#sca-nerd

[medievalpoc]

You do a beautiful job assisting other people with what they like or are looking for, so I thought I would ask what your favorite art piece or artist is.

Oh no!! You asked the dreaded “Favorite” question….

It’s so hard for me to pick favorites, because I like almost everything I post a lot, and at the very least I think each one is very important in its own right (which maybe goes without saying?)

How about this…I’ll try and choose a personal favorite post for each month of the past year, and that’s as much as I can narrow it down!!!

January: I learned that the woman who posed for Charles Cordier’s African Venus (1851) was named Seïd Enkess. She was a Frenchwoman originally from southern Sudan, who had been enslaved as a child, but worked as model in Paris as an adult.

February: @karnythia‘s #HistoricPoC hashtag on Twitter gave me an awesome opportunity to share small amounts of information about many fascinating individuals from history!

March: Frances d’Ath visits the Museum Kunstpalast Düsseldorf and takes amazing photographs of Abraham Janssen’s Agrippine Sibyl

April: For 1800s Week, Rudolf Swoboda’s thoughtful and introspective portrait of Abdul Karim, Queen Victoria of England’s secretary.

May: This portrait of Saint Martin de Porres Velázquez (December 9, 1579 – November 3, 1639), of the Dominican Order, canonized as a saint in 1862. He is the patron saint of mixed-race people and all those seeking interracial harmony.  He was noted for work on behalf of the poor, establishing an orphanage and a children’s hospital. He maintained an austere lifestyle, which included fasting and abstaining from meat. He is attributed with miraculous knowledge, instantaneous cures, and an ability to communicate with animals.

June: was VERY hard to pick a favorite for, but in the end I had to go with the Rubens study (c. 1617). It was so great to see Frances d’Ath’s photography finally do it justice. The runners up are here and here.

July: Robert Home’s Portrait of a Malay Woman (c. 1770–1788):

August: my favorite from this month is a reblog from EastIsEverywhere, a work by Shiba Kokan called A Meeting of Japan, China, and the West.

September: Definitely the Armorial panel of Jacob of Reinach and his first wife, Eva von Schonau.

(although an honorable mention is due to buckycee who almost made me pee my pants)

October: A good example of how a lot of my favorites get relatively little love. This guy is just a tiny detail of a whole altarpiece, but the colors, linework, and overall expressiveness of this tiny figure make me fall in love with him.

November: John Faber the Elder’s portrait of Portrait of John of Canajoharie might just be a simple and straightforward pencil sketch, but it makes an impact nonetheless. Or maybe I just really like his face.

December: Getting this awesome reminder that it’s never too late to look at a familiar artwork with fresh eyes and new perspective. These are scenes from Michelangelo’s masterpieces in the Sistine Chapel in Italy:

And these are just scratching the surface of my favorites from 2015; you can see some Best of 2014 Masterposts here, and these are the Masterposts from 2013. Please don’t ask me to pick favorites from those! :D

[medievalpoc]

I was wondering if you could suggest where or how to search for further info on medieval European artists who were also POC? I was able to pull up several of your entries about unknown artists in Japan and the information about African Presence in Renaissance Europe, but is there anything or anywhere else you would recommend to find more information on the artists themselves? I get results on art pieces where the subject is a POC, but I was hoping for more on the artists who were POC. Thank you!

I sure do!

The tag most relevant to what you want is “Artist of Color”. 

The thing about art history, especially medieval European artists, is that in a lot of cases we don’t know very much about them, because of how/why art was produces and its purposes. Very generally speaking, a lot of the art was produced for religious purposes, and the artists were often anonymous. What I’m speaking to is a difference in the ways we conceptualize “an artist” as an individual today, where in medieval Europe (once again, being super general here), an artist who made paintings or sculptures was considered more like a craftsperson, with a workshop and apprentices. It’s a fundamental difference in how we see artists as pioneering individuals today, versus the collective production of art via guilds and workshops in the medieval and early modern periods.

It’s not until later than you begin to see more focus on artists as individuals, including records of artists from earlier times. Sometimes you find stuff like Joachim von Sandrart’s Portrait of Higiemonte (from Teutsche Academie,Germany/Netherlands, 1683)

And like 99% of any mention I could find about this artist is pretty much garbage:

An additional problem with researching artists of color in the Western tradition is a lack of already-existing research, because these images have been pretty much shoved to the side, shrugged at, and/or written off as “exceptions, not worth explaining”, et cetera.

For example, we don’t know the name of the artist who painted this picture, the name of the artist painting in it, or the person the artist in the picture is painting!

One Early Modern European artist of color we DO know some biographical information about is Juan de Pareja, who was enslaved (later freed) by, and apprenticed to, Diego Velázquez. Velázquez also painted his portrait:

Honestly, it can be rather difficult to find information along the lines of “was this or that artist who lived hundreds of years ago what we would consider a person of color?” or a lot of reasons. Not the least of which is that the history we learn in the US is already Eurocentric and white-centric, but in addition, there is a lot of pushback from institutions and individuals when it comes to exploring the possibility that anyone we currently study in various history disciplines wasn’t white. A lot of people, even those who’ve studied them intensively, still don’t know that Alexandre Dumas and Alexander Pushkin both had documented African ancestry.

There are some artists of color I’ve featured here that some people positively had fits about, in the style of “how dare you accuse this artist i love of being one of Those People!!” Because of course being a person of color is negative. *eyeroll* Honestly if someone’s that racist, I’m not sure why they would bother with MPoC at all, but what’re ya gonna do. Giovanni Antonio Bazzi, called Il Sodoma (the Sodomite, a name he embraced), was a fairly scandalous eccentric who annoyed most of the Siena society elites during his time. He painted a self-portrait ( in the center here, along with his two pet badgers and a tame raven) in his Life of Saint Benedict:

He also painted a lot of people of color in his works:

[Benedict Foretells the Destruction of Montecassino]

I have yet to come across a substantial work documenting European artists of color from the Early Modern period, but I’m doing what I can to get as much compiled on them as possible, and hopefully inspiring people who see these to look into it more in their respective disciplines. You, for example! I hope what i have so far sparks your imagination and that you’ll not only find even more on this topic, but in turn, will share it with others!