People of Color in European Art History

Another photo of me(Rodney M. Rice) from the Michigan Renaissance Festival 

*This photo and the one I submitted before were taken by Mark More of Pict Studios

The courts of princes and nobles were fertile ground for upward mobility, not only for those of African descent. Known instances point to former black slaves making use of natural capabilities or artisanal skills, for example Christopfle Le More, who rose from stable work to be a personal guard of the Emperor Charles V.

In like fashion, “Grazico of Africa, called il Moretto (the little Moor), horseman, page to the knight Prospero” is noted in Medici court records for salaries paid in 1553, while a manumitted North African Muslim held an important position in the stable at the court in Lisbon of Catherine of Austria (1507–78).

João de Sá Panasco’s career at her court began as slave and jester, in which role he was known for his wit. However, much of it was self-deprecating and he suffered from jibes. The date of his manumission is unknown, but by 1547 he was a courtier, a gentleman of the royal household, and the king’s valet. He was awarded a knighthood in the Order of Santiago around 1550.

 Black salaried court entertainers were often musicians, usually their occupation before manumission. A black drummer was on the payroll at the Scottish court in 1504 while Johan Diez in Valencia and John Blanke in London were among those who were trumpeters. The chances are great that the subject of the exquisite Bust of a Young Black Man attributed to the German medalist Friedrich Hagenauer (1490/1500–after 1546) was attached to a court, possibly that of Munich where the artist was active 1525–27.

-Revealing the African Presence in Renaissance Europe, p. 86-87

Elizabeth’s gift to Sir Francis Drake is similarly evocative: one side is a locket with a portrait of the Queen by Nicholas Hilliard with a cover featuring on the interior her avian emblem, the phoenix. A miniature portrait was the single most frequent gift given by Elizabeth I to persons she would reward. It projected her image as monarch, equipped with state clothes and regalia and asserting a personal connection with the recipient as well as a political relationship. On another occasion Elizabeth I gave Drake a second miniature portrait, in which she stood at the focus of a sunburst, to use as a hat badge. That Drake, a commoner who rose to the position of state champion on the raid to Cadiz and Vice-Admiral of the Armada, was so honored marked his extraordinary place in the world.

More fascinating to present admirers of the Drake Jewel is the other side with the intaglio cut cameo of sardonyx featuring an African male bust in profile superimposed over the profile of a European.

There is some debate whether the European is a regal woman or a Roman Briton of the sort William Camden was idealizing in his Britannia. It is not the face of any contemporary man—and certainly not Drake—for it is clean shaven.

The symbolism here operates in two registers: a general imperial iconics in which the global range of imperium is figured in the equivalent faces of the African Emperor and the English Empress. (Karen Dalton has discussed this symbolism in a recent piece in Early Modern Visual Culture, [Peter Erikson and Clark Hulse, eds., University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000].) There is also a much more pointed symbolism meant particularly for Drake. The conjoint effort of Africa and the English will liberate the world from the power of Spain. Drake’s alliance with the Cimmarroons, runaway African slaves who intermarried with Natives, in Panama in 1576 led to his successful capture of the Spanish plate train crossing Panama. This act thrust Drake onto the world stage, secured him and the crown immense treasure, and gave the English forces in the Caribbean the character of liberators.

In the West Indian invasion of 1585–1586, he planned to resurrect his alliance, as part of his design to assert English power in the Spanish main. It survived as one of the most potent scenes in the English imperial imagination, serving as the central action of the Sir William Davenant’s opera, “The History of Sir Francis Drake,” one of only two stage works permitted during the English Commonwealth, and a piece condoned personally by Oliver Cromwell, who also sought to liberate Spanish America from “tyranny & popery.” In the Americas Drake had learned the truth that Elizabeth I understood on the eastern side of the Atlantic—the defeat of Spain required a combination, and the hatred of tyranny brought together Anglo and African.

Elizabeth’s cultivation of Mulay Ahmad al-Mansur (ruler of Morrocco from 1578–1603) in an alliance against their mutual enemy, Spain, was a diplomatic correlative to the martial alliance that Drake had forged in the jungles of the isthmus.

This is Maria Christian, my former cast director at the Michigan Renaissance Festival as her character, Princess Isaade M’boukou. Maria’s been designing and wearing African-Elizabethan fusion garb to MiRF for decades, so she has a few different gowns and headpieces in rotation. In addition to her duties keeping the stage acts organized, as Isaade she acts as an impresario at the feasts, talks about West African traditions and folklore, and is much needed and treasured PoC representation on the cast.

just so you know: i wouldn't use the "renaissance" tag on baroque art. it is incorrect. the renaissance in europe spanned from the early 15th century to ~1600. anything after is considered baroque. :)