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Self Evident Truths

S. Ross Browne

Ummm…I am so VERY into this right now!

But Black people in period or fantasy settings totally makes the stories unreal.

Also holy shit I love these.

How come I don’t run across this stuff regularly?

Because of racism and the retroactive erasure of POC in Medieval Europe. Pretty much the same reason you almost never see these works of art either unless you’re already looking for them:

But it’s SOOOOOOOOOOO UNREALISTIC TO SEE BLACK PEOPLE IN MEDIEVAL EUROPE!!!!

/sarcasm

Oh the last picture is the cutest.

On a more relevant note, this reminds me of when people are like ‘We can’t have POC in Lord of the Rings (or whatever) because it’s unrealistic.’

OH BUT HOBBITS AND ELVES AND MAGIC RINGS AND WIZARDS ARE FUCKING REAL, RIGHT?

Ok, I hate to rain on your parade here, but

1) A number of those are showing the nativity scene, and one of the three kings as been fanon-black since basically forever. (can you say fanon for christianty? It’s certainly never mentioned in the bible). There’s a theory that the three kings were meant to present the three continents known back then, Asian, Africa and Europe, so naturally one of the would be black. 

2) Another number of those is not from the middle ages? The last for example is no way in hell from the middle ages, neither the paiting style nor the clothes fit. Another one of them is even dated to 1744. That is not middle ages at all. and the vase up there? All people on ancient greek vases are black. Every single one of them, it’s the style this type of ceramic was done in. I’m also fairly sure that one of the sculpture heads included there (the white stone one) is a work of Egyptian art, so yeah that would be a black person from both the wrong age and moreover the very wrong continent?

3) two of these paintings (4th and 9th) are the same guy, btw. Alessandro de Medici to be precise (hail the google fu!) who was of mixed decent (half italian, half black (nationality not known)) and it’s actually not hard to find paintings of him seeing how he was duke of Florence. 

4) can you maybe source the rest, I did my best to find the rest of them on google but to avail? Especially those in the collected picture up there?

READ THE NOTES

I’VE ALREADY DONE THIS ABOUT EIGHT TIMES:

you know, I’m fucking sick and tired of people thinking I don’t know what I’m talking about. Did you notice that the DATE 1744 is right ON one of the paintings I posted? Or maybe that a few of the “paintings” are actually urns and sculptures that date well before the Medieval era? I swear to fucking god you people

Koninklijke Bibliotheek Den Haag Hours of the Virgin: Sext

circa 1300s

Heironymus Bosch circa 1490s

Armorial de Gelre 1370 –1414

Gaudenzio Ferrari circa 1480s

Mostaert, circa 1480s or 90s

portrait of Alessandro de Medici, 1530s

Armorial of Gelre 1370-1395

Anonymous Adoration of the Magi c. 1450

Jean, Duc de Berry, about 1410

From Esther Schruder’s Essay ‘Propaganda and consolation: ‘blacks’ in court culture in the period 1300-1900′:

The first introduction to black people in the ‘Low Countries’ almost certainly occured between AD 200 and 500 when black Africans came to the region in the service of Roman armies.

Research at the University of Newcastle has revealed that black Romans were found in all ranks of the army and that most Roman armies were multi-ethnic. Some Roman emperors, such as Septimius Severus (145-211), were North African in origin. Severus probably marched through the Low Countries with his army in 209 and died in England in 211.

While he may not have been a black African himself, the Historia Augusta does mention a black Ethiopian who served in his army in England. Objects on which black Romans are depicted have also been found in England, although not in the Netherlands as far as is known.

In later Netherlandish art there are certainly many representations of black Romans and black Roman emperors.

The following phase in European history, the Middle Ages, is considerably more important in establishing the roles and image of black people at courts. From the eight century onwards there was a real danger that the Moors, or Muslims, who included many blacks amongst their numbers, would conquer and colonise Europe. They proved formidable opponents.

In subsequent centuries the Moors held sway over the Iberian peninsula, Sicily and Corsica. Both negative and positive representations of black people appear in northern European art and literature from this period of Moorish threat and conquest. Initially these images were chiefly negative, as in the Spiegel Historiaelby Jacob van Maerlant from circa 1330. ( picture Charlemagne )

Positive representations of black people were inspired by the crusaders’ discovery of Christian Ethiopians living in Jerusalem.

When it further emerged that both Ethiopia and Nubia were ruled by Christian kings who were also fighting the Muslims, European crusaders and potentates became increasingly interested in these two lands, believing that they had finally found strong black Christian allies to help them against the Moors.

This idea persisted in art. In Les Très Riches Heures du Jean Duc de Berry(c. 1416) for example, an illumination by the Limburg brothers features three realistic black monks at the foot of the holy cross.

Esther Schreuder