With the growing presence of black girls and women in Italy came a new interest in their artistic portrayal. Black men had been represented in frescoes exalting biblical scenes since the thirteenth century, a black man having been venerated as one of the Three Kings in the Black Magus tradition.48 But representations of black women in religious images had been far fewer. The rise of the slave trade in Venice led to the rapid incorporation of black women into a variety of religious, domestic, and mythological scenes. They were typically rendered as the physically alluring social inferiors to white women, a representation that reified social distinctions.
This was the artistic and cultural milieu into which Titian landed as an adolescent in the early sixteenth century. The actual date of Titian’s birth is unknown. However, scholars believe that he was nearly twelve when he was sent from his hometown in Cadore to the city of Venice to apprentice as a painter.49 From then until 1510, Titian apprenticed with the Bellini family, the city’s best-known painters. Some critics argued that his talent outstripped that of the Bellinis even upon his arrival. But by the time the two most acclaimed painters of the Bellini family, Giorgione and Giovanni, had died, Titian had become the undisputed master of the Venetian school, a title he took with him to his death sixty years later.50
Titian was not to remain untouched by the conspicuous presence of Africans as servants in the region. One of his earliest representations of an African was found in his 1523 portrait Laura Dianti and Her Page. Laura Dianti was known by many as the mistress of Alfonso d’Este, Isabella’s brother.51 Her humble origins and uncertain status in the court made the painting controversial. Yet the work also suggests her evolving social status, as she is shown next to her small black pageboy, who looks up at her admiringly.52 (Even as the growing fashion in the region was to procure black female servants, black male servants were still commonly used to represent black servitude in art.) Laura Dianti and Her Page was one of the earliest paintings to exemplify the domestic intimacy and social distance between Africans and Europeans.
Black women also appeared in Titian’s vast portfolio. Titian pulled these women into the iconography of proportionate and fleshy feminine beauties, making them the aesthetic equals of European women. This was the case in what is considered one of the artist’s greatest works, Diana and Actaeon. In this 1559 painting, Titian reimagines a tale from the Roman poet Ovid’s Metamorphoses. In the myth, Actaeon, a young hunter fresh from the day’s kill, wanders aimlessly through the woods with his hunting dogs. He happens upon the sacred cave of the goddess and virgin huntress Diana while she is bathing. His presence sparks a flurry of activity as nymphs beat their breasts, warning Diana of Actaeon’s violent entry into their hallowed dwelling. Suspicious of his intent and believing that he has penetrated the cave for the express purpose of seeing her undressed, Diana curses him by turning him into a deer. Later, his own dogs devour him, ensuring that he will tell no one what he saw.53
While the tale itself was a well-rehearsed ancient myth, Titian adds a bit of colonial-era titillation by introducing a black female attendant into the story. The attendant is at Diana’s back, helping the goddess lift the cloth that would cover her nude body. The attendant is the only woman who is clothed, her inelegant striped frock an artistic device signaling not her modesty but her status as Other.
Figure 1.9. Titian, Diana and Actaeon, 1556–1559. Image courtesy of Art Resource, New York.
Yet, along with his depiction of the servant’s social status as inferior, Titian depicted her physique as no less alluring than that of the goddess. The attendant’s plain smock slides off one shoulder as she reaches to assist Diana, revealing her own shapely form. The attendant’s toned arm matches those of the nymphs bathing nearby. Indeed, there is a similarity in the silhouettes of the many women present. The forms of the many women drawn—reminiscent of Dürer’s plump, proportionate women, as well as the fleshy Venus of the late Florentine Republic—reveal a congruity in their voluptuousness. Each serves as a representation of the beauty of the female body that apparently transcended both color and social status.54
Titian may have been in a class by himself as an artist. But he had many peers among the Italian Renaissance notables when it came to the convention of reimagining tales from antiquity, and inserting a black woman as the social subordinate and yet physical analog to voluptuous and comely white women. Andrea Mantegna, court artist of Isabella d’Este, reimagined Judith in what many believe to be the first biblical allegory to incorporate a black woman. Judith was a widow depicted in the Old Testament as beautiful and chaste. She uses her considerable womanly charms to gain entrée into the tent of Holofernes, the enemy Assyrian general. When he falls asleep drunk, she beheads him with the aid of her handmaiden.
Betraying the tension over the questionable attractiveness of the African face during the High Renaissance, Mantegna’s first drawing of this biblical narrative, circa 1490, shows Judith grasping the general’s heavy and lolling decapitated head by the hair as an older, wizened black woman stoops down with an empty sack to collect the head. In a second portrayal of this scene, the maidservant is young, perhaps younger than Judith. In this portrait the servant’s facial features are presumptively African, and yet like Katharina, also attractive. In both paintings, the servant is as voluptuous and well-built as Judith.
Mantegna’s use of a black woman as a handmaiden in an iconic Christian story was telling. At once evocative and firmly rooted in the late fifteenth-century cultural scene in which it was drawn, Mantegna’s work reconstituted aristocratic white women’s servants as having always been black.55 But black women’s subjectivity and subordination did not diminish their bodily beauty.
After Mantegna, many other artists reproduced the scene of Judith and Holofernes featuring a winsome black handmaiden. Paolo Veronese produced late sixteenth-century paintings of Judith that evoked Mantegna. One, painted between 1582 and 1585, shows a young, contemplative, and buxom Judith being assisted by her seemingly black servant. The servant’s face is careworn, which may be an indication of her age, or alternatively an attempt to illustrate African physiognomy in a way that bespoke a harshness or unattractiveness. The servant in Veronese’s portrait is nevertheless sexually alluring in build. Her toned, largely bare upper torso extends toward the viewer. Her cleavage, like Judith’s, sits on display in the center of the frame, commanding an erotic attention. The viewer’s gaze is drawn more to the sensuality of the women than the triumphant act of decapitation, which, in the biblical tale, saves Judith’s city from enemy plunder.
Figure 1.10. Paolo Veronese, Judith with the Head of Holofernes, 1580. Image courtesy of Art Resource, New York.
Veronese’s version of Judith was composed only a few years before his death in 1588. By this time, he had lived in Venice for thirty-five years. And if Titian was in the estimation of many the unrivaled master of Venetian art, Veronese was esteemed for his beautiful, if often controversial, renditions of biblical tales and classical myths. In these works he was fond of including Africans in scenes in which they had previously been absent. No painter, in fact, during the two-hundred-year span between the late fifteenth and late seventeenth centuries that marked the simultaneous rise of both the slave trade and the Renaissance throughout Europe, painted more scenes featuring black figures.56 His frequent incorporation of black people into his work did more than raise a few eyebrows; he was at one point subject to a trial for what was described as his “misrepresentations” of the good book. His sentence? To correct the offending piece so that it accurately reflected the scripture.57
Figure 1.11. School of Paolo Veronese, Portrait of a Moorish Woman, 1550s. Image courtesy of Bridgeman Images.
Most of Veronese’s figures were of black men and children. But an unidentified student of his style and purported member of the school of Paolo Veronese presented a portrait of a young black woman that remains a significant