Rubens’s changing representations of black women might be better understood if we examine the context in which these works were created. Antwerp, his adopted home, had been a cultural and economic powerhouse and a key port for the lucrative slave-trading industry since 1490.20 But the fall of Antwerp in 1585 destroyed the city’s position as a center of trade activity, slave or otherwise. Throughout the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, the majority of slave traders were from Portugal. Once on amiable terms with the residents of Antwerp, Portuguese merchants cut a wide arc around the city during the war, cutting the port off from valuable resources.21
Figure 2.4. Peter Paul Rubens, Bathsheba, 1635. Image courtesy of Art Resource, New York.
There is little surviving evidence to indicate the number of Africans in the city after the siege. Although many other major port cities were seeing an increase in their African populations, it is very likely that the black population in Antwerp would have plummeted. Fewer slaves were coming in. In addition, in an Inquisition-style decree, the Spanish mandated that Antwerp’s Jewish and Protestant populations convert to Catholicism or vacate the city. Tens of thousands fled, heading north to Amsterdam, the pulsing new hub of the Low Countries. At the time, many of the city’s Africans were slaves or domestic servants to the city’s large population of Sephardic Jews.22 Perhaps owing to the diminishing populations of black people in Antwerp, Rubens did not appear to have worked with black female models. His eclectic approach of representing black women as dark-skinned Europeans and small young servant girls to goddesses and high-born women appears to be a result of the lack of live models to work with.23
Regardless, Rubens did appear to have his mind made up about one thing: white women were the most beautiful women in the world. Rubens wrote a treatise on beauty and proportionality, one that contained an entire chapter devoted to the specific good looks of women. The manuscript, Theory of the Human Figure, was reminiscent of the late Renaissance master Albrecht Dürer’s Four Books on Human Proportion in its studious return to classical theories of art and beauty. Indeed, while Rubens never took to mathematical calculations of perfect proportions, he wrote a statement on female beauty that could have easily been borrowed from the Renaissance master, claiming that “the body must not be too thin or too skinny, nor too large or too fat, but with a moderate embonpoint, following the model of the antique statues.”24 Moreover, like Dürer and other masters of the prior century, he paid homage to Venus and the classical ideal while also describing in detail the value of added padding in the proper places.25 According to Rubens, “The hip, or the tops of the thighs, and thighs themselves should be large and ample, … the buttocks should be round and fleshy, … the knees should be fleshy and round.”26
Where Rubens differed from Dürer was in his admiration of a peculiarly “white” kind of beauty. In his descriptions of the proper amount of flesh and fat that should be present on a woman’s body, he also states, “The skin should be solid, firm and white, with a hint of a pale red, like the color of milk tinged with blood, or a mix of lilies and roses.” Of the voluptuous backsides he fetishizes, he prefers that they remain “white as snow.”27
Rubens made only one reference to a black woman in the text. In a section titled “How the Ancients Represented Their Goddesses,” he notes that “Venus was represented by the Lacedaemonians being armed for battle. In Arcadia, she was black. In Cyprus she had a spike, a masculine air, and feminine garb. In Egypt, the goddess of love was represented with wings.”28 The point of mentioning the legend of the black Venus in Arcadia, it seems, was to diminish its stature or perhaps even discount it. Rubens effectively relegates the black Venus of Arcadia to a footnote in the history of Venus statues, a cultural curiosity, comparable to a winged goddess or one wielding a spike. He makes this position clear when he claims that “there are 100 other statues” he could mention, “but suffice it to say that each one represents the region it comes from.”29
There is scant evidence from surviving texts to suggest that Rubens actively harbored a disdain for black women. Rather, he was working during a period of profound cultural change, a shift in the way Europeans saw Africans. Artists in the Dutch and English Golden Ages were less likely to gush about the beauty of Africans and more likely to note their social—and now also embodied—distinctions from whites.30 Importantly, Rubens’s work throws into relief the historical moment in which distinctions between African and European women came to increasingly rely on the physical body. For Rubens, and a growing number of artists and philosophers, white skin was necessary to elevate a woman to the height of bodily beauty.
It is not for nothing that the Netherlands would have been one of the earliest places to witness this evolution in the relationship between skin color and beauty. In the early seventeenth century, Dutch provinces were still embroiled in a costly war with Spain. What they desired, in addition to their independence, was a viable presence in the lucrative market of international trade. To that end the enslavement of Africans, while inhumane, was to prove intensely profitable. In 1602 the Dutch government decided to throw its support behind homegrown merchants determined to enter the trade. Established in Amsterdam, a mere hundred miles from Antwerp, the Dutch East India Company (also known as the VOC) was made up of local merchants and investors.31 It was backed by the States General of the Netherlands, which offered the chartered company a trade monopoly in trade routes between parts of Asia, South America, and South Africa. It became, by many accounts, the world’s first multinational corporation.32 Gaining a foothold in the spice industry after Antwerp had been cut off may have been one of the VOC’s key directives, but it did more than dabble in the slave trade. Scholars have shown that by the 1650s, envoys with the VOC set down roots in the Cape of Good Hope, enslaving innumerable members of the indigenous Khoikhoi, or as they became known to the Dutch, the “Hottentot.”33
If the VOC made slavery only one of the tools in its trading arsenal, the Dutch West India Company (WIC) made the traffic in human commodities its main directive. Founded only a few years after the VOC, the WIC had as one of its primary objectives what has been euphemistically described as establishing “direct relations with indigenous people in African coastal regions.”34 While the VOC operated largely on the Indian Ocean, the States General granted the WIC a trade monopoly on the Atlantic between Africa and the Americas. Between the 1630s and the 1650s, the WIC became the dominant force in the African slave trade.35
While these developments may seem tangential to the question of aesthetics, they were, in fact, integral to the issue. As Simon Gikandi has noted, the slave trade was fundamental to the development of the bourgeoning “culture of taste.”36 Within this culture, the objectification of black bodies and labor through the slave trade turned black people themselves into the shadow figures of modernity, appearing to exist outside of and in opposition to it.37 Black people thus increasingly came to represent différance, or a perverse primitivity and backwardness, a “polemical otherness.”38 Black people became, in other words, aesthetic counterpoints within the budding culture of taste. This had a visible impact on the representations of black women, given the centrality of appearance to the assessment of a woman’s worth.39 Once accorded a measure of dignity and desirability, black women were progressively represented as small, low, and foul. White women dominated the landscape of statuesque beauties.
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England had been a relative latecomer to the traffic in Africans in both art and commerce. The country had not participated in the slave trade during its entire first century. But in the late sixteenth century, England was transformed from underdog to dominant global power. As a nation, England appeared to have skipped the honeymoon phase of infatuation with African slaves witnessed elsewhere on the Continent during the early years of the slave trade. The first slaves had appeared in England in 1555.40 That