“The Three Mulattoes of
Esmereldas” (1599) is one of the works in “Revealing the African Presence in
Renaissance Europe," at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore. More
Photos »
Published: November 8, 2012
BALTIMORE — In a fall art
season distinguished, so far, largely by a bland, no-brainer diet served up by
Manhattan’s major museums, you have to hit the road for grittier fare. And the
Walters Art Museum here is not too far to go to find it in a high-fiber,
convention-rattling show with the unglamorous title of “Revealing the African Presence in Renaissance
Europe.”
Visually the exhibition is a
gift, with marvelous things by artists familiar and revered — Dürer, Rubens,
Veronese — along with images most of us never knew existed. Together they map a
history of art, politics and race that scholars have begun to pay attention to
— notably through “The Image of the Black in Western Art,” a multivolume book
project edited by David Bindman and Henry Louis Gates Jr. — but that few
museums have addressed in full-dress style.
Like the best scholarship, the
Walters show, organized by Joaneath Spicer, the museum’s curator of Renaissance
and Baroque art, is as much about questions as answers, and makes no bones
about that. Many wall labels begin with an interrogative, suggesting that a
museum visitor’s reading of a particular image carries as much weight as the
curator’s.
And, like most ambitious but
risky undertakings, it has flaws. There is evidence of budget limitations.
Although no corners were cut in getting crucial European loans, the catalog — a
good one — has come in a third smaller in size than planned and with signs of changes-at-the-last-minute
production.
The presence of a chatty
“resource center” midway through the show, with gamelike audience-participation
activities on offer, will rile museum purists. (I have no problem with it.)
And, in a show that tackles the issue of race head-on, the line between an
objective view of the past taken on its own terms and interpretation of it in
light of the present can sometimes feel precariously drawn.
But in the end none of this
matters. The show is so interesting to look at and so fresh with historical
news as to override reservations. It does what few museum shows ever do: It
takes a prized piece of art history, one polished to a glow by generations of
attention, and turns it in an unexpected direction, so it catches the searching,
scouring rays of new investigative light.
Europe’s ties to Africa were
ancient but sporadic. Particularly strong bonds were forged during the heyday
of the Roman Empire. And in the 15th and 16th centuries, the period covered by
the Walters show, they were renewed. True, as early the eighth century a pocket
of intercontinental culture had sprung up in Muslim-occupied southern Spain.
But it wasn’t until that occupation was coming to a close that a broader
exchange began.
By the mid-1400s an
expansionist Europe was hungry for new materials and markets, and a globally
minded Roman Catholic Church sought new members. Well before Vasco da Gama
first sailed around Africa, Portuguese merchants had opened trading depots
along its west coast. And enterprising Africans were coming to Europe.
In 1484 a Congolese delegation
visited Lisbon on a diplomatic mission, and Ethiopian Christian pilgrims were
establishing permanent communities in Rome.
Superficially Africa and Europe
had embarked on an age of cosmopolitan rapport, an idea promoted in art. It was
during this period that the convention was introduced of including a black
African as one of the three foreign kings in images of the Adoration of the
Magi. A beautiful early-16th-century Flemish example and one with, exceptionally,
two black figures, tenderly particularized, opens the Walters show on a utopian
note, with a vision of multicultural harmony.
In reality harmony was rarely
associated with Africa in the European mind. Known primarily secondhand from
sensationalizing ancient texts, the African continent was often depicted in the
Renaissance as a place of freakish beasts and bestial, violence-prone,
naturally subject peoples. The attitude found its place in Renaissance
decorative objects like oil lamps and door pulls cast in the shape of African
heads, and in paintings that routinely included dark-skinned figures as
servants or slaves.
Slavery had a long
institutional history in Europe, and for centuries most slaves were white, from
the eastern Mediterranean and Russia. The source changed with the beginnings of
an African slave trade in Europe in the mid-1400s. And the complexion of
European art, subtly but surely, changed with it.
Colaboradora dessa postagem: Kristin Mann
FONTE: The New York Times
