Each of the three major centers of sixteenth-century Renaissance artistic production had a distinctive identity. Despite differences in method and execution, when it came to considerations of feminine attractiveness, Dürer’s mathematical calculations, the Florentine Academy’s neoclassicism, and the Venetian voluptuousness were all united by the notion that beauty was found in proportionality and that fleshiness was pleasing to the eye.
Such similarities are not surprising. The artists did not live in creative silos. Surviving reports reveal that artists like Dürer traveled throughout Italy, Belgium, and the Netherlands to finish commissioned pieces. They also uncover the creative love affair between artists in the various regions. Raphael and Dürer apparently exchanged prints of their works; each was known to admire the work of the other. In Venice, Titian’s crush on Dürer bordered on infatuation, and Dürer noted his concern that the artist was simply copying his work. This concern, it seems, was not unfounded.59 But it was also not without a hint of irony, given his own dogged attempt to pinch the secrets of execution of the Venetian artist Barbari.
It is perhaps because of the shared influences and similarities across regions that for centuries no one knew who sculpted the first African Venus. The statue was originally ascribed to Danese Cattaneo, an Italian sculptor who produced much of his work in Venice.60 This view was later discredited, and the sculpture was attributed to other artists in Florence, northern Italy, and even France. In recent years, a Netherlander named Johan Gregor van der Schardt, who studied in Italy before being employed by the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian II, has been credited with its creation.
The African Venus has many of the same attributes as the classical and neoclassical paintings and statues of Venus, including the famed Venus de Medici statue that was known to be part of the Medici family collection by the late sixteenth century.61 Like the Venus de Medici, the African Venus was of a similarly proportionate, medium build, and fleshy. The blackness of the African Venus is marked by more than just her bronze coloring. The features of the face are also paradigmatically African. Her curly hair is covered by a nondecorative headdress, a detail unique to African Venus statues. Also unique to these statues, in one hand she holds a cloth presumably used to polish the mirror held in the other, into which she gazes longingly.
Figure 1.12. African Venus, 1581 or later. Attributed to Johan Gregor van der Schardt.
The African Venus represents a curious play on the Venus iconography. On the one hand, the sculpture fits within the prevailing idiom of beauty, representing the “refined tastes of the ruling elite of Europe” circulating during the Renaissance.62 Her rounded, elongated limbs speak to the influence of the Mannerist period, which extended approximately from the 1520s to the 1580s. But because she is black, the sculptor also used some markers to indicate her low social status. The African Venus carries a cloth rag and wears a headdress that may signify that she is a domestic servant. Black female servants were often fitted with simple headdresses, as was the case in Dürer’s Katharina, Titian’s Diana, and Veronese’s Judith. The African Venus is, moreover, immodest. In a prelude to ideas about Africans that would be developed over the next several centuries, the African Venus is lacking in shame; whereas the Europeanized Venus Pudica covers her pubis and breasts, the African Venus is mesmerized by her own beauty as she gazes wistfully at her own reflection.63
There are thirteen known African Venus statues, each of a similar design as that purportedly crafted by van der Schardt in the 1580s. It is possible that van der Schardt’s African Venus is one manifestation of a “profane” or lowly Venus, neither exalted nor heavenly. Her earthly beauty and its wholly physical manifestation would inspire lust, but not, as with the Venus Pudica, love.64
But a change was coming. In sixteenth-century Italian masterworks, low-status black women had been prized for their figures. But by the turn of the seventeenth century, black women were shifting from the aesthetic counterparts of European women to their aesthetic counterpoints. Their novelty having worn off in areas where the slave trade had been going on the longest, black women’s figures too were being described as inferior. In the new “proto-racist” order,65 black women were increasingly deemed little, low, and foul. The plump aesthetic became more and more frequently associated with white women.
At the same time in England, a country that arrived relatively late to the transatlantic slave trade, a new trend was taking off among refined men: thinness. In English high society, philosophers had started to rethink the meaning of the fat male body. Voluptuousness in women was all well and good; women were but the objects of men’s fancies. Fatness in men signaled a lack of self-control, or dimness. For elite men, slenderness became bodily proof of rationality and intelligence.
2
Plump Women and Thin, Fine Men
Peter Paul Rubens was a dapper sort. Tall and good-looking, he was known by many women as il fiammingo, or the Fleming. The nickname was less a testament to the figure cut by Flemish men in general than to Rubens’s preeminence among them. He dressed like a gentleman and had a certain grace and ease when he galloped about town, a stallion on his steed. His own good looks aside, Rubens was revered for his ability to turn any woman into a “Venus.” His sumptuous paintings of full-bodied nudes were taken as a celebration of real women’s curves, and they made the name Rubens synonymous with the voluptuous aesthetic of the late Renaissance. Even today a full-figured woman is often described as “Rubenesque.” Yet what scholars have often failed to note is that not just any robust woman could fit this description. Along with Rubens’s attraction to fleshiness was a predilection for whiteness. As the artist was to state in his own treatise on beauty, he preferred women whose skin was, as he put it, as “white as snow.”
Rubens’s story helps us to understand the unfolding preference for full-bodied white women in art and literature from the late sixteenth to the late seventeenth centuries, particularly in the Dutch Republic and England. The seventeenth century represented a seminal period for each of these states. Each experienced a Golden Age during the era, which coincided with, and was supported by, their emergence as the world’s most powerful slave-trading countries.
Herein, I show that as the slave trade expanded to areas where Africans had been largely absent, the sudden and proliferating presence of black people sparked a simmering and often vocal discomfort. The germinating anti-black sentiment had ramifications for the way black people were represented in art and literature. That is, in the seventeenth century, a “proto-racist” discourse emerged that marked black women and men as unattractive, hypersexual, and diminutive in both size and social status.1 White women were idealized as pure, chaste, and stately.
Figure 2.1. Peter Paul Rubens, The Honeysuckle Bower, 1609. Image courtesy of Art Resource, New York.
Curiously, at the same time that full-figured white women were ascending to the pinnacle of beauty, a visible cadre of well-to-do Englishmen were starting to openly abhor fleshiness in men. Fatness, for English intellectuals, was progressively linked to irrationality. Thinness was seen as more befitting the intelligent, self-possessed white male.
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Rubens was the sixth of seven children. He was born in Siegen, Germany, in 1577. At that time, his father, Jan Rubens, was under house arrest. An avowed Calvinist, Jan had once been an alderman for the city of Antwerp. But nine years earlier, he had fled Antwerp under the threat of religious persecution, landing in Cologne, Germany, in 1568. There he became the chief counselor for Anna of Saxony, a Lutheran princess and wife