rudegyalchina: medievalpoc: Annibale Caracci Portrait of an Enslaved Woman Italy (c. 1580s) Leeds, England Walters Museum [source] [source] She doesn’t look enslaved to me …. Which is interesting, especially in the context of this post. What does an ensla

rudegyalchina: medievalpoc: Annibale Caracci Portrait of an Enslaved Woman Italy (c. 1580s) Leeds, England Walters Museum [source] [source] She doesn’t look enslaved to me …. Which is interesting, especially in the context of this post. What does an enslaved person look like? How do we know? Here’s what the Walters Museum had to say (one of the sources above): Paintings representing real individuals in servitude show them primarily in domestic roles, as the maid in the fragment (p. 1, fig. 1) of a larger portrait by a North Italian artist, or children depicted virtually as exotic pets as in Titian’s stunning portrait of Laura dei Dianti and her black page, and Portrait of Juana of Austria with her Black Slave Girl (fig. 11) by Cristovao de Morais. Probably all the extant studies of Africans drawn from life, such as those by Michelangelo, Carracci, and Veronese (fig. 12) are of slaves. We will be straight-forward about the paucity of documentation in attempting to reconstruct something of their lives. Here, the astonishing sensitivity of great artists (Veronese, Titian, Michelangelo, Durer, and others) comes through most poignantly in bringing these men, women, and children to life. Why are they so sure about that, when they admit the documentation is sparse? But the fact is, that is the given title of this painting, and if you want to look it up, that is how it will be indexed. How do you think that affects our perception of the woman in the painting, and what her life would have been like?

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