Did racism exist in the Renaissance? Can art teach us about morality?
The standard answer to both questions seems to be “no”. In fact, although studies on race and racism are currently in their second bloom in Europe, critical race theorists like David Theo Goldberg (“Racial Europeanization” in Ethnic and Racial Studies 29(2), 2006) think that racism has a “date of birth”, which according to some is 1492 and, according to the majority, is the 18th and 19th century. They do not seem to believe that racism was already present in the early modern period.
At the same time, scholars seem to have accepted the ethical-aesthetic divide, namely the idea – on which Kant’s theory of taste had a considerable influence – that ethics and aesthetics are separate domains with different concerns. However, this separation seems to contradict not only our common experience but also the discussions that are being held by curators.
In this post, I’ll try to challenge the standard negative answer to the abovementioned questions. I’ll try to explain why we have reasons to believe that there was racism even before its supposedly official birth date, and why philosophers should bridge the ethical-aesthetic divide and start to explore the muddy terrain where ethics and aesthetics enter into each other’s territory. To do so, I will use a rather famous artwork that Andrea Mantegna realized in the Castello di San Giorgio (Mantua, Italy), the Camera degli Sposi.
While during the period of the Comuni (city-states) (11th-13th century), Italy was predominated by a strong particularism, during the Renaissance a few courts increased their power and became cultural and political centers. The most important courts in Northern Italy were Milan in Lombardy, Florence in Tuscany and Venice in Veneto. Yet, two seigniories kept their importance: Mantua in Lombardy, ruled by the Gonzaga family, and Ferrara in the adjacent region, Emilia-Romagna, ruled by the Este family. Compared to Rome, Milan, Venice or Florence, the political power of Mantua was undoubtedly limited. The Gonzaga family was well aware of its political situation. For this reason, Gianfrancesco Gonzaga, first marquis of Mantua, did his best to make Mantua the capital of a small but culturally refined court.
In virtue of his classical education, Andrea Mantegna was the perfect candidate for satisfying the Gonzaga’s ambitions, and in 1460 Ludovico III, Gianfrancesco’s son, appointed Mantegna his court artist. His Mantuan masterpiece is the Camera degli Sposi, a series of frescoes realized in the Castello di San Giorgio between 1465 and 1474. In fact, on November 26, 1475, one year after the conclusion of the frescoes, Zaccaria Saggi da Pisa, ambassador of the Gonzaga in Milan, wrote a letter to his master telling him that the chamber Mantegna decorated was universally acknowledged as the most wonderful chamber of the world.
The chamber was originally known as Camera Picta (painted chamber) until 1648 when Carlo Ridolfi, an Italian art biographer and painter himself, renamed it Camera degli Sposi (chamber of the bride and the groom). The new title led many people to think that the room served as the bedroom of the prestigious couple. However, most scholars are convinced that the room actually had a double function. Besides being a bedroom, it is likely that the room was also used to welcome guests and diplomats since this was considered a way of showing the power and superiority of the host over the guests.
Let’s take a step into the chamber. Imagine being a tourist who visits the Castello di San Giorgio. You enter the Camera Picta through a wooden door in the west wall. You walk to the center of the room and start looking around. You notice that in the room only the cornices of the fireplace and of the door, the door itself, two windows (one on your left, on the north wall, and one in front of you, on the east wall), and the peducci are real. The rest of the architecture is actually painted (fig.1). In fact, Mantegna painted poles that hold heavy golden curtains, which are closed on the south and east walls, and open on the other two sides, where we can see two scenes of the Gonzaga family’s history. The first one is the Court Scene or La Corte dei Gonzaga, the second is the Meeting scene or L’Incontro.
On the north wall over the fireplace, the Court scene (fig. 2) shows Ludovico III seated, discussing a document with his secretary Marsilio Andreasi. He’s surrounded by members of his family and of the court. The content of the letter remains unknown. However, many scholars believe that the letter was sent by Bianca Maria Visconti to inform Ludovico, who was commander of the army in Milan, of the proximate death of her husband and Duke of Milan, Francesco Sforza.
This interpretation would explain the Meeting scene too (fig.3). This fresco shows Ludovico’s meeting with his second son and newly elected cardinal Francesco Gonzaga on January 1, 1462. Ludovico was allegedly going to Milan (due to the proximate death of the Duke) while Francesco was coming back from the Sforza castle, where he went to thank the Sforza family for their role in his election. However, father and son managed to meet somewhat halfway, in Bozzolo. Apart from members of the family, important political figures of the time are represented in the Meeting scene, such as the Holy Roman Emperor Federick III and Christian I of Denmark.
While the Court scene was characterized by a predominant realism, the Meeting scene is quite idealized. Not only it is quite unlikely that Federick III and Christian I were actually present at the meeting, but we can also see an idealized Rome appearing in the background, where Mantegna painted the Colosseum, the Cestio Pyramid, the Marcello Theater, and other imaginary classical monuments. This probably had a symbolic meaning. It was both a wish of good luck to Francesco for his new role and a political celebration. The Gonzaga family wanted to stress their political power and important (national and international) connections.
Although the interpretation of the scenes of the walls is not complete, and further research is needed to clarify the historical facts behind the two episodes, their political purpose is quite clear. Yet, this creates a puzzle for what concerns the last scene, namely the one represented in the oculus.
Imagine, once again, being a visitor in the room. After having stared for a while at the walls, something else catches your eye. You suddenly look up and see the finely decorated ceiling, where Mantegna used perspective to give the impression of being in an open space, in a sort of exterior gallery (fig.4).
The oculus opens itself on a blue sky with some passing clouds, standing on and behind the parapet are some putti, a peacock, and a wooden vase with a fruit-bearing plant (probably a lemon or orange tree, a well-known remedy in this area of the Po Valley against the diseases caused by a polenta-based diet). Moreover, there are two groups of women. The first group is composed of three women, the first one is combing her long blond hair with a double-sided comb, the second one has an almost finished hairdo, and the third one has a finished hairdo (fig. 5). The second group is composed of two women, the first one has white skin, a complex hairdo, and a short veil covering her head, the second figure has black skin, the head is bent, and she is wearing a long veil with black and white stripes, which hides her body (fig. 6). Around the oculus, there is a garland of citrus trees and bows. White painted architectural elements on a golden background create eight spaces and twelve rib vaults. In the eight spaces, eight putti statues hold medallions with the Caesars. In the rib vaults, we can see mythological stories of Arion, Hercules, and Orpheus.
In this context, it is difficult to imagine that the elements and characters represented by Mantegna are not part of a precise iconographic order. Everything seems to have a specific meaning. For this reason, it is quite surprising that scholars have overlooked the presence and meaning of the black figure in the oculus. A pressing question arises. What was Mantegna thinking while painting the black figure?
Let’s explore together four possible explanations.
(1) Mantegna, antiquity lover
The first hypothesis about the meaning of the black figure is that the characters in the oculus have to be interpreted in the context of Mantegna’s love for antiquity. According to the art historian Germano Mulazzani (1978), Mantegna was inspired by Pliny the Younger’s oration Panegyricus Traiani (you can read Mulazzani’s paper here). Pliny’s oration had been discovered in a library in Mainz by the Italian historian Giovanni Aurispa in 1433 while he was traveling to attend the Council of Basel (1431-1449). Scholars are not sure about the presence of the Panegyricus in Mantua but the oration was surely present in Ferrara and some letters seem to suggest the Gonzaga borrowed a copy of it from their neighbors. Therefore, it is almost sure Mantegna knew and read it.
In Maluzzani’s opinion, the Panegyricus would not only be able to explain Mantegna’s architectural choice for the oculus but also the meaning of the figures represented. More specifically, the oculus would represent the theme of the good government (“Buon Governo”) and would celebrate Ludovico as the new Trajan. In the Middle Ages, Trajan had become the symbol of the possibility of reconciling justice and good government with tyranny. Given the several attempts by 15th-century political thinkers of giving a political justification for absolute power, it is plausible that Ludovico asked Mantegna to connect him to the great Roman Emperor. The presence and meaning of two putti in the oculus who are holding an apple and a laurel wreath would be explained by a passage of the Panegyricus, in which Pliny describes them as symbols of the divine glory of the emperor. The Caesars around the oculus and the three mythological scenes dedicated to the stories of Arion, Hercules, and Orpheus support the idea that Mantegna wanted to create a connection between Ludovico and Trajan too. In fact, while Arion obtained eternal glory thanks to his nautical skills, Hercules and Orpheus obtained glory because of their physical strength and shrewdness, virtues that probably Ludovico wanted to attribute to himself.
Another advantage of this interpretation is that it would explain not only the theme of the oculus but also the scenes on the wall. In chapter 86 of the oration, Pliny talks about the importance of friendship for political relations. The presence of Fredrick III and Christian I in the Meeting scene would therefore be a way of showing Ludovico’s benevolence and kindness towards his friends. However, this interpretation does not really explain the presence of the black person, whose connection to Trajan and Pliny’s text is not clear.
(2) The Gonzaga family is networking
The second hypothesis is that the decoration of the oculus was part of a broader political goal, namely the will of the family to show their wealth, power, connections. As I previously mentioned, Mantua was a small political center if compared to Milan, Venice, or Rome. Gianfrancesco Gonzaga obtained the title of marquis in 1433 after the payment of 12,000 golden florins to the emperor Sigismund of Luxembourg. Yet, the Gonzaga family realized that they needed something more than wealth in order to gain political power. For this reason, Ludovico tried his best to make Mantua the cultural capital of humanism, inviting to his court artists like Mantegna, Pisanello, Leon Battista Alberti and Filippo Brunelleschi. Moreover, during the 15th-century a few opportunities came up that could have secured the family’s political position.
Among these opportunities, one was offered by the Turks. For a small state like Mantua, a friendship with the sultan Bayezid was a considerable asset on the chessboard of European politics, especially given the fact that the others powers were not in a position to create and cultivate a friendship with the Ottomans. Francesco definitely seized this opportunity and created a long relationship between Mantua and the Ottomans, reinforced through regular visits from Turkish ambassadors and through Francesco’s interest in Ottoman fashion. In fact, in a letter dated February 16, 1492, Francesco asked his diplomat Giorgio Brognolo to get him a Turkish headgear, which he probably intended to use to seal the relationship between the Turks and Mantua.
These events will take place after the end of the works in the Camera Picta. However, it is quite plausible that Ludovico had already started his search for allies outside Italy, and found in the Turks an excellent potential candidate. He might have asked Mantegna to include in his fresco series not only political figures already connected to Mantua but also potential future allies, like the Turks, to make them favorably disposed towards the family. This hypothesis would explain why the black figure is wearing headgear and why s(he) is standing right next to the white figure. On the one hand, the headgear made immediately recognizable for the viewers of the 15th-century that the black figure was an Ottoman, since, at the time, the turban was the main element of fashion that characterized them. On the other hand, the white woman next to the black figure has been thought to be Ludovico’s wife, Barbara. The two figures would then represent the harmony that connects political allies like the Gonzaga, represented by Barbara, and the Turks, represented by the black figure.
(3) Mantegna, a feminist?
The third hypothesis is that the oculus is a precursor of a theme that Mantegna will develop a few years later while working for Isabella d’Este. Paul H. D. Kaplan (“Isabella d’Este and the black African women” in Black Africans in Renaissance Europe, 2005) claims that Mantegna and Isabella d’Este created a new and influential female version of an already existing iconography, the black African attendant to a white European protagonist. With Isabella and Mantegna, black figures started to have a more important role in artistic representation. Mantegna already had considerable experience in the depiction of black Africans. Five years before starting to work at the Camera Picta, he painted the Adoration of the Magi (1460) in which a black Magus and a group of Africans were represented. Although Isabella will arrive in Mantua sixteen years after the end of the works in the Camera Picta, she did certainly see the oculus and this must have had an impact on her and on her relationship with her maidservants. Isabella was fascinated with black child servants, she made many efforts to procure them, she seems to have been literally obsessed with black maidservants. In a way, Isabella took to real-life a relationship that Mantegna only imagined and painted in his works.
This relationship of both subordination and alliance culminated in Judith and her maidservant with the head of Holofernes (1491/1492) (fig. 7). Kaplan notes that there are a few differences between the Judith and the oculus. For instance, in the oculus we cannot really tell if the black figure is a woman, the body is not represented, and the only element that suggests the identity of the figure is the color of the skin. In Judith these elements disappeared, the skin color is not part of the drawing, the facial features are more emphasized, but the relationship of subordination and alliance remains. Although in the oculus only a few elements suggest that the two are servant and master (the haughty look of the white woman and the bent head of the black figure), the fact that the two are complicit is made explicit by their physical closeness.
Even in this case, the developments exposed here will take place after Mantegna’s work in the Camera. Nevertheless, any form of evolution needs some precursors to build upon. I think that the black figure in the Camera Picta can be considered one of these precursors. It anticipates a theme that will have much fortune in the years following the creation of Mantegna’s oculus. Some elements will change, like the physiognomic markers, but the core relationship of subordination and alliance will remain the same.
(4) Mantegna, a racist?
According to the fourth and last interpretation, the black figure might be part of the canon of stereotyped representation of black Africans in art. In the chapter “The stereotyping of black Africans in Reinassance Europe” (in Black Africans in Renaissance Europe, 2005), Kate Lowe describes some of the stereotypes associated with black Africans during the early modern period. Their black skin, for example, was associated with an evil nature, and with slavery, they were usually represented naked to show their lack of understanding of decent behavior, they were often wearing jewelry to show off the status of their master but also to convey a coexistence of richness and inferiority in Africa. They were typically represented while laughing because considered too stupid to understand their misery, they were slaves but careless of their situation. Furthermore, the facial expression of laughing was denigrating in itself, they were represented with an open mouth and showing the teeth as a canine habit. They were considered lazy and irresponsible, criminals and alcoholics, but they were also associated with pleasure and sex. Black people were thought to be unskilled but good at martial arts, dancing, singing, playing music. According to this interpretation, the black figure in the oculus would be part of this typical iconography. In fact, we can see that the figure is represented with some of those “typical” elements I have just mentioned, like the smiling expression and the showing of the teeth.
Two take-home messages to reflect upon
Although I have spent quite some words talking about the Camera degli Sposi and the oculus, it is not my intention (neither in this post nor in any other in the future) to provide you with a definitive interpretation of the meaning of the black figure (so, sorry if you were hoping for such a thing). We do not have to choose among the different hypotheses, which could be equally valid. Eventually, the puzzle of the black figure might as well remain just a puzzle.
Rather, I believe that the example of the Camera Picta should make us reflect upon two different yet interconnected questions: was there racism before its “official” starting date? Can art teach us something about morality?
As for the first question, the widespread theory among critical race theorists is that racism did not exist before the 18th-century. For instance, David Theo Goldberg (The Racial State, 2002) claims that racism is linked with the birth of the modern nation-state. In his opinion, we cannot talk of proper racism before the birth of the nation-state in the 18th-century. George Fredrickson (Racism. A Short History, 2002) suggests another starting date and claims that racism is a modern creation because the scientific grounds of racism simply were not there before the scientific developments of the 19th-century.
Truth be told, if we are looking for a scientific theory in support of racism like the one that will be used to justify the Holocaust, we will definitely not find it in the early modern period. Yet, this does not mean that the building blocks of racism were not there. Without going as far as to claim that racism was already present in the Middle Ages, as Geraldine Heng does in her book The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages (2011), and although the concept of race was not applied to humans yet, the raw material was already there during the Renaissance. The concept of race was already used and applied to animals, and it will not take long before it will be applied to “human races”.
This should lead critical race theorists to question their idea of a starting date of racism. In fact, as Dr. Anya Topolski has pointed out in her interview for the Blog (which you can read here) nowadays racism has taken new forms, one of which is islamophobia. Yet, the same could be said for the modern period. Perhaps racism was there but it manifested itself in different ways, which were not, however, less hurtful or unjust. Therefore, I think that the first take-home message of this post would be something along these lines. Let’s keep our eyes open to the many shapes and forms racism can take. Not only the shapes and forms it has nowadays but also the shapes and forms it took in the past because, as is often the case, the past can teach us something about our present.
As for the second question, the one about whether art can teach us something about morality, I think it requires a positive answer too. The idea that ethics and aesthetics are separate domains has prevented moral philosophers and curators to engage in proper conversation. This is unfortunate because, on the one hand, the general public and museum curators are struggling with distinctively philosophical-ethical questions to which moral philosophers could contribute, and, on the other hand, to explore how ethics enters into allegedly non-ethical areas, such as aesthetics, would give a more complete picture of moral agents.
The tendency to separate ethics from aesthetics, which is referred to as the ethical-aesthetic divide, has famously been attributed to Kant and his theory of taste. However, this clear-cut separation seems incorrect for a number of reasons. First, the separation seems to be grounded on a misguided interpretation of Kant’s theory itself, where the connection between aesthetic and moral judgments is actually a persistent theme. Second, common experience shows us that there are many cases in which the (im)moral value of an artwork has a major impact on its overall artistic value. For example, we tend to change our minds about the aesthetic value of artwork if we find out that the artist who made it was a deeply immoral figure, or that a museum exposed the artwork without being honest about its origin. Aesthetic revisions based on ethical reasons are quite common experiences. In many cases, aesthetic revisions are not due to any change in the aesthetic features of the objects of our aesthetic judgments. Rather, it is because we morally disapprove of what we came to know about such objects that we change our aesthetic judgments. Moral values can have – and, in fact, do have – an impact on our aesthetic experiences. Third, the ethical-aesthetical divide contradicts discussions that are being held by museum curators. Debates about what to do with the colonial heritage held in museums, about how to create an anti-racist collection, and about whether – and if so, how – to decolonize museums are, ultimately, ethical debates. Therefore, the reality of the issues museums and curators are struggling with should lead philosophers to question the ethical-aesthetical divide.
There are many ways in which art could contribute to morality. Although philosophers such as Martha Nussbaum (Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature, 1992) and Berry Gaut (“Art and Cognition” in M. Kieran (Ed.), Contemporary Debates in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art, 2006) have acknowledged not only that art can give us substantial knowledge but also that the ability of an artwork to provide such knowledge has an impact on its value qua art, an exploration of how being an ethically virtuous person could contribute to being an aesthetically virtuous agent is still very much needed. The second take-home message, then, would be an invite for philosophers to properly engage with aesthetics again, and to explore the muddy terrain in which aesthetics and ethics enter into each other’s terrain and contribute to each other’s development.
Ilaria Flisi is a graduate Research Master's student in Social and Political Philosophy at Radboud University. She wrote her Master's thesis on the interrelationships between aesthetics and ethics, and - more specifically - on the ethical duties of aesthetic experts and art institutions. She completed her Bachelor's degree in Humanities for the Study of Culture at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia. She has been editor-in-chief of the faculty philosophical journal Splijtstof for the past three years. You'll have her most undivided attention by bringing up any of the following topics: art history, museum practices, epistemic (and real-life) injustice and discrimination, and (sour) beers.
