{"id":26456,"date":"2012-11-13T22:07:09","date_gmt":"2012-11-13T22:07:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=26456"},"modified":"2012-11-13T22:07:09","modified_gmt":"2012-11-13T22:07:09","slug":"from-kongo-to-othello-to-tango-to-museum-shows","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=26456","title":{"rendered":"From Kongo to Othello to Tango to Museum Shows"},"content":{"rendered":"

From Kongo to Othello to Tango to Museum Shows<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

ARTnews<\/a>
\n2012-10-25<\/p>\n

Robin Cembalest<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n
\"\"<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Jacopo da Pontormo (Jacopo Carucci), Portrait of Maria Salviati de\u2019 Medici and Giulia de\u2019 Medici<\/em>, ca. 1539, oil on panel.<\/p>\n

THE WALTERS ART MUSEUM, BALTIMORE, ACQUIRED BY HENRY WALTERS WITH THE MASSARENTI COLLECTION, 1902 (37.596).<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

Artists and scholars are taking increasingly nuanced approaches to tracking the image\u2014and influence\u2014of Africans in Western art<\/em><\/p>\n

In 1902 the Walters Art Museum<\/a> acquired a Pontormo<\/a> painting of an Italian noblewoman, Maria Salviati<\/a>, dated ca. 1539. Back then it was considered a portrait of a woman whose hands were \u201cin funny places,\u201d as Gary Vikan, the museum\u2019s director, puts it. Then in 1937, restorers removed some over-painting\u2014and discovered a child was there. That child was assumed to be a portrait of Maria\u2019s son, Cosimo de\u2019 Medici<\/a>.<\/p>\n

And Then He Was a She<\/strong>
\n\u00a0
\nNow curators say the boy was a girl\u2013Giulia de\u2019 Medici<\/a>. The daughter of Duke Alessandro de\u2019 Medici<\/a>, who was believed to be the son of a black female servant, Giulia is thought to have been the most prominent European woman of African descent at that time.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Darkness Visible<\/strong>
\n\u00a0
\nThis discovery helped inspire \u201cRevealing the African Presence in Renaissance Europe<\/a>,\u201d an inventive show at the Walters that enlists familiar faces of art history to spotlight lesser-known ones in social history. Focusing on the period between 1480 to 1610, an era of increased contact as trade routes expanded, diplomats traveled more widely, and Africans were imported to Europe en masse to serve as slaves, the show includes works by D\u00fcrer<\/a>, Rubens<\/a>, Pontormo, and Veronese<\/a>, among many others, depicting Africans living in or visiting Europe. The museum describes the show as an effort to restore an identity to individuals who have been invisible\u2013in various senses of the word.
\n\u00a0
\nThe show uses representations of slaves in Europe to find out who they were, how they lived, and what their depictions say about Renaissance society. A Caracci<\/a> portrait of a slave woman is a fragment of a double portrait of her owner, of whom a bit of veil remains. She is holding a clock, meant to announce her mistress\u2019s Christian concern for the quick passage of time…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From Kongo to Othello to Tango to Museum Shows ARTnews 2012-10-25 Robin Cembalest Jacopo da Pontormo (Jacopo Carucci), Portrait of Maria Salviati de\u2019 Medici and Giulia de\u2019 Medici, ca. 1539, oil on panel. THE WALTERS ART MUSEUM, BALTIMORE, ACQUIRED BY HENRY WALTERS WITH THE MASSARENTI COLLECTION, 1902 (37.596). Artists and scholars are taking increasingly nuanced […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,24,28,459,8],"tags":[12709,12710,12481],"class_list":["post-26456","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-arts","category-europe","category-history","category-media-archive","tag-artnews","tag-robin-cembalest","tag-walters-art-museum"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26456","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=26456"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26456\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=26456"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=26456"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=26456"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}