Research Catalog

Title

The slave in European art : from Renaissance trophy to abolitionist emblem / edited by Elizabeth McGrath and Jean Michel Massing.

Publication

London : Warburg Institute ; Turin : Nino Aragno Editore, 2012.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Additional Authors

• McGrath, Elizabeth.
• Massing, Jean Michel.
• McGrath, Elizabeth
• Massing, Jean Michel
• Warburg Institute.
• Warburg Institute, host institution.

Description

x, 386 p. : ill. (some col.); 25 cm.

Summary

This volume explores the imagery of slaves and enslavement - white as well as black - in early modern Europe. Long before the abolitionist movement took up the theme, European art abounded in images of slaves - chained, subjected, subdued figures. Often these enslaved figures were meant to be symbolic, for slavery was widely invoked as a metaphor in both religious and secular contexts. The ancient Roman iconography of triumphalism, with its trophies and caryatids, provided a crucial impetus to this imagery, particularly for Renaissance artists who developed their own variations. Here the use of classical models had a peculiar force, since nudity, the attribute of antique heroes and idealized abstractions, was the mark of the Mediterranean galley slave. It was also to become the condition of the enslaved and transported African. The poignant sculptures of naked black Africans on Italian monuments of the seventeenth century are Ottoman galley slaves, representatives of the Islamic enemy along with their Turkish companions. But with the expansion and extension of the trade in enslaved Africans among the nations of Europe, African blackness became in itself a sign of slavery in European art. Fashionable portraits increasingly showed young and servile blacks, sometimes wearing silver slave collars, paying tribute to the status or supposed beauty of their masters and mistresses. This imagery often presents itself as playfully metaphorical, even though the slavery of Africans so portrayed could be literal enough. Unsurprisingly, there was little demand for representations of the slave trade. In the few cases in which African slaves in colonial situations became the subject-matter of paintings, they were generally depicted as part of an imperialist and 'civilizing' mission, or accommodated to picturesque formulae, distant from the uncomfortable realities of life on the plantation. Indeed - as the case of Spain especially demonstrates - the representation of slaves in art is never proportionate to their numerical presence in slave-owning societies. It is only with abolitionism that the slave trade and its injustices becomes an artistic theme, provoking the visual counter-propaganda that is charted in the coda to this collection.--Publisher.

Series Statement

Warburg Institute Colloquia ; 20

Uniform Title

Warburg Institute colloquia ; 20.

Alternative Title

• From Renaissance trophy to abolitionist emblem.
• From Renaissance trophy to abolitionist emblem

Subject

• Slavery in art > Congresses
• Art, European > Congresses

Genre/Form

Conference papers and proceedings

Note

• "This volume had its origin in a conference held at the Warburg Institute in 2007, the bicentenary of the ending of the slave trade by Britain. [The conference was] entitled "The Iconography of Slavery in Europe, 1500-1800..." --Preface.

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical reference and index.

Language (note)

• Text in English with some text in French.

Processing Action (note)

• committed to retain

Contents

1. Introduction: reality and metaphor: -- Caryatids, page boys, and African fetters: themes of slavery in European art / Elizabeth McGrath -- Allegory and ambiguity in Michelangelo's 'Slaves' / Charles Robertson -- L'esclavage comme métaphore religieuse dans l'iconographie de l'ordre des Trinitaires / Jean-Luc Liez -- 2. Galley slaves and Moorish captives: -- The iconography of Mediterranean slavery in the seventeenth century / Jean Michel Massing -- Messina 1535 to Lepanto 1571: Vasari, Borghini and the imagery of the Moors, Barbarians and Turks / Rick Scorza -- From Borgo Pinti to Doccia: the afterlife of Pietro Tacca's Moors for Livorno / Anthea Brook -- 3. Europe, the Americas and the slave trade: -- The urban slave in Spain and New Spain / Carmen Fracchia -- Black slavery and the 'mulatto escape hatch' in the Brazilian ensembles of Frans Post and Albert Eckhout / Ernst van den Boogart -- Becoming human: the iconography of black slavery in French, British and Dutch book illustrations c. 1600-c. 1800 / Elmer Kolfin -- 4. Abolitionism and its critics: -- George Moreland's 'Slave Trade' and 'African Hospitality': slavery, sentiment and the limits of the abolitionists image / Meredith Gamer -- 'They are happy people': some newly identified pro-slavery caricatures from the age of abolition / David Bindman -- Abolitionists, African diplomats and 'the Black Joke' in George Gruikshank's The New Union Club / Temi Odumosu.

ISBN

• 9781908590435
• 1908590432

OCLC

• 811970449
• SCSB-12317369

Owning Institutions

Harvard Library