt to illustrate African physiognomy in a way that bespoke a harshness or unattractiveness. The servant in Veronese’s portrait is nevertheless sexually alluring in build. Her toned, largely bare upper torso extends toward the viewer. Her cleavage, like Judith’s, sits on display in the center of the frame, commanding an erotic attention. The viewer’s gaze is drawn more to the sensuality of the women than the triumphant act of decapitation, which, in the biblical tale, saves Judith’s city from enemy plunder.
Figure 1.10. Paolo Veronese, Judith with the Head of Holofernes, 1580. Image courtesy of Art Resource, New York.
Veronese’s version of Judith was composed only a few years before his death in 1588. By this time, he had lived in Venice for thirty-five years. And if Titian was in the estimation of many the unrivaled master of Venetian art, Veronese was esteemed for his beautiful, if often controversial, renditions of biblical tales and classical myths. In these works he was fond of including Africans in scenes in which they had previously been absent. No painter, in fact, during the two-hundred-year span between the late fifteenth and late seventeenth centuries that marked the simultaneous rise of both the slave trade and the Renaissance throughout Europe, painted more scenes featuring black figures.56 His frequent incorporation of black people into his work did more than raise a few eyebrows; he was at one point subject to a trial for what was described as his “misrepresentations” of the good book. His sentence? To correct the offending piece so that it accurately reflected the scripture.57
Figure 1.11. School of Paolo Veronese, Portrait of a Moorish Woman, 1550s. Image courtesy of Bridgeman Images.
Most of Veronese’s figures were of black men and children. But an unidentified student of his style and purported member of the school of Paolo Veronese presented a portrait of a young black woman that remains a significant contribution to the collection of black women in Renaissance art. The painting, Portrait of a Moorish Woman, is a bust of a bejeweled African woman in simple garb that recalls Dürer’s Katharina. This painting, which was completed around 1550, shows none of the melancholy that was evident in Dürer’s portrait. The unidentified “Moorish woman” is marked through her skin color, facial features, and dazzling jewels as “African.”58 Her plain vestments are arranged in a bit of peekaboo pageantry that conveys the influence of Veronese. They also remind viewers of her Otherness and her social station, even as her womanly charms are on full display.
Each of the three major centers of sixteenth-century Renaissance artistic production had a distinctive identity. Despite differences in method and execution, when it came to considerations of feminine attractiveness, Dürer’s mathematical calculations, the Florentine Academy’s neoclassicism, and the Venetian voluptuousness were all united by the notion that beauty was found in proportionality and that fleshiness was pleasing to the eye.
Such similarities are not surprising. The artists did not live in creative silos. Surviving reports reveal that artists like Dürer traveled throughout Italy, Belgium, and the Netherlands to finish commissioned pieces. They also uncover the creative love affair between artists in the various regions. Raphael and Dürer apparently exchanged prints of their works; each was known to admire the work of the other. In Venice, Titian’s crush on Dürer bordered on infatuation, and Dürer noted his concern that the artist was simply copying his work. This concern, it seems, was not unfounded.59 But it was also not without a hint of irony, given his own dogged attempt to pinch the secrets of execution of the Venetian artist Barbari.
It is perhaps because of the shared influences and similarities across regions that for centuries no one knew who sculpted the first African Venus. The statue was originally ascribed to Danese Cattaneo, an Italian sculptor who produced much of his work in Venice.60 This view was later discredited, and the sculpture was attributed to other artists in Florence, northern Italy, and even France. In recent years, a Netherlander named Johan Gregor van der Schardt, who studied in Italy before being employed by the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian II, has been credited with its creation.
The African Venus has many of the same attributes as the classical and neoclassical paintings and statues of Venus, including the famed Venus de Medici statue that was known to be part of the Medici family collection by the late sixteenth century.61 Like the Venus de Medici, the African Venus was of a similarly proportionate, medium build, and fleshy. The blackness of the African Venus is marked by more than just her bronze coloring. The features of the face are also paradigmatically African. Her curly hair is covered by a nondecorative headdress, a detail unique to African Venus statues. Also unique to these statues, in one hand she holds a cloth presumably used to polish the mirror held in the other, into which she gazes longingly.
Figure 1.12. African Venus, 1581 or later. Attributed to Johan Gregor van der Schardt.
The African Venus represents a curious play on the Venus iconography. On the one hand, the sculpture fits within the prevailing idiom of beauty, representing the “refined tastes of the ruling elite of Europe” circulating during the Renaissance.62 Her rounded, elongated limbs speak to the influence of the Mannerist period, which extended approximately from the 1520s to the 1580s. But because she is black, the sculptor also used some markers to indicate her low social status. The African Venus carries a cloth rag and wears a headdress that may signify that she is a domestic servant. Black female servants were often fitted with simple headdresses, as was the case in Dürer’s Katharina, Titian’s Diana, and Veronese’s Judith. The African Venus is, moreover, immodest. In a prelude to ideas about Africans that would be developed over the next several centuries, the African Venus is lacking in shame; whereas the Europeanized Venus Pudica covers her pubis and breasts, the African Venus is mesmerized by her own beauty as she gazes wistfully at her own reflection.63
There are thirteen known African Venus statues, each of a similar design as that purportedly crafted by van der Schardt in the 1580s. It is possible that van der Schardt’s African Venus is one manifestation of a “profane” or lowly Venus, neither exalted nor heavenly. Her earthly beauty and its wholly physical manifestation would inspire lust, but not, as with the Venus Pudica, love.64
But a change was coming. In sixteenth-century Italian masterworks, low-status black women had been prized for their figures. But by the turn of the seventeenth century, black women were shifting from the aesthetic counterparts of European women to their aesthetic counterpoints. Their novelty having worn off in areas where the slave trade had been going on the longest, black women’s figures too were being described as inferior. In the new “proto-racist” order,65 black women were increasingly deemed little, low, and foul. The plump aesthetic became more and more frequently associated with white women.
At the same time in England, a country that arrived relatively late to the transatlantic slave trade, a new trend was taking off among refined men: thinness. In English high society, philosophers had started to rethink the meaning of the fat male body. Voluptuousness in women was all well and good; women were but the objects of men’s fancies. Fatness in men signaled a lack of self-control, or dimness. For elite men, slenderness became bodily proof of rationality and intelligence.
