Africans in Black and White: Images of Blacks in 16th- and 17th-Century Prints.

Rudenstine Gallery, W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research, Harvard University, Cambridge, September 2 - December 3, 2010.

Curated by David Bindman and Anna C. Knaap.

This fine selection of just 20 prints representing black Africans in European prints from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century formed the initial installation in the new Neil and Angelica Zander Rudenstine Gallery in the W.E. B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard, a location that offered an opportunity to combine teaching with a new setting for access to the university's collections. The show accompanied the re-launch of the publication series, The Image of the Black in Western Art, under the general editors David Bindman and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and sponsored by the Institute (reviewed in this issue, see under 17th-century Dutch Art). Anna Knaap's contribution was supported by a Mellon post-doctoral fellowship at the Fogg Art Museum.

The exhibition was modest in scope as was its two-page introduction and brief, label-length descriptions in the 65-page catalogue, but the selection of prints - ­ largely from the Fogg - was both thematically illuminating and presented in high quality impressions. Through this attention to the quality of the impressions, the curators fostered an appreciation of the subtle techniques used by printmakers to evoke black skin - chiefly in engraving and etching but also in the new technique of mezzotint developed at the end of the 1600s - as demonstrated in a particularly fine example by Elias Heiss, a portrait of the Ethiopian scholar, known in Europe as Abba Gregory, living in Rome in the mid 1600s.

The prints were organized in three sections: Biblical Subjects, Allegory and Mythology, and Real People. While a few individual prints were originally published as plates in printed books, most were issued separately. Space constraints apparently did not allow for case displays of printed books, such as travel, costume, or history books from university collections, although their inclusion would have permitted a vastly expanded range of imagery, including, for example, some harsher or more patronizing views of West African native people to balance the generally high tone of the themes displayed.

The initial section on Biblical Subjects focused on depictions of New Testament stories, specifically the Adoration of the Magi, the Baptism of the [Ethiopian] Eunuch (the only explicit reference to an African in the New Testament), and the role of Africans as bystanders and witnesses. Here appeared well-known works by or after Lucas van Leyden, Aert Claesz, Rembrandt, Dürer, and Rubens, but also one little-known work outside the chronology of the exhibition's title but nonetheless riveting: the only drawing in the show, a large watercolor and gouache study from 1858 by John Ruskin after the upper body of a black woman attendant in Veronese's painting Solomon Receiving the Queen of Sheba (Turin).

The section on Allegory and Mythology featured three representative roles for black Africans in the 1500s and 1600s: a personification of the continent of Africa by Adriaen Collaert after Maarten de Vos within a series of the Four Continents; a personification of Darkness in Jan Muller's fabulous engraving after Hendrick Goltzius' Separation of Light and Dark from his series Creation of the World; and a satyr with the features of a black African presenting fruit to Diana in Schelte à Bolswert's engraving after Rubens's Return from the Hunt. In each case the black African is depicted as a handsome figure but also as a foil for the more resplendent, confident, or graceful European.

For visitors not steeped in the material, the section on "Real People" was likely the most revelatory. Here appeared both formal portraits of prominent Africans working in Europe, such as Abba Gregory or the Congolese ambassador Antonio Emanuel Ne Vunda who died in Rome soon after his arrival, as well as moving representations of unidentified servants or slaves, who served as models for artists' exploration of otherness. The most famous print in this section was Rembrandt's 1658 etching, called here Black Woman Lying Down. The interpretation of this figure as a black person is much disputed, but for this reviewer, the curators' decision to include it was fully justified. In this section, as elsewhere, just a little more information, especially in the published form of these texts, would have been useful: for example, whether an associated drawing from life is known or what contents are conveyed by the inscriptions on the print.

The last two portrait prints in the show depict Jacob Capitein, born and recruited for the Calvinist church in Ghana; he defended his doctoral dissertation in Leiden in 1742, the date of the prints. Both hold great interest, for the artists' use of portrait formulas and for their inscriptions. A poem appended to the engraving after the sensitive portrait of Capitein by Phillip van Dijck (translated in the entry) extols in traditional fashion both the skill of the artist and the wisdom of the sitter; however, it would also be useful to call attention to the inscription on Francois van Bleyswyck's etching of Capitein (an image that accompanied his dissertation), which reads in part "His skin is black but his soul is white… He is going to teach Faith, Hope, and Love and to the Moors so that they, made white, with him will continue to revere the Lamb [my translation]." This is just the kind of ongoing, contemporaneous ambivalence about black skin that we need to keep firmly in mind in assessing these remarkable images.

A fully illustrated catalogue (64 pages) is announced for a future date, available from the Du Bois Institute and Harvard Art Museums.

This review was prepared with the assistance of a pdf of a proof, kindly supplied by the authors.

Joaneath Spicer
Walters Art Gallery