People of Color in European Art History

One of the wonders of Kongo: Power and Majesty, on view through January 3, 2016, is the group of luxury textiles finely woven from golden palm fiber, then hand-cut and rubbed in the weaver's hands. The result is a rich interplay of tone and texture that reminded me at first of aerial views of crop circles cut into fields of ripening grain.

The textiles, however, are far more complex as virtuoso pieces. Their making was described with admiration by Antonio Zuchelli (1663–1716), an Italian missionary to the Kongo. He notes how the local weavers finished their cloth "with a knife they cut the cloth in the proper spots and rub it well with their hands, so that it looks like patterned velvet."

Europeans compared what they saw to luxurious Italian silk velvets with elaborate woven patterns, but they admired pieces that were "so beautiful," in the words of the Portuguese sea captain Duarte Pacheco Pereira (ca. 1460–1533), "that those made in Italy do not surpass them in workmanship." What really surprised them was the way in which Kongo cloths were woven not from silk but from raffia, which made them miraculously soft to the touch. The designs were less often a source of comment, although in 1656, John Tradescant the Younger (1608–1662) described a cloth in his museum in Lambeth—now in the Pitt Rivers in Oxford—as "A Table-cloath of grass very curiously waved."

From Stockholm to Florence, London to Prague, Kongo luxury cloths were preserved in court and cabinet collections formed by rulers, princes, and urban elites. The first two recorded examples appear in Prague in 1607—in the Kunstkammer of the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II of Prague (r. 1576–1612), where they remain today—but the royal houses of Sweden and Denmark swiftly followed.

Kongo cloths are also recorded in the seventeenth century as prize pieces acquired by doctors, scientists, and scholars. The Milanese physician Ludovico Settala (1552–1633) and his son Manfredo (1600–1680) formed one of Italy's most famous scientific museums, which included several examples. There is a drawing of a folded one, annotated as "a small mat to make a cushion to sit on, made of straw of rare beauty…made in Angola or Congo." Settala's scholarly network included the Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher (1602–1680), founding director of the the Musaeum Kircherianum in Rome, who acquired pieces described in 1709 as "four mats made with admirable skill in the Kingdom of Angola….they look like a silk cloth notwithstanding they are made of very thin palm threads."

[via the Kongo Exhibition Blog]

After King Nzinga’s death in 1509, his son Afonso I Mvemba a Nzinga succeeded him. One of Afonso’s first acts in office was to declare Christianity the kingdom’s official religion….

Afonso’s story of accession was formalized by the design of a Kongo coat of arms, which a Portuguese artist created in response to a written account Afonso had sent to Europe. (It’s unclear whether Afonso commissioned the design or whether it was a gift from Portugal.) Interpreting its symbolism to his vassals, Afonso said that the scallop shells symbolize Saint James; the five swords, the five wounds of Christ. The cross in the middle recalls the miraculous appearance in the sky on the day of the battle and therefore God’s grace and favor on the Kongo. The two broken, toppling figures at the bottom, which flank Portugal’s own coat of arms, represent the idols that the kingdom used to vest power in before its conversion.

Between the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries, the west central African kingdom of Kongo practiced Christianity and actively participated in the Atlantic world as an independent, cosmopolitan realm.

Drawing on an expansive and largely unpublished set of objects, images, and documents, Cécile Fromont examines the advent of Kongo Christian visual culture and traces its development across four centuries marked by war, the Atlantic slave trade, and, finally, the rise of nineteenth-century European colonialism. By offering an extensive analysis of the religious, political, and artistic innovations through which the Kongo embraced Christianity, Fromont approaches the country’s conversion as a dynamic process that unfolded across centuries.

The African kingdom’s elite independently and gradually intertwined old and new, local and foreign religious thought, political concepts, and visual forms to mold a novel and constantly evolving Kongo Christian worldview. Fromont sheds light on the cross-cultural exchanges between Africa, Europe, and Latin America that shaped the early modern world, and she outlines the religious, artistic, and social background of the countless men and women displaced by the slave trade from central Africa to all corners of the Atlantic world.

The exhibition Kongo: Power and Majesty, on view through January 3, 2016, provides an opportunity to consider the remarkable cross-cultural artistic interaction that took place between Kongo and Portugal from the fifteenth through the eighteenth century.