FRACCHIA Carmen Fracchia - 'Black But Human' - Slavery and Visual Arts in Hapsburg Spain, 1480-1700-OUP Oxford (2019)

‘Black but Human’
‘Black but Human’

Slavery and Visual Art in Hapsburg
Spain, 1480–1700
C A R M E N F R AC C H IA
1
1
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Acknowledgements
In the writing of this book I have received terrific support, encouragement, and
help from many people who shared my enthusiasm for this project and believed
in it. There are so many of them and they know who they are. I thank all of them.
I feel particularly grateful to all my undergraduate and postgraduate students
(Sander Berg, Michelle Enuson, Hilary Furey, Mairi Macdonald, Mike Pope, Janet
Ravenscroft, Sara Santos, Richard Tilbury) whose unfailing questioning about the
visual arts of the early modern Spanish period led me to explore different con-
cepts of humanity and the institution of slavery, one of the greatest crimes against
humanity, during the Hapsburg dynasty; to my colleagues at Birkbeck University
of London (those who left and those who stayed) for our exchange of ideas, their
intellectual rigour, and challenge that helped the emergence and development
of the main lines of enquiry in this project, especially Emily Baker, Mari Paz
Balibrea, Zoltán Biedermann, Jessamy Harvey, John Kraniauskas, Luciana
Martins, María Elena Placencia, William Rowe, and Luis Trindade. Special thanks
to my colleague Philip Derbyshire for his detailed feedback on every chapter and
his many revisions, suggestions and discussions about the political significance of
the iconographies of slavery. Philip also provided me with most of the excellent
translations into English from the Spanish sources. These were translated for the
first time and they were complemented by the single translations into English by
Sander Berg (Fragoso’s treatise in chapter 5) and Hilary Furey (descriptions of
statues from the confraternity of Our Lady of the Angels in chapter 3 and the title
of Godínez’s play in chapter 6), who also proofread the whole manuscript with
great precision and offered useful suggestions. Many thanks also for the support
I received from my colleagues in the United States: Daniel Balderston, John
Beverley, Jerome Branche, Juan Duchesne, and Gonzalo Lamana, all from the
University of Pittsburgh, for the interdisciplinary dialogues on black diasporan
subjectivity, and the experience of slavery and freedom; and to my colleagues
Agnes Lugo-Ortiz, Larissa Brewer-García, and Cécile Fromont (Yale), from The
Slavery and Visual Culture Working Group at the University of Chicago, who also
discussed with me and their postgraduate students the first two chapters of
this book. I am also indebted to my colleagues in Spain: José L. Fresquet Febrer,
María Luz López Terrada, and José Antonio Rojo at the Consejo Superior de
Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC) and the Instituto de Historia de la Ciencia y
Documentación López Piñero (IHCD) in Valencia for our exchanges on the mir-
acle of the black leg, Spanish surgical practices and the slave presence in hospitals
(chapter 5); to Aurelia Martín Casares (Granada), Luis Méndez Rodríguez (Seville),
vi Acknowledgements
Arturo Morgado (Cádiz), Margarita García Barranco (Granada), Rocío Períañez

Gómez (Extremadura), Rafael Mauricio Pérez García (Seville), and Manuel
Francisco Fernández Cháves (Seville) with whom I participated in three collab-
orative projects on Spanish slavery and abolition (2008–13).
I cannot forget the contributions made by a number of people, amongst them
academics, curators, visual artists, scriptwriters: Oladipo Agboluaje, Manuel
Arias Martínez, David Bindman, Xanthe Brooke, Victoria Burger, Andrew A.
Cashner, Peter Cherry, Baltasar Fra-Molinero, Michael Halton, Jaime Ryan Heintz,
Alison Hilder, Gillian Kennedy, Victoria de Lorenzo, Hilary Macartney, Elizabeth
McGrath, Helen Melling, Mpalive Msiska, Margo Newman, Tom Nichols, Michael
Ohajuru, Javier Portús Pérez, Ángel Pradal Benito, Brendan Prendeville, Benita
Sampedro, Dillwyn Smith, Barry Taylor, Holly Trusted, Dawn Walton, Elizabeth
Wright, and Kees Zimmermann.
A very special thanks to Jesusa Vega (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid) and
the late Nigel Glendinning for their invaluable contributions to my manuscript
which I could not have written without the wealth of primary sources and icono-
graphical material which they sent me over many years.
I could not have written this book without the continuous dialogue with Peter
Abrahams, and his key contributions to the workings of the visual form. Finally, I
would like to acknowledge my passion for the visual arts to my father and for the
African Diaspora and their cultural contributions in Latin America from my
mother. I cannot forget the solidarity and support from my sisters and my brother,
and their respective families. My special thanks to them all.
List of Illustrations
Cover
Bust of an African Youth, plaster cast, before 1770, Inv. Number V-143, Real
Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, Madrid. Photo: © Carmen Fracchia.
Plates
2.1. Michael Lupi de Çandiu (Initial S., Northeastern Spain. c.1290–1310),
The Baptism of a Moor: 00522101, The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles,
United States of America.
3.1. Juan Bautista Maíno, Adoration of the Magi, 1612–1614. © Museo Nacional
del Prado.
3 .2. Diego Velázquez, Adoration of the Magi, 1619. © Museo Nacional del Prado.
3.4. Juan de Roelas, Allegory of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin, 1616,
Museo Nacional de Escultura, Valladolid (Spain). © Photo: Javier Muñoz
y Paz Pastor, CE0930.
4 .2. Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, Three Boys, c.1670, oil on canvas,
168.3 × 109.8 cm, DPG222. Dulwich Picture Gallery, London.
6.1. Cristovão de Morais, Juana de Austria with her Black Slave Girl, 1553,
© Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels/photo: J. Geleyns
Y-Ro scan—or © RMFAB, Brussels/photo: J. Geleyns—Art Photography.
6.3. Juan de Pareja, The Architect José Ratés Dalmau, c.1660–70, Museo de Bellas
Artes de Valencia, Spain.
6.4. Juan de Pareja, Spanish, 1604–70, The Flight into Egypt, 1658, Oil on canvas,
66 1/2 × 49 3/8 inches, SN339, Bequest of John Ringling, 1936, Collection
of the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, the State Art Museum
of Florida, Florida State University, Sarasota, Florida.
6.5. Juan de Pareja, The Baptism of Christ, 1667. © Museo Nacional del Prado.
6.7. Jacopo Bassano and workshop, The Purification of the Temple, 1580.
© The National Gallery, London. Presented by Philip L. Hinds, 1853.
6.8. Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, Madonna del Rosario, 1601,
364.5 × 249.5 cm, Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien, Gemäldegalerie.
©KHM-Museumsverband. Reproduction.
6.9. Anonymous Spanish artist, Black Servant with Flowers, The Menil Collection,
Houston. © Photo: Paul Hester.
CREDIT LINE: Follower of Bartolomeo Passarotti, Allegory of the Sense of Smell,
early 17th century, Oil on canvas, 28 1/4 × 38 in. (71.8 × 96.5 cm), CA 6804, the
Menil Collection, Houston. Photo: Paul Hester.
x List of Illustrations
3.3. Anonymous artist, St Benedict of Palermo, first quarter of the eighteenth

century, Museo Nacional de Escultura, Valladolid (Spain). © Photo: Javier
Muñoz y Paz Pastor, CE0570.
4.1. Joris Hoefnagel, View of Seville, 1573, Bibliothèque Royale Albert Ier
Cabinet des Estampes, S.I 23045, Brussels.
5.1. Isidro de Villoldo, The Miracle of the Black Leg, 1547. © Museo Nacional
de Escultura, Valladolid (Spain). © Photo: Javier Muñoz y Paz Pastor, CE0362.
6.2. Diego Velázquez, Juan de Pareja, c.1650, New York, Metropolitan
Museum of Art. © 2018. The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Art Resource/
Scala, Florence.
CREDIT LINE: Velazquez, Diego (1599–1660): Juan de Pareja (born about
1610, died 1670), 1650. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art. Oil on canvas,
32 × 27 1/2 in. (81.3 × 69.9 cm). Purchase, Fletcher and Rogers Funds, and
Bequest of Miss Adelaide Milton de Groot (1876 1967), by exchange, supplemented
by gifts from friends of the Museum, 1971. Inv. 1971.86 © 2018 the Metropolitan
Museum of Art/Art Resource/Scala, Florence.
6.6. Juan de Pareja, The Calling of St Matthew, 1661. © Museo Nacional del Prado.
6.10. Juan de Pareja, Detail: Self-portrait. Juan de Pareja, The Calling of
St Matthew, 1661. © Museo Nacional del Prado.
6.11. Juan de Pareja, Detail: Self-portrait with a piece of paper. Juan de Pareja,
The Calling of St Matthew, 1661. © Museo Nacional del Prado.
6.12. Juan de Pareja, Detail: St Matthew. Juan de Pareja, The Calling of St Matthew,
1661. © Museo Nacional del Prado.
Figures
1.1. Juan de Noort. Frontispiece, Alonso de Sandoval, De instauranda
Aethiopum salute (Madrid: Alonso de Paredes, 1647). © the British
Library Board, reproduced by permission. 31
2.1. Anonymous Flemish artist, Baptism of the Ethiopian Eunuch by St Philip.
The Book of Hours of Charles V, fol. 82r. Brussels or Malines, c.1519,
Vienna Österreichische Nationalbibliothek. 41
2.2. Pedro Moreno, Allegory of Baptism, 1723–31, Chapel of St Marina,
St Matthias and Baptistery, Mosque-Cathedral, Córdoba. 43
3.1. Flemish-Spanish Anonymous artist, Adoration of the Magi, c.1550.
© Victoria & Albert Museum, London. 66
3.2. Anonymous artist, Our Lady of the Angels, seventeenth-century, Cofradía
de Nazarenos del Santísimo Cristo de la Fundación y Nuestra Señora de
los Ángeles (Los Negritos) (Brotherhood of the Little Blacks), Seville.
© Photo: Adrián Sarmiento. 68
3.3. Andrés de Ocampo, Cristo de la Fundación, 1622, Cofradía de Nazarenos
del Santísimo Cristo de la Fundación y Nuestra Señora de los Ángeles
List of Illustrations xi
(Los Negritos) (Brotherhood of the Little Blacks), Chapel of Our Lady of

the Angels, Seville. © Photo: Adrián Sarmiento. 69
3.4. Diego Márquez y Vega, Saint Elesbaan, 1740, Altarpiece of Cristo de las Penas,
El Carmen Church, Antequera (Málaga). © Photo: Adrián Sarmiento. 74
3.5. Diego Márquez y Vega, Saint Iphigenia, 1740, Altarpiece of Cristo de las Penas,
El Carmen Church, Antequera (Málaga). © Photo: Adrián Sarmiento. 75
3.6. Attributed to Francisco Alonso de los Ríos and Juan de Ávila, Float for
Preparations for the Crucifixion, 1641, Museo Nacional de Escultura,
Valladolid (Spain). © Photo: Javier Muñoz y Paz Pastor, A36conjunto. 80
3.7. Attributed to Francisco Alonso de los Ríos and Juan de Ávila, Float for
Preparations for the Crucifixion, 1641, Museo Nacional de Escultura,
Valladolid (Spain). © Photo: Javier Muñoz y Paz Pastor, A36conjunto. 80
3.8. El Greco, Cardinal Don Fernando Niño de Guevara, c.1600. Metropolitan
Museum of Art, New York. 81
CREDIT LINE: El Greco (Theotokopulos, Domenico 1541–1614), Portrait of
a Cardinal, Probably Cardinal Don Fernando Nino de Guevara (1541–1609),
c.1600. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Oil on canvas, 67 1/4 × 42 1/2 in.
(170.8 × 108 cm). Inscribed: Signed (lower center, on paper, in Greek):
Domenikos Theotokopoulos/made this. H. O. Havemeyer Collection, Bequest
of Mrs. H. O. Havemeyer, 1929. Acc.n.: 29.100.5. © 2018 Image copyright
The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Art Resource/Scala, Florence.
3.9. Pedro de la Cuadra, St Peter Nolasco Ransoming Captives, 1599, Main

altarpiece of the Convent of Our Lady of Mercy (Valladolid).
© Museo Nacional de Escultura, Valladolid (Spain), CE0430. 89
4.1. Joris Hoefnagel, Detail: Hispania. Joris Hoefnagel, View of Seville, 1573,
Bibliothèque Royale Albert Ier Cabinet des Estampes, S.I 23045, Brussels. 94
4.2. Anonymous artist, S-clavo between angels or palm leaves. Devotional
jewellery, 1601–25, Inv. 847. ©Museo Lázaro Galdiano. Madrid. 107
4.3. Christoph Weiditz, Black Slave with a Wineskin in Castile, Das Trachtenbuch
(1529). Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg (Hs 22474, fol. 22v). 110
4.4. Christoph Weiditz, In this manner slaves carry fresh water to the galleys,
Das Trachtenbuch (1529). Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg
(Hs 2247–73v). 111
4.5. Christoph Weiditz, In this manner slaves carry fresh water to the galleys,
Das Trachtenbuch (1529). Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg
(Hs 2247–74r). 112
5.1. Isidro de Villoldo, Detail: Mutilated African Man. Isidro de Villoldo,
The Miracle of the Black Leg, 1547: © Museo Nacional de Escultura,
Valladolid (Spain). © Photo: Javier Muñoz y Paz Pastor, CE0362. 122
5.2. Master of Rubió, The Miracle of the Black Leg, third quarter of the
fourteenth century. ©Museu Episcopal de Vic. Photo: Joan M. Díaz. 130
xii List of Illustrations
5.3. Master of the Rinuccini Chapel (Matteo del Pacino), Miracle of the Black
Leg, circa 1370–1375, Tempera and gold leaf on panel, Left predella:
7 ¼ × 16 1/8 × 1 ¼ in. (18.4 × 41 × 3.2 cm), North Carolina Museum of
Art, Raleigh, Gift of the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, GL.60.17.9/a-c. 130
5.4. Andrés Sánchez de Oña, A Verger’s Dream: Saints Cosmas and Damian
performing a miraculous cure by transplantation of a leg, 1495. Oil painting
attributed to the Master of Los Balbases. Credit: Wellcome Collection.
Public domain. 133
5.5. Pedro Berruguete, The Miracle of the Black Leg, c.1496, Museum of the
Royal Collegiate Church of SS. Cosmas and Damian, Covarrubias
(Burgos, Spain). Mary Evans/CAGP/Iberfoto. 134
5.6. Fernando del Rincón de Figueroa, The Miracle of the Black Leg, c.1492.
© Museo Nacional del Prado. 136
5.7. Pedro de Raxis the Elder, The Miracle of the Black Leg, 1592. © Museo de
Bellas Artes de Granada (Spain). 138
5.8. Miquel Nadal, The Miracle of the Black Leg, 1454, Cathedral of the Holy
Cross and Saint Eulalia, Barcelona. © 2019 Institut Amatller d’Art
Hispànic—im. 05496024 (Photo Gudiol A-2975/ante 1939). 141
5.9. Isidro de Villoldo, Lucas Giraldo, Juan Rodríguez and Cornielis de Holanda.
The Miracle of the Black Leg, 1538–43, Cathedral. Ávila. © 2019 Institut
Amatller d’Art Hispànic—im. 05496027 (Photo Gudiol G-32999/1954). 144
5.10. Felipe Vigarny, The Miracle of the Black Leg, 1533, Cathedral. Palencia.
©Photo: Carmen Fracchia. 146
6.1. Titian, Portrait of Laura de’ Dianti, c.1523, Heinz Kisters Collection,
Kreuzlingen, Switzerland. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q3937592156
6.2. Alonso Sánchez Coello, Isabel Clara Eugenia with Magdalena Ruiz, 1585–8.
© Museo Nacional del Prado. 157
6.3. Il Molinaretto (Giovanni Maria delle Piane), Charles VII, King of Naples
(future Charles III of Spain), with his black page, 1737. © Museo Nacional
del Prado. 159
6.4. Antonio Carnicero, The Royal Riding School of Carlos IV of Bourbon, 1796,
D. 296 bis. Courtesy of Calcografía Nacional, Real Academia de Bellas
Artes de San Fernando, Madrid. 160
6.5. Unknown Artist (after Diego Velázquez), Attributed to Juan de Pareja,
Juan de Pareja, A1897. Courtesy of the Hispanic Society of America,
New York. 173
List of Illustrations xiii
6.6. Diego Velázquez, Kitchen Maid with Supper at Emmaus, 1622–1623,

National Gallery of Ireland Collection. Photo © National Gallery of Ireland. 181
CREDIT LINE: Diego Velázquez (1599–1660) Kitchen Maid with the Supper at Emmaus,
c.1617–18, Oil on canvas, 55 × 118 cm, NGI.4538 National Gallery of Ireland Collection,
Photo © National Gallery of Ireland
6.7. Diego Velázquez, Las Meninas, 1656. © Museo Nacional del Prado. 183
6.8. Diego Velázquez, Juan de Pareja, X-rays, X-radiograph under stretcher,
the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. © 2019. Image copyright the
Metropolitan Museum of Art/Art Resource/Scala, Florence. 184
CREDIT LINE: Velazquez, Diego (1599–1660): Juan de Pareja (born about 1610,
died 1670), 1650. Oil on canvas, 32 × 27 1/2 in. (81.3 × 69.9 cm). Purchase,
Fletcher and Rogers Funds, and Bequest of Miss Adelaide Milton de Groot
(1876–1967), by exchange, supplemented by gifts from friends of the Museum,
1971 (1971.86). X-radiograph under stretcher. Department of Paintings
Conservation. Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. New York, Metropolitan
Museum of Art. © 2019. Image copyright the Metropolitan Museum of Art/
Art Resource/Scala, Florence
6.9. José Leonardo, Moses and the Serpent, 1630–40. Courtesy of Calcografía
Nacional. Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando. Madrid. 186
6.10. Michel Lasne (after Aubin Vouet), St Philip Baptising the Ethiopian
Counsellor (Eunuch), engraving, 1640. © the Trustees of the British Museum. 190
6.11. Andrea Alciati, LIX ‘Impossibile,’ Emblematum libellous, 1534, Paris:
‘Why are you washing an Ethiopian in vain? Ah, desist/No one can
illuminate the darkness of black night.’ © the British Library Board,
reproduced by permission. 191
Photographic Acknowledgements
Adrián Sarmiento; Bibliothèque Royale Albert, Brussels; Courtesy of Calcografía

Nacional, Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, Madrid; Carmen
Fracchia; Collection of the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, the State
Art Museum of Florida, Florida State University, Sarasota, Florida; Dulwich
Picture Gallery, London; Excmo. Cabildo Catedral de Córdoba; Germanisches
Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg; Heinz Kisters Collection, Kreuzlingen, Switzerland.
Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons; Courtesy of the Hispanic Society of America,
New York; Institut Amatller d’Art Hispànic; J. Geleyns Y- Ro scan; Javier Muñoz y
Paz Pastor; Joan M. Díaz; Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien, Gemäldegalerie;
Mary Evans/CAGP/Iberfoto; Museo de Bellas Artes de Granada (Spain); Museo
de Bellas Artes de Valencia (Spain); Museo Lázaro Galdiano, Madrid; Museo
Nacional de Escultura, Valladolid (Spain); Museo Nacional del Prado; Museu
Episcopal de Vic; National Gallery of Ireland; North Carolina Museum of Art,
Raleigh; Paul Hester; Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, Madrid;
Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels; the British Library Board;
the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, United States of America; the Menil
Collection, Houston; the Metropolitan Museum of Art/Art Resource/Scala,
Florence; the National Gallery, London; the Trustees of the British Museum;
Victoria & Albert Museum, London; Vienna Österreichische Nationalbibliothek;
Wellcome Collection. Public domain.
Introduction
The African presence in imperial Spain, from the last quarter of the fifteenth century
until the end of the eighteenth century, was due to institutionalization of the
transatlantic slave trade that brought 700,000–800,000 Africans as slaves to
the Crowns of Portugal, Aragon, and Castile. During the same period and in the
same territories, the Mediterranean slave trade was responsible for the presence
of 300,000–400,000 Moor, Berber, and Turk slaves. According to Alessandro
Stella, if we add those born in these European territories, there were approxi-
mately two million slaves living in the Iberian Peninsula and islands during the
early modern period. The black presence was ubiquitous in the south of these
territories and in the main cities of the centre and the north, as we shall see in
chapter 4 of this book. In terms of percentages, the black presence oscillated
between 10 and 15 per cent of the population in Lisbon, Seville, Palmas in the
Gran Canaria, Granada, Málaga, and Valencia. As Stella also claims, the equation
of the social condition of slavery and blackness had already been established by
the fifteenth century.1 The high visibility of Afro-Iberian people perceived as
slaves and the arbitrary colour classification of blackness propelled me to the
choice of the Afro-Hispanic proverb or refrain ‘Black but Human’ that provides
the first part of the book’s title. It serves as a lens through which to explore the
ways in which certain early modern visual representations of slavery both embody
and reproduce hegemonic visions of subaltern groups, and at the same time
provide material for critical and emancipatory practices by Afro-Hispanic slaves
and ex-slaves themselves in imperial Spain. It thus allows us to generate critical
insights into the articulations of slave subjectivity by exploring the links between
visual regimes and the early modern Spanish and New World discourses on slavery
and human diversity. For the period between the end of the fifteenth century and
the end of the seventeenth century, there has been little attention given or paid
to the relation between the discourses of slavery and those of human diversity,
and the ways in which visual regimes articulate them and by doing so serve as
mechanisms of control. My book provides a complex new reading of neglected
moments of artistic production in Hapsburg Spain establishing their importance
1 Alessandro Stella, Ser esclavo y negro en Andalucia Occidental (Siglos XVII y XVIII) (Madrid:
Fundación Ignacio Larramendi, 2011), pp. 1–7 in digital form, see http://www.larramendi.es/i18n/
consulta/registro.do?id=1204, accessed 14 August 2018.
‘Black but Human’: Slavery and Visual Art in Hapsburg Spain, 1480–1700. Carmen Fracchia, Oxford University Press
(2019). © Carmen Fracchia.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198767978.001.0001
2 Black but Human
as relays of power and resistance. Thus, we could claim that the Black but Human
topos encodes the multi-layered processes through which, firstly, a black emanci-
patory subject emerges and a ‘black nation’ forges a collective resistance and, sec-
ondly, the ways in which these moments are articulated visually by a range of
artists from imperial Spain. Therefore, this proverb that encodes the painful,
ambivalent and ultimately inhuman experience suffered by slaves and ex-slaves in
imperial Spain is the main thread of the six chapters of this book.
In the first section of chapter 1, ‘Black but Human’, I address the origins of the
proverb ‘Black but Human’ that emerged from the Afro-Hispanic oral tradition as
it had been respectively codified in 1611 and 1627 by Sebastián de Covarrubias
Orozco and Gonzalo Correas.2 In the following section, I discuss the origins and
incidence of the ‘Black but Human’ topos, and the ways in which colour and
social status are compounded. There is convincing documentary evidence that
the word ‘black’ was popularly used as a mark of the inferior social condition of
slaves in the kingdoms of Castile and Aragon, and that it designated a diversity of
ethnic backgrounds that included groups of people with a range of arbitrary and
contradictory colour classifications, identified in the latest research by Spanish
anthropologists and historians of slavery.3 In the third section, I am concerned
with the Afro-Hispanic beliefs that are embodied in the ‘Black but Human’ topos
and are conveyed in black carols. These beliefs centre on the assertion that
Africans are human in spite of their legally enforced status as commodified
objects with no rights, where they became objects of material exchange: donations
to save the donor’s soul, gifts, dowry, heritage, money to pay debts and settle
accounts; in lieu of mortgages, rents, leasehold payments, and, as precious
commodities in auctions.4 These work songs are infused with the idea that to be
human is to have a soul, and they focus centrally on the association between
being human and the possession of a soul that becomes white as the result of the
transformative effects of baptism. This whitening of the soul (and the post
mortem body) is the evidence that slaves and ex-slaves offer to support the claim
2 Sebastián de Covarrubias Orozco, de, Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española (1611), edited by
Martín de Riquer (Barcelona: Horta, 1987), p. 826 and Gonzalo Correas, Vocabulario de refranes y
frases proverbiales y otras fórmulas comunes de la Lengua Castellana, en que van todos los impresos
antes y otra gran copia que juntó el Maestro Gonzalo de Correas, Catedrático de Griego y Hebreo en la
Universidad de Salamanca (1627), edited by Louis Combet (Bordeaux: Institut d’Edtudes Ibériques,
1967), p. 33.
3 Joaquín Álvaro Rubio, La esclavitud en Barcarrota y Salvaleón en el período moderno (Siglos
XVI–XVIII) (Badajoz: Diputación de Badajoz, 2005); Aurelia Martín Casares, ‘Free and freed Africans
in Granada in the time of the Spanish Renaissance’, in Black Africans in Renaissance Europe, edited by
Thomas F. Earle and Kate J. P. Lowe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 247–52; Raúl
González Arévalo, La esclavitud en Málaga a fines de la Edad Media (Jaén: Universidad de Jaén, 2006)
and Aurelia Martín Casares, ‘Productivas y silenciadas: el mundo laboral de las esclavas en España’, in
Mujeres esclavas y abolicionistas en la España de los siglos XVI–XIX, edited by Aurelia Martín Casares
and Rocío Periáñez Gómez (Madrid and Frankfurt: Iberoamericana-Vervuert. 2014), pp. 57–94.
4 José Luis Cortés López, Esclavo y Colono (Introducción y sociología de los negroafricanos en la
América Española del siglo XVI) (Salamanca: Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca, 2004).
Introduction 3
for spiritual equality with Hispanic people. In the last section, ‘Being Human’,
I explore the ways in which the ‘Black but Human’ topos is deployed in the
recently discovered black carols,5 written by Afro-Hispanic slaves and ex-slaves in
the Spanish black confraternities, and later re-appropriated by Hispanic white
writers, such as Lope de Vega, Luis de Góngora, and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz.
In the first sectionof chapter 2, ‘What is Human about Slavery?’, I deal with
attempts by the Church and the Crown to ‘humanize’ the suffering of slaves and
ex-slaves and to efface the horror of the institution of slavery that they did not
fully condemn until the end of the nineteenth century. I start by looking at prom-
inent Hispanic theologians, intellectuals, and jurists,6 who were heavily influenced
by the scholastic thought of the School of Salamanca and the Council of Trent.
My aim is to discern whether there is any discussion of the presence of souls in
Africans that might parallel similar discussions about the Native Americans of
the New World, and to see what conditions restricted Africans in their becoming
Christian and what benefits might accrue to them in doing so. In the second
section, I then discuss the firm belief that it was necessary to evangelize and baptize
both the Africans who had just arrived in Spain and the New World (bozales) and
those already assimilated (ladinos). I also explore the visual representations of the
Baptism of the African (from the end of the thirteenth century in the kingdoms of
Castile and Aragon), based on the story of the eunuch prime minister of Candace,
Queen of the Ethiopians, baptized by Saint Philip, to show that the process of
Christianization promoted by the archbishop of Seville, Pedro Castro y Quiñones
(1614),7 follows longstanding traditions of evangelization of non-Europeans.
Here we could cite the enforcement of mass baptism of the infidel in the Spanish
territories—which also led to mass expulsion of the Jews (1492) and Moriscos
(1609–14)—and the indoctrination of the Native American elites in the kingdoms
of Castile and Aragon and the New World. In the third and last section of this
5 José Labrador Herraiz and Ralph A. Di Franco, ‘Villancicos de negros y otros testimonios al
caso en manuscritos del Siglo de Oro’, in De la canción de amor medieval a las soleares. Profesor
Manuel Alvar in memoriam (Actas del Congreso Internacional Lyra Mínima Oral III, Sevilla, 26–8
de noviembre de 2004), edited by Pedro Manuel Piñero Ramírez (Seville: Fundación Machado y
Universidad, 2004).
6 Domingo de Soto, De iustitia et iure libri decem (1553–1554) in José Andrés-Gallego and Jesús
María García Añoveros, La Iglesia y la esclavitud de los negros (Pamplona: Eunsa, 2002), pp. 26–8;
Tomás Mercado, Manual of Deals and Contracts (Tratos y contratos de mercaderes y tratantes descidi-
dos y determinados (Salamanca: Mathías Gast, 1569), edited by Restituto Sierra Bravo (Madrid:
Editora Nacional 1975); Francisco de Vitoria, Relecciones sobre los Indios y el derecho de Guerra (1539)
(Madrid: Espasa Calpe, S.A., 1975); Bartolomé Frías de Albornoz, ‘De la esclavitud’, in Arte de los
Contratos (Valencia: en casa de Pedro de Huete, 1573), digitalized version at the Biblioteca de la
Universidad de Sevilla. @Misc{BVMC:687809, author = {Albornoz, Bartolomé Frías de}, title = {Arte
de los contractos}, url ={http://www.cervantesvirtual.com/obra/arte-de-los-contractos-0} and Luis de
Molina, De iustitia et iure: tomi sex (Antwerp: Ioannem Keerbergium, 1615).
7 Pedro de Castro y Quiñones, Instrucción para remediar y asegurar, quanto con la divina gracia
fuere posible, que ninguno de los Negros que vienen de Guinea, Angola, y otras Provincias de aquella
costa de África, carezca del sagrado Baptismo (Seville, 1614) (Instructions for Remedying and Ensuring
that None of the Blacks Is Lacking in Sacred Baptism).
4 Black but Human
chapter, I explore the nature, origin, and function of the exclusively black
confraternities, where the ‘Black but Human’ topos is articulated in the black
carols and work songs. I focus on the operation of the oldest black confraternity
in the Western World, dedicated to Nuestra Señora de los Reyes (Our Lady of the
Kings or The Wise Men), which was founded at the end of the fourteenth century
in Seville. I show how this institution becomes the template for all the black and
mixed-race confraternities subsequently founded throughout the Spanish empire
and how it was considered a ‘black nation’ by Afro-Hispanic slaves and ex-slaves.
The ‘Black but Human’ topos is also the backbone of the following four chapters,
where I investigate the ways in which the paradoxical position of slaves and
liberated Afro-Hispanics in imperial Spain is articulated visually. To date, the
monograph literature has no in-depth discussion of slavery and visual culture in
imperial Spain using the approach indicated in my title. However, my book does
build on the seminal work for studies of the visual representation of African
slavery in Europe and Spain in four of the ten volumes of The Image of the Black
in Western Art.8 Important here is volume 2 (1979), which provides the radical
Castilian revision of the iconography of the Miracle of the Black Leg (chapter 5),9
and volume 3.2 (2011), where the cultural historian Victor I. Stoichita expands on
the discourses on the ‘white / black binary paradigm’ in visual and literary sources
from early modern Spain developed in his earlier work on the depiction of
Spanish slaves. Here he had noted the paradoxical nature of the Velázquez portrait
of the slave Juan de Pareja and the symbolic ‘whitening’ of four exceptional black
slaves: a saint, a writer, a soldier, and a painter.10 The visual field also includes the
rare biographies of the slave-painter Juan de Pareja and documents regarding his
life (chapter 6). There are also the art historical studies of single Afro-Hispanic
slave images (such as the motif of chained slaves, chapter 4) in monographs and
catalogue exhibitions dedicated to specific artists or movements.11 As the Spanish
visual depiction of slaves and ex-slaves is still sparse by contrast with their greater
8 The Image of the Black in Western, edited by David Bindman and Henry Louis Gates, Jr, 6 vols.
(Cambridge, Mass., London: Harvard University Press, 2010–11).
9 Jean Devisse, and Michel Mollat, ‘The African Transposed’, in The Image of the Black in Western
Art: From the Early Christian Era to the ‘Age of Discovery’. Africans in the Christian Ordinance of the
World, edited by David Bindman and Henry Louis Gates, Jr 2. 2 (Cambridge, Mass., London: Harvard
University Press, 2010), pp. 229–32, which is a revision of The Image of the Black in Western Art, edited
by Ladislas Bugner, Jean Devisse, and Michel Mollat, 2 vols. (Fribourg: Office du Livre, Menil
Foundation, 1979), pp. 205–6.
10 Victor I. Stoichita, ‘The Image of the Black in Spanish Art’, in The Image of the Black in Western
Art: From the ‘Age of Discovery’ to the Age of Abolition: Artists of the Renaissance and Baroque, edited
by David Bindman and Henry Louis Gates, Jr, 3, part 1 (Cambridge, Mass., London: Harvard
University Press, 2010), pp. 225–34.
11 Splendeurs d’Espagne et les villes belges 1500–1700, edited by Jean-Marie Duvosquel and Ignace
Vandevivere, 2 (Bruxelles: Crédit Communal, 1985), pp. 373–4; Christoph Weiditz, Authentic
Everyday Dress of the Renaissance. All 154 Plates from the ‘Trachtenbuch’ (New York: Dover
Publications, 1994) and Carmen Fracchia, ‘The Urban Slave in Spain and New Spain’, in The Slave in
European Art: From Renaissance Trophy to Abolitionist Emblem, edited by Elizabeth McGrath and Jean
Michel Massing, The Warburg Colloquia Series, 20 (London and Turin: The Warburg Institute and
Nino Aragno Ed., 2012), pp. 197–200.
Introduction 5
visibility in the contemporaneous Spanish and colonial literature, and in the

visual material from other parts of Europe, I have chosen to look at religious
visual representations, where black people appeared for the first time in a range of
different media. In this context, I register the shift from the representation of
Afro-Hispanic slaves and ex-slaves as stereotypes to that of subjects in the period
prior to the eighteenth century, by trying to identify both how slave masters
articulate their view of their slaves visually and even more importantly, by explor-
ing whether—and how—slaves and freed slaves depict themselves (chapter 6).
In chapter 3, ‘Visual Culture and Slavery’, in the first part, ‘Tridentine Visual
Culture’, I discuss the total semiotic control imposed on the production of the
religious visual representations in Spain after the last session of the Council of
Trent. This was achieved by the decree on sacred images (1563) and the subsequent
monitoring of art production, from conception to consumption, by an artistic
censor appointed by the Inquisition and supported by Spanish artists and
theoreticians, especially Velázquez’s father-in-law, Francisco Pacheco, himself a
censor. I map out the visual discourses in early modern Spain that offer represen-
tations of blackness, slavery, and human diversity. I then concentrate on ‘Black
Sainthood’ (the institutionalization of black people as saints) in the last section:
St Baltasar in Nuestra Señora de los Reyes or the Adoration of the Magi and the
Spanish resistance to the shift from the depiction of a white King to a black
magus; on the impact of the first black European saint, Benedict of Palermo from
Sicily; and very briefly on the Ethiopian saints, Princess St Iphigenia baptized by
St Matthew and St Elesbaan, King of Ethiopia, promoted in black confraternities
by the Council of Trent. In Seville, the creation of Ethiopian saints as well as the cult
of Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception was promoted by the city’s archbishop.
In my account of the rituals and processions, I reveal the prohibition to members
of the Our Lady of the Kings or The Wise Men, to participate in these public events
from 1604 and I provided the translation into English of the relevant instances of
the legal case against the black confraternity. I consider the eighteenth-century
legend of the miraculous blackening of the face of the sculpture of St Francis
of Paula, patron saint of mariners, boatmen, and naval officers and protector of
animals, during a procession in La Habana, in Cuba. Here the saint is seen to
support the black brothers as they defend their rights over their brotherhood—
after the institution had been taken over by the white nobility.12 I also argue that
Hapsburg Spain lacks the traditional European iconography of chained African
slaves. Instead, the visual representation of chained white Christian slaves rescued
from Africa (such as, St Peter Nolasco Ransoming Captives by Pedro de la Cuadra,
1599) is more popular in the Spanish religious visual form.
12 Don Gómez Arias, El Clarín Armónico de las glorias, y milagros del mínimo máximo taumaturgo
S. Francisco de Paula (Madrid: Imprenta de Joseph González, 1749), pp. 34–48.
6 Black but Human
In the first part of chapter 4, ‘Props and Costume’, I discuss the stereotypical
sixteenth-century image of slaves in chains produced by Northern European
artists and the ways these are part of the discourses circulating in the kingdoms
of Aragon and Castile that situate captured Africans as pagans and chattel slaves,
who become strategic resources for the colonization of the New World. Here it is
clear that the traditional iconography of chained Afro-Hispanic slaves has no
resonance in topographic Spanish views and landscapes of Hapsburg Spain, as the
latter are only codified by artists from the Spanish territories in Northern Europe.
I focus on the ways that the View of Seville (1573) drawing by Joris Hoefnagel
articulates the institutionalization of the local Spanish and transatlantic slave
trades. In this context, I construct an account of the material culture of slavery,
based on archival sources and legal discussions found in the work of historians of
Spanish slavery. I also lay out the Royal Surgeon Juan Fragoso’s extraordinary set
of recommendations for assessing the economic value of slaves at auction in his
Universal Surgery, which has not been translated into English before.13 My views
are based primarily on the findings of Rafael Pérez García and Manuel Fernández
Chaves (2009),14 who prove that there was an illegal slave market in Castile
which included a transatlantic component, and that the Portuguese slave traders
resident in Seville exported African slaves directly from Portugal or from the
colonies to the Spanish city. I argue that even if the slave trade during the formation
of the Spanish empire was small and sporadic compared to its nineteenth century
transatlantic version, it was the most significant trade in Western Europe during
the period in question. It is crucial not to underestimate the effects that slave
markets had on the kingdoms of Castile and Aragon, especially given the ignor
ance of that history among the general public and in the school and university
curricula of Spain today. In the second part of this chapter, ‘Slave Resistance’,
I address the ways in which the drawings of chained slaves by Christopher Weiditz
represent the traditional iconography of Afro-Hispanic slave labourers. In his
Trachtenbuch (1529), the imperial project is visualized as part of the stereotypical
‘parade’ of non-European subjects, including Moriscos and Aztecs that are repre-
sented for the first time in Europe and are used to convey different customs and
dress. But I also interpret the image of a chained slave by Weiditz as symbolizing
13 Juan Fragoso, ‘Tratado de las declaraciones que han de hazer los cirujanos acerca de muchas
enfermedades y muchas maneras de muertes que suceden’, in Juan Fragoso, Cirugía Universal
(1581, ed. 1666 Madrid), edited by Jacint Corbella (Barcelona: PPU, 1988), fols. 418, 419.
14 Rafael Mauricio Pérez García and Manuel Francisco Fernández Chaves, ‘Sevilla y la trata negrera
atlántica: envíos de esclavos desde Cabo Verde a la América española, 1569–1579’, in Estudios de histo-
ria moderna en homenaje al professor Antonio García-Baqueo, edited by León Carlos Álvarez y Santalló
(Seville: Universidad de Sevilla, 2009), pp. 597–622 and Rafael Mauricio Pérez García and Manuel
Francisco Fernández Chaves, ‘Hombres y murallas: mercado y geografía de la esclavitud de la Sevilla
de Felipe II’, in Población y grupos sociales en el Antiguo Régimen, edited by Juan Jesús Bravo Caro and
Juan Sanz Sampelayo, IX Reunión Científica de la Fundación Española de Historia Moderna.
Universidad de Málaga (7–9 June 2006), 1 (Málaga: Universidad de Málaga, 2009b), pp. 587–98.
Introduction 7
the Afro-Hispanic resistance forged in their confraternities against their

subjugation, commodification, and inhuman existence. These forms of resistance
were confirmed by the relatively recent publication by Pedro Herrera Puga (1981)
of the Jesuit Pedro de León’s Grandeza y Miseria en Andalucía 1578–1616, written
during his experience as a chaplain at the royal prison of Seville, for which I also
provide the translation into English of the most relevant cases recorded.15
In chapter 5, ‘Commodification: Is There Any Caste Lower Than Blacks and
Slaves from Guinea?’, I explore the bizarre depiction of the Miracle of the Black
Leg in the Spanish territories, which appears in a range of media and I propose
this image as the unique Hispanic iconography of enslaved Afro-Hispanic people
in Hapsburg Spain. This narrates the miraculous cure in Rome of a white verger
with a diseased leg. When the holy doctors Cosmas and Damian grafted a leg
from a dead African man on to his amputated stump, the limb subsequently
heals. In the first section of this chapter, I examine the supporting framework,
that is, the Greek, Catalan, and Latin literary sources that underpin this account.16
I show for the first time how these three distinctive legends give rise to different
conceptions of the black subject defined as either a ‘Moor’ or an ‘Ethiopian’, and
interpretations about the effects that the miraculous operation had on the patient.
In the last section, I look at the violent sixteenth-century image of the mutilated
African man, worked up by Isidro de Villoldo in Valladolid (1547), the seat of the
Hapsburg court before 1561, and the ways in which it was interpreted by other
sculptors (Felipe Vigarny, Nicolás Cornelis de Holanda, Juan Rodríguez, and,
Lucas Giraldo) in the powerful Castilian cities of Palencia (1533) and Ávila
(1538–44), and show how it drastically departs from the original literary and
visual sources examined in the first section of this chapter. I believe that the visual
motif of the mutilated African man refers to the mutilation of limbs or ears
suffered by fugitive slaves in Hapsburg Spain. In this context, I construct an
account of the moral and legal treatment of Afro-Hispanic slaves, based on a
Spanish household manual that gives instructions on how to treat slaves and their
obligations, partly dedicated to the domestic treatment of slavery, written by the
Dominican Vicente Mexía (1566),17 which has not been translated into English
before. The unique Castilian version of the Miracle of the Black Leg has been
rightly perceived as a visual symbol of prejudice against black slaves, but it has
15 Pedro de León, Grandeza y Miseria en Andalucía: Testimonio de una encrucijada histórica
(1578–1616), edited by Pedro Herrera Puga (Granada: Facultad de Teología, 1981).
16 The Phantom Limb Phenomenon: A Medical, Folkloric, and Historical Study. Texts and
Translations of 10th to 20th Century Accounts of the Miraculous Restoration of Body Parts, edited by
Douglas B. Price and Neil J. Twombly (Washington: Georgetown University Press, 1978), pp. 402–12
and Jacobus de Voragine, ‘The Lives of Saint Cosmas and Damian’, in The Golden Legend: Readings on
the Saints, translated by W. Granger Ryan, with an Introduction by Eamon Duffy (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2012), pp. 582–4.
17 Vicente Mexía, Saludable instrucción del estado del matrimonio [Healthy Instruction on the State
of Matrimony] (Córdoba: Juan Bautista Escudero, 1566), fols. 237v–242r.
8 Black but Human
never been fully set in the context of the importation and commodification of
Africans as slaves in Spain and the colonies. Thus, I explore the radical trans
formation of this medieval European image of an in vivo amputation and grafting
of the leg of an African man foregrounded in these wooden bas-reliefs, and
conclude that there is an extraordinary visual shift from the traditional European
depiction of the Miracle of the Black Leg. This takes place against the backdrop of
the abolition of ‘Indian’ slavery in the New World in 1542 and the emergence
there of a new system of slavery with the enslavement, capture, and export to the
Americas of Africans, a trade that was directly promoted by the Crown and the
Cardinal Inquisitor Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros, but also by Bartolomé de Las
Casas. The latter expresses pastoral concern only about Native Americans and
actively contributes to the export of black slaves to New Spain in the years
between 1516 and 1543, an action that he came to regret (1545–7), some time
before the end of the famous Valladolid debate with Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda
about the soul of the Native Americans (1550–1). I reveal the links between the
makers of the Castilian interpretation of this legend with their influential client
Cisneros, who also promoted the crusades in North Africa from 1505 to 1541.
I claim that the shift to the Castilian version of the Miracle of the Black Leg is
symbolic of the violence of slavery, the paradoxical emergence of the commodified
domestic Christian Afro-Hispanic slave, and the encounter with free Christian
European subjects. I thus read this image as an allegory of the process of colon
ization, and, the beginning of intermixture (mestizaje) in the Spanish empire.
In the final chapter, ‘The Image of Freedom: All Souls Are of a Single Colour
and They Are Wrought in the Same Workshop’, I discuss the early modern Spanish
shift from an hegemonic view of Afro-Hispanic slaves and ex-slaves to the articu-
lation of the emergence of the slave ‘subject’ and the ‘emancipatory subject’. In the
first section of chapter 6, I focus on early modern Spanish accounts of portraiture
as a genre that is restricted to the depiction of ‘worthy’ subjects as defined by
Spanish writers on the theory of art. It is clear that the genre has no room for
depictions of slaves, who are considered as ‘unworthy’ subjects. We are not aware
of any royal portraiture with depictions of Afro-Hispanic slaves as elegant ser
vants (unlike regal images produced in Western Europe) until the end of the
eighteenth century, as in the portrait Charles VII, King of Naples and future
Charles III of Spain, with his black page (1737) by the Italian painter known as
Il Molinaretto (Giovanni Maria delle Piane) and in the drawing The Royal Riding
School of Carlos IV of Bourbon by Antonio Carnicero (1796). I show, however,
that besides their art collection, the Hapsburg dynasty commissioned portraits
by the sixteenth-century court painters Alonso Sánchez Coello, Rodrigo
Villandrando, Bartolomé González, and Juan Bautista Martínez del Mazo of
themselves with the servants at the court—such as mixed-race dwarfs—who were
themselves slave owners. These paintings were displayed in the royal collection
along with European portraits of African slaves and ex-slaves by the Portuguese
Introduction 9
Cristovão de Morais and the late sixteenth-century Italian Annibale Carracci and
with portraits of slaves that are now lost, such as that of the first Afro-Hispanic
writer, Juan Latino, a freed slave, by an unknown painter, recorded in the 1636
inventory of the Alcázar palace in Madrid.18 I also consider the presence of Afro-
Hispanic slaves and ex-slaves in the recent documentation of artistic workshops,19
and the ways that this undermines the classical tradition, established since
antiquity, that underlies the defence of painting as a liberal art. I discuss the ways
in which Pareja’s freedom allows him to become a producer of visual culture in
his own right, and I reveal that he worked as an independent painter before his
manumission. I provide a more extended account of his career at the Hapsburg
court where he lived and worked as the slave of Velázquez and his family at least
since 163420 than the previous brief biographies.21 In the central section of this
chapter, I discuss the only extant seventeenth-century portrait of an imposing
Afro-Hispanic slave subject. The painting is Juan de Pareja by his celebrated master,
Diego Velázquez, court painter to Philip IV, King of Spain, which was made
(1649) and exhibited to great acclaim in Rome during the Jubilee year of 1650,
before Velázquez emancipated Pareja. I give an account of Pareja’s manumis-
sion from slavery, based on the legal Roman document issued in Rome on
23 November 1650, which has not been translated into English before.22 I then
discuss Palomino’s claim that Pareja acquired a ‘second nature’ because of the
interconnectedness between Christianity and his freedom from slavery. In the
third and last section, I concentrate on the articulation of the freed subject in
Pareja’s self-portrait, which is embedded in his religious cum genre painting, The
Calling of St Matthew (1661). I reveal the ways in which the visual links Pareja
adopts and adapts in his monumental canvas show his engagement with several
antecedents: Caravaggio’s paintings in Rome (The Stories of St Matthew, 1599–1600)
and Spanish Naples (Madonna del Rosario, 1607) and with the work by Jacopo dal
Ponte (Bassano) and his workshop (Purification of the Temple, 1580) at the
Hapsburg court in Madrid, where their paintings ‘reached its apex in the late
18 Elizabeth Wright, The Epic of Juan Latino: Dilemmas of Race and Religion in Renaissance Spain
(Toronto, Buffalo and London: University of Toronto Press, 2016), pp. 7, 196.
19 Luis Méndez Rodríguez, ‘Gremio y esclavitud en la pintura sevillana del siglo de oro’, Archivo
Hispalense, 256–7 (2001), pp. 243–55 and Luis Méndez Rodríguez and Jeremy Roe, ‘Slavery and the
Guild in Golden Age Painting in Seville’, Art in Translation, 7 (1) (2015), pp. 123–39.
20 Corpus Velazqueño. Documentos y Textos, edited by Ángel Aterido Fernández, 1 (Madrid:
Ministerio de Educación, Cultura y Deporte, 2000).
21 Antonio Palomino de Castro y Velasco, ‘Juan de Pareja’, in El Museo Pictórico y Escala Óptica
(1715–1724) (Madrid: M. Aguilar, 1947), pp. 960–1; Juan Antonio Gaya Nuño, ‘Revisiones sexcentis-
tas: Juan de Pareja’, Archivo español de arte, 30 (1957), pp. 271–85 and María del Mar Doval Trueba,
Los ‘Velazqueños’: pintores que trabajaron en el taller de Velázquez (Phd dissertation, Universidad
Complutense, 2000), 223–41.
22 Pareja’s manumission document is written in Latin and it has been translated for the first time
into Spanish for the novel El esclavo de Velázquez by Fernando Villaverde (Madrid: Suma, 2014),
pp. 260–4.
10 Black but Human
seventeenth century’.23 I also discuss how Velázquez’s portrait Juan de Pareja

provides the form by which the freed slave fashions his Europeanized self-portrait
after his master’s death in order to depict the ‘emancipatory slave subject’ in his
chef d’oeuvre (still frequently inaccessible in the storage of the Museo del Prado).
The portrait by Velázquez has been commented on extensively, but Pareja’s
self-portrait as a biblical Ethiopian has never been discussed in the way I do to
disclose the emergence of a Spanish freedman subject at the Hapsburg court.
I explore the ways its iconography embodies extant discourses on diversity and
slavery: Pareja is attached both to the collective Christian African past and to his
present where black communities are united by the adoption and the cult of black
saints, a practice which helped to forge the solidarity and resistance of members
of black and mixed-race Spanish confraternities, where the ‘Black but Human’
topos emerged in humble poems and migrated to a literary form. I consider
Velázquez’s Juan de Pareja and Juan de Pareja’s self-portrait as exceptional
instances in which the subject’s humanity is recognized and resistance is
expressed. I argue that despite the prejudiced views and images of Afro-Hispanic
slaves and ex-slaves in imperial Spain and the social and personal constraints
borne by the slave and ex-slave population, there is a discrete, if limited, visual
manifestation of the emergence of the slave subject and freed slave subject in
Hapsburg Spain. For the first time, my book provides material for a novel inter-
pretation of this overlooked artistic production in the context of the emancipa-
tory discourses/practices by slaves and freed slaves. I conclude by noting that the
Afro-Hispanic proverb ‘Black but Human’ turned into the expression ‘Black but Free’
and into a celebration of blackness in the shift from the Hapsburg to the Bourbon
dynasty. This is the central message of The Song of a Freedman (1700), an extraor-
dinary poem by an anonymous Afro-Hispanic freedman, discovered in 1993, and
fully transcribed for the first time in 2004 by Labrador Herraiz and Di Franco.24
23 Miguel Falomir, ‘Jacopo Bassano and the “Purification of the Temple” ’, Artibus et Historiae,
34 (67) (2013), pp. 275–84.
24 José Labrador Herraiz and Ralph A. Di Franco, ‘Villancicos de negros y otros testimonios al caso
en manuscritos del Siglo de Oro’, pp. 163–5.
1
Black but Human
Black but Human
The first official record of the Black but Human topos in Castilian is provided in
1611 by Sebastián de Covarrubias Orozco in his Tesoro de la lengua castellana:
‘Although we are black we are human, and no one should be despised however
humble or low: on black there is no stain. I do not know if this is black or white,
that is I have had no news of it.’1 This proverb is found in the lexicographer’s entry
Negro (‘Black’): ‘One of the two extremes of colour, opposed to white: from the
Latin niger. Black, a black person from Ethiopia, an unlucky and sad colour, and
so we use this word, saying: Black [mis]fortune, black life, etc.’2
The saying Black but Human was also recorded in Castilian and more import
antly in black speech in 1627 by the Spanish paremiographer (proverb collector)
Gonzalo Correas in his Vocabulario de refranes y frases proverbiales: ‘Though
black, we are people, and we have a soul. This is said against those who disdain to
associate with or admit others.’3
Correas’s noting of the association made by Afro-Hispanics between the
concept of humanity and the possession of a soul is crucial here. He also regis
tered how both languages have slight but significant variations of this complex
Afro-Hispanic proverb: ‘We’re black; we’re men, “n” we got souls (He imitates black
1 Sebastián de Covarrubias Orozco, Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española (1611), edited by

Martín de Riquer (Barcelona: Horta, 1987), p. 826: Proverbio: ‘Aunque negros, gente somos’; no se ha de
despreciar a nadie por humilde y baxo que sea [. . .]. Sobre negro no hay tintura. Ni sé si es blanco ni
negro, id est no tengo noticia dél.” See Jeremy Lawrence, ‘Black Africans in Renaissance Spanish
Literature’, in Black Africans in Renaissance Europe, edited by Thomas F. Earle and Kate J. P. Lowe
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 76.
2 See entry Negro (Black), in Covarrubias Orozco, Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española (1611),
p. 826: Uno de los dos estremos de los colores, opuesto a lo blanco; latine niger. Negro el etiope de color
negra. Es color infausta y triste, y como tal usamos desta palabra, diziendo: Negra ventura, negra vida, etc.
3 Gonzalo Correas, Vocabulario de refranes y frases proverbiales y otras fórmulas comunes de la
Lengua Castellana, en que van todos los impresos antes y otra gran copia que juntó el Maestro Gonzalo
de Correas, Catedrático de Griego y Hebreo en la Universidad de Salamanca (1627), edited by Louis
Combet (Bordeaux: Institut d’Edtudes Ibériques, 1967), p. 33: Aunke somo negro, ombre somo, alma
tenemo. Dícese contra los que se desdeñen de juntarse y admitir a otros and Aunque negros, gente somos,
alma tenemos. Dícese contra los que se desdeñan de juntarse y admitir á otros. Correas’s manuscript was
only published in the twentieth century and its 1967 edition follows two previous publications by the
Real Academia Española de la Lengua (1906 and 1924) based on bad copies of the original text. See
Correas’s sources, in Eva María González González, Las expresiones paremiológicas en el Dictionario de
Alonso Sánchez de la Ballesta: propuesta de sistematización, pp. 69–87, accessed 17 December 2010,
http://ruc.udc.es/dspace/bitstream/2183/5425/1/RL_5-4.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198767978.001.0001
12 Black but Human
people’s speech); We’re black, but we’re folk, we got souls’; Though we are black,
we have a soul; Though black, we do not stain.’4
These variations recorded by Correas also convey the strange idea (at least to
our contemporary sensibilities) that blackness does not have the power to blacken
or stain white people, because black people have a soul and are therefore human:
‘Although we are black, we do not stain others.’5
The misinterpretation of the biblical story of the ‘curse of Canaan’, the son of
Ham and grandson of Noah in the book of Genesis 9:18–27, was responsible for
the circulation of the idea that the black skin of Africans stains white people:
The sons of Noah who came out of the ark were Shem, Ham, and Japheth—Ham
being the father of Canaan [. . .] saw his father’s nakedness and told his two
brothers outside. [. . .]. When Noah woke up from his wine and learned what his
youngest son had done to him, he said: ‘Cursed be Canaan:/ the lowest of slaves/
Shall he be to his brothers.’ And he said, ‘Blessed be the Lord/ the God of Shem:/
Let Canaan be a slave to them. / May God enlarge Japheth, / And let him dwell
in the tents of Shem;/ and let Canaan be a slave to them.’
According to Alonso de Sandoval (1576–1652) in his De instauranda Aethiopum

Salute (Treatise on Slavery), published in Seville in 1627: ‘God made Canaan a
slave and black so that his colour would become a visible and permanent mark of
punishment on all blacks that were descendants of his grandfather.’6 The Spanish
Jesuit also claimed that ‘[Canaan] would be stained, and sullied, and like the
blame of the Blacks (shall we say) because they were descendants of such an
ancestor’. However, Noah’s punishment of his grandson in condemning him and
his descendants to slavery contains no hint of colour or race.7 Yet this idea may
well have been very widespread in Seville, since Tiznado was one of the commonest
names assigned to black people, along with Antón, Juan, or Francisco.
4 Variations of Correas’s claims: Aunque samo negro, no tisnamo; hombre samo, alma tenamo.
(Imita la habla de los Negros); Aunquen, gente samo, alma tenamo; Aunque somo negro, hombre somo,
alma tenemos, and Aunque negro, no tiznamo. See Correas, Vocabulario de refranes y frases proverbi
ales y otras fórmulas comunes de la Lengua Castellana, p. 33.
5 Correas, Vocabulario de refranes y frases proverbiales y otras fórmulas comunes de la Lengua
Castellana, edited by Miguel Mir (1906), pp. 27–8: Aunque somos negros, no entiznamos.
6 Alonso de Sandoval, De Instauranda aethiopum salute. El mundo de la esclavitud negra en América,
1627 (Bogotá: Biblioteca de la Presidencia de Colombia, 1956). Digitized by the Internet Archive in
2014: https://archive.org/stream/deinstuarandaaet00sand/deinstuarandaaet00sand_djvu.txt In Book I,
Chapter II, pp. 26–7: Dice esto fue castigo de Dios [ . . .] porque descendían de padre innoble; que por
haber maldecido Noé a su hijo Cam por la desvergüenza que usó con él, tratándole con tan poca reveren-
cia, perdió la nobleza y aun la libertad, costándole quedar por esclavo él y toda su generación, de los
hermanos que fue [ . . .] la primera servidumbre que se introdujo en el mundo [ . . .]. Y siendo claro por
linaje, nació oscuro. Y de allí nacieron los negros, dice el M. Pedro de Valderrama, y aun pudiéramos
decir también los esclavos, como tiznando Dios a los hijos por serlo de malos padres. Que a los que los
tienen buenos, llamamos de sangre esclarecida, como a los que no, de gente oscura.
7 David Brion Davis, Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 66–7.
Black but Human 13
These beliefs had already been expressed in Spanish literature at the beginning
of the sixteenth century in plays by Gil Vicente (1465–1536?), where black people
are represented for the first time and in the work of Félix Lope de Vega (1562–1635).8
Even the first black European saint, Benedict of Palermo (Benito de Palermo,
1524–89), was called stained black (negro tiznado) in Lope de Vega’s comedy El
santo negro Rosambuco de la ciudad de Palermo (c.1611–12). The topos Black but
Human is conveyed in the scene when St Francis appears in the dreams of the
newly converted saint and expresses his joy even ‘if he is black’:
My joy is already infinite

that I bring with me
a holy brother even if he is black.9
According to Weber de Kurlat, the idea that neither the social condition of
slaves nor the colour of their skin made Africans inferior before God, is articu
lated by the character Antíobo who highlights his colour when he prays to
God: ‘My Lord, I am your black.’10 This is also conveyed in another play by
Lope de Vega, Los comendadores de Córdoba (1596), where the Commander
claims that even if his little slave Jorgillo is black, he is ‘white’ in his eyes and
emphasizes that even though his twenty-four slaves are black, he feels the desire
to hug them all.11
Being Black
The roots of the Afro-Hispanic proverb Black but Human are in the concepts
embedded in the term ‘black’ in Hapsburg Spain. To be a black person was to be a
chattel, a piece of property, to be bought and sold at auctions, donated, mort
gaged, hired, and exchanged.12 It meant to be owned by a slave master and to
suffer punishment at any sign of rebellion against this complete dehumanization
8 See Frida Weber de Kurlat,l ‘El negro en el teatro de Lope’, Nueva Revista de Filología Hispana,
19 (2) (1970), pp. 345–9, 351 and Glenn Swiadon Martínez, ‘Fiesta y parodia en los villancicos de
negro del siglo XVII’, Anuario de Letras: Lingüística y Filología, 42–3 (2004–2005), p. 288, who also
mentions the work by Diego Sánchez de Badajoz and Lope de Rueda.
9 Lope’s lines in Spanish, Que ya infinito me alegro/de que he de llevar conmigo/un fraile santo
aunque negro are cited in Weber de Kurlat, ‘El negro en el teatro de Lope’, pp. 345–9. Baltasar Fra-
Molinero, La imagen de los negros en el teatro del Siglo de Oro (Madrid: Siglo Veintiuno de España
Editores, 1995), p. 83.
10 Weber de Kurlat, ‘El negro en el teatro de Lope’, p. 349: Señor, vuestro negro soy.
11 Weber de Kurlat, ‘El negro en el teatro de Lope’, p. 339.
12 José Luis Cortés López, La esclavitud negra en la España peninsular del siglo XVI (Salamanca:
Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca, 1989) and by the same author, José Luis Cortés López, Esclavo
y Colono (Introducción y sociología de los negroafricanos en la América Española del siglo XVI)
(Salamanca: Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca, 2004).
14 Black but Human
in a society where the word black and the physical appearance of blackness were
signifiers of the specific social condition of slavery.13 Notarial archives in Seville
recorded the existence of 5,271 slaves, almost 4,000 of whom were listed as ‘blacks’
or ‘mulattos’, between 1501 and 1525.14
However, slavery did not necessarily connote blackness or darkness. The slave
population was very diverse in terms of origins and ethnicity.15 White slaves were
registered and described in documents, as in the case of the 1633 sale of ‘Alonso
García Hidalgo’ by his owner Francisco Mejía Pachón, a cleric of la Puebla de
Sancho Pérez (Extremadura), where this white slave was described as having
‘white skin, a good body, black bearded, long-faced and hook-nosed [. . .] speaks a
somewhat closed Arabic, of Turkish nationality [ . . .] his name is Juan Bautista’.16
Jewish slaves were also documented in Valladolid in 1558, such as those brought
from Northern Africa,17 and the case of ‘Isaac Cansino’, in the document of his
emancipation in Málaga by Captain Francisco Negrete who was the intermediary
of the English consul in Cádiz and received orders to free the slave from English
merchants resident in the Spanish port, though the date of his manumission is
not mentioned.18 Seville was also the main slave market for ‘Indian’ slaves and 80
per cent of the Native Americans who had arrived in this city by 1502, especially
from Hispaniola (the Dominican Republic and Haiti), were slaves. When their
presence in the kingdoms of Castile and Aragon was legally proscribed in the
1530s, Native Americans were sold in Lisbon.19 Thus, there were white Muslim
and Christian slaves in Iberia, as well as slaves from Turkey and the Canary Islands,
Asians, Jews, and Native Americans who came from the New World plantations
with black and casta (mulatos, mestizos) people.
13 Aurelia Martín Casares, ‘Productivas y silenciadas: el mundo laboral de las esclavas en España’,
in Mujeres esclavas y abolicionistas en la España de los siglos XVI–XIX, edited by Aurelia Martín
Casares and Rocío Periáñez Gómez (Madrid and Frankfurt: Iberoamericana-Vervuert, 2014), pp. 57–94,
Aurelia Martín Casares ‘Free and freed black Africans in Granada in the time of the Spanish Renaissance’,
in Black Africans in Renaissance Europe, pp. 247–52, and Raúl González Arévalo, La esclavitud en
Málaga a fines de la Edad Media (Jaén: Universidad de Jaén, 2006).
14 Martín Casares, ‘Free and freed black Africans in Granada in the time of Spanish Renaissance’, in
Black Africans in Renaissance Europe, p. 252 and William D. Philips, Jr, Slavery in Medieval and Early
Modern Iberia (Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania 2014), pp. 144–5.
15 See Martín Casares, ‘Productivas y silenciadas: el mundo laboral de las esclavas en España’, in
Mujeres esclavas y abolicionistas, pp. 57–94, González Arévalo, La esclavitud en Málaga a fines de la
Edad Media and Joaquín Álvaro Rubio, La esclavitud en Barcarrota y Salvaleón en el período moderno
(Siglos XVI–XVIII) (Badajoz: Diputación de Badajoz, 2005).
16 Rocío Periáñez Gómez Cáceres, La esclavitud en Extremadura (Siglos XVI–XVIII) PhD disserta
tion (Universidad de Extremadura, 2008), p. 330: de color blanco, buen cuerpo, barbinegro, cariagu-
ileño [ . . .], y habla algo cerrado arábigo, de nación turco [ . . .] ha por nombre Juan Bautista.
17 See Antonio Domínguez Ortiz, ‘La esclavitud en Castilla durante la Edad Moderna’, in Estudios
de historia social de España, edited by Carmelo Viñas y Mey et al., 2 (Madrid: Consejo Superior de
Investigaciones Científicas, 1952), p. 376.
18 María Carmen Gómez García and Martín Vergara, La esclavitud en Málaga entre los siglos XVII y
XVIII (Málaga: Diputación Provincial de Málaga, 1993), p. 50.
19 See Esteban Mira Caballos, Indios y mestizos americanos en la España del siglo XVI (Madrid:
Vervuert-Iberoamericana, 2000), pp. 81, 135.
Black but Human 15
The ideological association of the terms ‘black’ and ‘slave’ can be seen in
documents where the status of slaves was specified: for example, the 1566 claim
from a widow in Granada, who bequeathed her estate to two siblings of African
origins testifies: ‘The colour of their faces gives rise to the suspicion that they are
slaves, but I say they have never been anything but free people.’20 When the
contemporary binaries of ‘white’ and ‘free’ and ‘black’ and ‘slave’ were disrupted,
clarification became necessary. This can be seen in the record of the execution by
hanging of a white slave who had killed her owner with the help of a black freed
woman, in Seville, on 28 July 1610. In his account of his experience as chaplain of
the royal prison in the city (1544–1632), the Jesuit Pedro de León makes it clear
that Inés was ‘a slave even if she was white’, while her accomplice Beatriz was ‘free
even if she was black’.21
This notion of blackness and its associations were taken as a natural assump
tion and made the existence and life of freedmen and freedwomen extremely
difficult because they ‘were fatally stigmatized by their past’. To be freed from
slavery was not equivalent to being ‘a free born person in early modern Spain’,
not only because of skin colour, but also because the previous condition of manu
mitted slaves was always recorded in documents.22 Manumission was not very
common in Spain and freedom from slavery could only be obtained by docu
ments of emancipation (cartas de ahorrías) or by the expressed wish of the slave’s
owner in the latter’s will.23
By the turn of the eighteenth-century, the term ‘black’ had already generated a
range of arbitrary colour sub-classifications regardless of the person’s origins, that
is whether they came from sub-Saharan Africa, were Berbers, Iberian Muslims,
Native Americans, or, indeed, were Jewish. So we have black (negro); dark (moreno);
somewhat dark (moreno claro); quince (membrillo); cooked quince (membrillo
cocho); light cooked quince (membrillo cocho claro); dark cooked quince (mem-
brillo cocho oscuro); light wheat (trigueño claro); dark wheat (trigueño oscuro); wheat
(trigueño); blond (rubio); pink or rosy (rosa); with a black skin or with black hair
(pelinegro); and good colour (buen color).24 Though the concept of black may be
imprecise and fluid, the ideological mutual implication of the terms ‘black’ and
Black Africans in Renaissance Europe, p. 252 and Phillips, Jr, Slavery in Medieval and Early Modern
Iberia, pp. 144–5.
(1578–1616), edited by Pedro Herrera Puga (Granada: Facultad de Teología, 1981), items 282, 283,
pp. 548–9: Inés, esclava aunque blanca y Beatriz negra, aunque libre, ahorcadas, a 28 de julio, porque
ésta dio a la esclavilla unos polvos para que diese a su ama. Y a lo que ambas dijeron en el tormento, eran
para que su ama tuviese paz con ella; aunque, por temor del tormento, dijo la Beatriz, que había sido
para que muriese con ellos.
Black Africans in Renaissance Europe, p. 252.
23 Cortés López, La esclavitud negra en la España peninsular del siglo XVI, pp. 140–52.
24 Gómez García and Vergara, La esclavitud en Málaga entre los siglos XVII y XVIII, p. 29.
16 Black but Human
‘slave’ was deeply embedded in the minds of a slave-owning society, which is

evident in the following statement made in 1604 by Friar Prudencio de Sandoval,
biographer of Charles V, King of Spain and Holy Roman Emperor: ‘Who can
deny that in the descendants of Jews there persists and endures the evil inclin
ation of their ancient ingratitude and lack of understanding, just as in the Negroes
[there persists] the inseparability of their blackness.’25
The recently discovered twenty-nine black carols (composiciones ‘de negros’),
in 2004, in the Fernán Núñez Collection at the Bancroft Library, University of
California, Berkeley, were originally written in hablar negresco26 during the early
sixteenth century, but they were copied out in the following century.27 These
humble poems reveal that urban Africans and Afro-Hispanic slaves and ex-slaves
composed them to be sung with their musical instruments at their main religious
festivities at Corpus Christi and Christmas.28 Their instruments are also recorded
in their own poems, as in the Diálogos guineos: ‘guitar, bagpipes, tambourine, lit
tle bells, flute, drum, rebec, and, rattle’ (gitariya, gaytiya, panderetiyo, cascabeliyo,
flautiya, tamborilico, rabeliyo, and sonaja) amongst others.29 They sang their
work songs (canciones de trabajo de los esclavos) at their owners’ homes, in public
spaces, in processions, festivities and in their black and mixed-race confratern
ities (to be explored in the following chapter).30 According to José Labrador
Herraiz and Ralph A. Di Franco, their written poems are about labourers, shep
herds, artisans, traders, parties, music, dance, and plays, and include children’s
rhymes and popular proverbs. Other recurrent topics were redemption, religious
participation and the proverb Black but Human as a plea to be considered human,
in spite of the prevalent association of blackness and slavery and the subsequent
enforced commodification of African subjects and their descendants.31 In these
poems, the deep-rooted belief in Hapsburg Spain was also internalized, to some
degree, in the enslaved person’s mind, as one of the newly discovered Christmas
25 My emphasis. This quotation by Fray Prudencio de Sandoval, Historia de la vida y hechos del
emperador Carlos V, Biblioteca de autores españoles, 82 (Madrid, 1956), p. 319 is cited by Davis,
Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World, p. 72.
26 José Labrador Herraiz and Ralph A. Di Franco, ‘Villancicos de negros y otros testimonios al caso
en manuscritos del Siglo de Oro’, in De la canción de amor medieval a las soleares. Profesor Manuel
Alvar in memoriam (Actas del Congreso Internacional Lyra Mínima Oral III, Sevilla, 26–8 de noviem
bre de 2004), edited by Pedro Manuel Piñero Ramírez (Seville: Fundación Machado y Universidad,
2004), p. 169.
27 Herraiz and Di Franco, ‘Villancicos de negros y otros testimonios al caso en manuscritos del
Siglo de Oro’, pp. 163, 174.
Siglo de Oro’, p. 174.
29 See poems 2 and 18, in Herraiz and Di Franco, ‘Villancicos de negros y otros testimonios al caso
en manuscritos del Siglo de Oro’, pp. 177, 183.
Siglo de Oro’, pp. 176–87. See also Swiadon Martínez, ‘Fiesta y parodia en los villancicos de negro del
siglo XVII’, pp. 288–9.
Black but Human 17
songs, written, perhaps collectively, at the beginning of the seventeenth century

by anonymous Afro-Hispanic poets, from the second, third and fourth gener
ations testifies:
A dark, graceful girl

Today gave birth to a slave
Question: Is he beautiful?
Answer: he cannot cease to be so
and in the end is like a rose.32
The identification that the Afro-Hispanic poets felt with Christ, ‘a slave’, conveys
the extent to which the contemporaneous association between the concept of
blackness and the social condition of slavery was embedded in the social imagin
ary in Spain.
Black Carols
The Afro-Hispanic Black but Human topos is deployed in the black poems, songs
or carols by Afro-Hispanic slaves and ex slaves (guineos) born in Spain that were
discovered in 2004 after previous finds in the National Library of Madrid, the
British Library in London, and the University of Cambridge Library.33 This dis
covery certainly reveals that Afro-Hispanic people in the Spanish empire were
producers of culture involved in literary production much earlier than had been
thought. These poems are written in the literary genre known as ‘black carols’
(Villancicos de negros). The origin of the word villancico (carol) is villano, rústico,
aldeano—that is a labourer who works the land, as opposed to a hidalgo (noble,
old lineage); villancicos are carols or songs that villanos used to sing.34
32 This poem, Vna morena graciosa/oy parió vn esclauo./Pregunta: ¿Es vello?/Responde: No puede
dejar de sello,/que es al fin como una rrosa, is one of the twenty-one poems from the Fernán Núñez
Collection at the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, BUC, 143 vol. 153, 201, pub
lished for the first time by José Labrador Herraiz and Ralph A. Di Franco, ‘Villancicos de negros y
otros testimonios al caso en manuscritos del Siglo de Oro’, p. 173.
33 The discovery of Afro-Hispanic manuscripts by Glenn Swiadon Martínez opened up a renewed
interest in Afro-Hispanic poetry, see Glenn Swiadon Martínez, Los Villancicos de negro en el siglo XVIII
(PhD dissertation, Universidad Autónoma de México, 2000), and Swiadon Martínez, ‘Fiesta y parodia
en los villancicos de negro del siglo XVII’, p. 287. See Catálogo de villancicos de la Biblioteca Nacional.
Siglo XVII (Madrid: Ministerio de Cultura, 1992); Álvaro Torrente and Miguel Alonso Martín, Pliegos
de villancicos en la British Library (Londres) y la University Library (Cambridge), I (Kassel: Edition
Reichenberger, 2000), and, Antonio Rodríguez-Moniño, Nuevo diccionario bibliográfico de pliegos
sueltos (Siglo XVI), edited by Arthur L.-F. Askins and Víctor Infantes (Madrid: Castalia, 1997).
34 See entry Villa in Covarrubias Orozco, Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española (1611), pp. 1008–9:
la labrança de la tierra del señor [. . .] los que allí viven se llaman propiamente villanos [. . .] son de con-
dición muy rústicos; pp. 590–1: Fidalgo: equivale a noble, castizo y de antigüedad de linaje, and p. 1009:
Villanescas: las canciones que suelen cantar los villanos quando están en solaz [. . .] Esse mismo origen
tienen los villancicos tan celebrados en las fiestas de Navidad y Corpus Christi.
18 Black but Human
According to Labrador Herraiz and Di Franco, white musicians and poets

adopted black music and dances and the poetic improvisation from black work
songs and poems, as, for example, Cervantes did in his La novela del celoso
extremeño.35 Others, like Luis de Góngora y Argote, also adopted the spontaneity,
simplicity, and lack of artifice in their hablar negresco, as conveyed, for example,
in the black poem Para con guitarra, that circulated from the beginning of the
seventeenth century:
Zambumbá
a dark man from the Congo
Zambumbá
what a handsome fellow I become
Zambumbá
tomorrow is the fiesta of sire San Roque
no one knows what he drinks
but he gets into
a dance from Peru
Zambumbú/a dark man from Congo
Zambumbú
what a handsome fellow I become
Zambumbú.36
Góngora appropriated part of this poem in his Letrilla for Corpus Christi, entitled
En la fiesta del Santísimo Sacramento (1609), although he adopted a female pro
tagonist and adapted the black poem into a different format by creating a dialogue
between two black slaves, Juana and Clara:
Juana: Tomorrow is Corpus Christi.

Dear Clara;
Let’s make up our faces
And wash our eyes.
Clara: Oh, Jesus, how sad I am!
Juana: What’s wrong dusky lady?
Clara: I am a black sinner,
And the Sacrament is white.
Juana: The soul is white as a tooth,
Siglo de Oro’, pp. 171–2.
Siglo de Oro’, pp. 169–70: Zambumbá/morinico de Congo./Zambumbá,/qué galano me pongo./
Zambumbá./Mañana sa fesa/de sior san Roque,/no sabé que traga/sino que le troque/dansa de Perú./
Zambumbú,/morinico de Congo./Zambumbú,/qué galano me pongo./Zambumbú.
Black but Human 19
Dear Clara.
Let’s put on our fine dresses,
And dance joyfully;
For though I am black,
You are beautiful.
Let’s go to the festival,
Zambanbu, dark-skinned one of the Congo,
Zambanbu.
Zambanbu, how I softly move,
Zambanbu,
Let’s go the festival,
Let’s see the procession,
For though you are black, you are human.37
In short, the recent discovery of Afro-Hispanic poems reveals that there were two
distinctive groups of poets writing black carols: guineos (Afro-Hispanic slaves and
ex-slaves and second, third and fourth generation freedmen born in Spain) and
villanciqueros (white cultivated poets). This distinction brings to our attention the
complex processes of appropriation and adaptation of each other’s literary form.
White writers from Spain and New Spain adapted work songs from the oral trad
ition that had been created by people from different areas of Africa. Afro-Hispanic
work songs by enslaved and liberated Afro-Hispanic people, on the other hand,
derived from the carols that were created by the former group, although African
poets deviate from the literary canon.38 Carols are poems that combine devotion
and entertainment and are mainly performed to celebrate religious festivities,
such as the Epiphany, the Purification of Our Lady, Corpus Christi, or an indi
vidual saint’s day. In fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Spain, the most popular
carols containing descriptions of the moral and physical features of ethnic groups,
such as the Portuguese, the French, or the Gypsies, were the ‘black carols’ with
Afro-Hispanic slaves as the main protagonists. These ‘black songs’ published by
37 Góngora’s text is cited in English in Victor I. Stoichita, ‘The Image of the Black in Spanish Art’, in
The Image of the Black in Western Art: From the ‘Age of Discovery’ to the Age of Abolition: Artists of the
Renaissance and Baroque, edited by David Bindman and Henry Louis Gates, Jr, 3, part 1 (Cambridge,
Mass., London: Harvard University Press, 2010), pp. 201–2. The Spanish text reads: Juana: Mañana
sa Corpus Christa,/mana Crara;/alcoholemo la cara/e lavémono la vista./[. . .] Clara: Samo negra
pecandora,/e branca la Sacramenta./Juana:La alma sa como la denta,/Crara mana/. Pongamo fustana, e
bailemo alegra,/que aunque samo negra, sa hermosa tú.[. . .] Vamo a la sagraria, prima,/veremo la pro-
cesiona,/que aunque negra, sa persona. Accessed 18 October 2016: https://www.upf.edu/todogongora/
poesia/letrillas/206/, 42–3 (2004–2005), p. 300. See Herraiz and Di Franco, ‘Villancicos de negros y
otros testimonios al caso en manuscritos del Siglo de Oro’, p. 170; Glenn Swiadon Martínez, ‘Los vil
lancicos de negro y el teatro breve. Un primer acercamiento’, Lyra Mínima (2006), p. 162, and Swiadon
Martínez, ‘Fiesta y parodia en los villancicos de negro del siglo XVII’, p. 300.
20 Black but Human
white writers became fashionable and popular because of the entertainment they
offered with their imitation of ‘black speech’, and the drumming and dances per
formed by Afro-Hispanic slaves and ex-slaves in religious and civic processions.39
Black speech and its variations was first appropriated by Castilian literature at the
end of the fifteenth century in the Coplas a los negros y negras by Rodrigo de
Reinosa (c.1520), which followed the examples of the Portuguese writers Enrique
de Mota and Fernão da Silveira.40 Black speech, spoken by Africans and their
descendants, included linguistic elements of Afro-Portuguese, Andalucian, and
a variety of Africanisms. It emerged and developed in the period between 1446
and 1580,41 as Africans arrived in the Iberian Peninsula and the New World, and
direct contacts were established between the Spanish kingdoms and Africa, as a
consequence of the slave trade between the Old and New Worlds.42 However,
the ‘real’ Africans and their descendants wrote in habla negresca, a mixture of
Castilian and a variety of African languages, sometimes keeping them and the
Castilian language separate in distinctive paragraphs and without mixing them.
The main difference between the two types of ‘black carols’ is that, obviously,
Africans did not mock their own way of speaking, their habla negresca, while
their white imitators did.43
Their work songs include new characters: poor black people named ‘Francisquillo,
Antón, Domingo’ and ‘Jorge’ replaced the shepherds from traditional carols and,
in most of their poems, all the biblical figures—Jesus, the Virgin, the Apostles,
and the saints—are conceived of as black: the baby Jesus, for example, would be
Ethiopian. On the other hand, black religious characters had already been
adopted and adapted by the cultivated elite in Spain and New Spain in their black
carols,44 as in the seventeenth-century Christmas poem by ‘one of the best-known
colonial Spanish composers, Juan Gutiérrez de Padilla from Málaga’,45 the poem
39 Swiadon Martínez, ‘Fiesta y parodia en los villancicos de negro del siglo XVII’, pp. 285–7.
40 Fra-Molinero, La imagen de los negros en el teatro del Siglo de Oro, p. 25; Swiadon Martínez,
‘Fiesta y parodia en los villancicos de negro del siglo XVII’, p. 288, and John M. Lipski, ‘Golden-Age
“Black Spanish”: Existence and Coexistence’, Afro-Hispanic Review, 5 (1.3) (1986), pp. 7–12.
41 See John Beusterien, ‘Talking Black in Spanish: an Unfinished Black Spanish Glossary’, in BCom,
51(1&2) (1999), pp. 83–104. Germán de Granda, ‘Posibles vías directas de introducción de africanis
mos en “el habla de negro” literaria castellana’, Thesaurus, 24 (3) (1969), pp. 459–69.
42 Jesús María García Añoveros and José Andrés-Gallego, La Iglesia y la esclavitud de los negros
(Pamplona: Eunsa, 2002), pp. 18–19.
Siglo de Oro’ p. 176. For a detailed analysis on this specific function of black carols written by white
writers, see Glenn Swiadon Martínez, ‘Los personajes del villancico de negro en su entorno social
(Siglo XVII)’, in Actas del XV Congreso de la Asociación Internacional de Hispanistas ‘Las dos orillas ’,
Monterrey, México del 19 al 24 de julio de 2004, edited by Beatriz Mariscal, María Teresa Miaja de
la Peña, I (8) 2007, pp. 595–604, accessed 24 July 2017, cvc.cervantes.es/literatura/aih/pdf/15/
aih_15_1_054.pdf.
45 Poems by Juan Gutiérrez de Padilla (c. Málaga, 1590–Puebla, 1664), such as: Yo sabe, siola,
Mariya/Cuciná mejó qui el mundo [. . .] /Yo sabe, siolo Niño/Calgá mucho con palanza (1690), one of
his Christmas poems A la portá de Belene/venimo neglo contenta/a hacé una plosisione/delante la
Black but Human 21
for the Cathedral of Cádiz by the Valencian José Pérez de Montoro,46 and the
poem written between 1606 and 1616 by the Mexican Gaspar Fernándes for the
Cathedral of Puebla.47
Black carols by white writers mainly describe the slaves’ occupations, and in
this context they also recorded their activities as writers and composers of black
carols.48 There is, however, a fundamental difference between the two variants of
this literary form: new elements emerged from the black poems written by ‘real’
Afro-Hispanic people almost certainly as a collective activity within their own
institutions. Their black carols conveyed aspects of their social condition as slaves
and ex-slaves, and a variety of different feelings and aspirations. Central to the
majority of their poems and work songs was the Black but Human proverb that
encoded their deep desire to be perceived as human beings by the dominant cul
ture, despite being forced into slavery and regardless of the belief that blackness
stains (tiznar) white people in imperial Spain.49 This Afro-Hispanic saying chal
lenged these beliefs and claimed an equality by defining themselves not just as
‘blacks’ as a social category, but as ‘people who are black, and not just as persons
(personas) or men (hombres) but people (gente)—people of class, quality, distinc
tion, refinement, even’.50
It is not a surprise, therefore, that it became a recurrent topos in their literary
production, such as in the following poems:
Let’s go to Bethlehem, Jorge

Fernando, let’s go
For although we are black
We are black and human.51
nacimenta (1612), and African work songs are cited by Swiadon Martínez, ‘Fiesta y parodia en los
villancicos de negro del siglo XVII’, pp. 288–9, 295, 297. Juan Gutiérrez de Padilla composed carols for
the Cathedrals of Jerez and Cádiz (1617) before he moved to Puebla (Mexico) (1622) to become one of
the most important composers of this literary form in New Spain. See Andrew A. Cashner, ‘Playing
Cards at the Eucharistic Table: Music, Theology, and Society in a Corpus Christi Villancico from
Colonial Mexico, 1628’, Journal of Early Modern History, 18 (2014), pp. 383–49.
46 José Pérez de Montoro (Játiva, Valencia, 1627–Cádiz, 21 December 1694) had contacts with
Juana Inés de la Cruz and he wrote for the elite but also received commissions from civic and religious
congregations. Swiadon Martínez, ‘Fiesta y parodia en los villancicos de negro del siglo XVII’, p. 297.
47 The lines by Gaspar Fernándes (c.1570–1629) from his Cancionero musical de Puebla-Oaxaca,
217v–218: Guiguiriguí, que negriño es/Cando niño Dios naçe/La treya a la neglo envía, are cited by
Swiadon Martínez, ‘Fiesta y parodia en los villancicos de negro del siglo XVII’, p. 298 and Cashner,
‘Playing Cards at the Eucharistic Table’, pp. 391–2, 404.
50 Email correspondence from Andrew Cashner, from the Eastman School of Music, University of
Rochester, USA, 9 August 2017.
51 See Herraiz and Di Franco, ‘Villancicos de negros y otros testimonios al caso en manuscritos del
Siglo de Oro’, p. 178: Poem 4: Negros (Vamo a Velén, Chorche./Foronando, vamo,/que aunque samo
negro,/negra gente samo).
22 Black but Human
Afro-Hispanics adopted this proverb ‘Black but Human’ (que aunque negros,
gente somo),52 thus expressing their equality, dignity and worth, even in a poem
sent to Rome to none other than Pope Innocent X (r.1644–55), who just three
years earlier had sat for the magnificent portrait by Diego Velázquez. In 1650,
one year before his return to Madrid, the Spanish court painter also painted the
extraordinary portrait of his own slave, Juan de Pareja, before signing his docu
ment of manumission, as we will see in chapter 6.
Their poem was written for the Sunday 21 July 1653 celebrations of the feast
day of Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception in Seville to defend the Virgin’s
‘purity’ (limpieza). There is documentary evidence that the people of Seville were
astonished by the magnificence of Afro-Hispanic celebration of the Virgin and
the fervour they showed towards the Immaculate Conception, a cult that had
been promoted by the archbishop of Seville, Pedro de Castro from 1613,53 one
year before the publication of his treatise Instrucción para remediar y asegurar,
quanto con la divina gracia fuere posible, que ninguno de los Negros que vienen de
Guinea, Angola, y otras Provincias de aquella costa de África, carezca del sagrado
Baptismo (Instructions for Remedying and Ensuring that None of the Blacks Is
Lacking in Sacred Baptism), as we will see in the following chapter.
In their poem dedicated to Innocent X, Afro-Hispanic people claimed that
they had the same right as all the people of Seville to defend the new dogma and
to be heard by the Pope in Rome:
Although snub nosed

our vow sounds out so much [or our party/cause / dreams so big]
that it be written to Rome [or that in Rome songs might
be written]
so that the Holy Father knows
that though we are black we are human.54
According to Andrew Cashner, the Afro-Hispanic concept of ‘people’ implied

people of ‘quality’ and another factor that marks their equality is the fact that they
write in perfect Castilian, with the ‘use of the subjunctive’.55 In these verses to the
Pope, Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception was portrayed as a black woman.56
53 Isidoro Moreno, La antigua hermandad de los negros de Sevilla: Etnicidad, poder y sociedad en
600 años de Historia (Seville: Universidad de Sevilla, 1997), pp. 92–5.
Siglo de Oro’, pp. 165–6: Aunque de narices romos,/suene nuestro voto tanto,/que a Roma se escriban
tonos/porque sepa el Padre santo/que aunque negros, gente somo (21 July 1653).
55 Email correspondence from Andrew Cashner, 9 August 2017.
56 For a discussion of the medieval emergence of Black Madonnas in Spain, see Jeanette Favrot
Peterson, Visualizing Guadalupe: From Black Madonna to Queen of the Americas (Austin: University
of Texas Press, 2014), pp. 17–40.
Black but Human 23
In this example it is evident, as Swiadon Martínez shows, that the Afro-Hispanic

topos Black but Human imitates the motif that was used to describe the Queen of
Sheba (Ethiopia) in the Old Testament Canticles, The Song of Songs 1:4: I am black
but beautiful (Nigra sum sed Formosa).57
Dark you are of mouth

and being so Virgin
You touch us dark people.58
This biblical reference opens the possibility of reading this poem as ‘Dear Virgin,
you said yourself that you are (a) black (woman)’.59 I agree with these conclusions
that ‘conceptually, the idea [. . .] goes beyond the mere fact of her skin color’
and that the writers imagine the Virgin ‘as a real black woman, lips and all’, who
for the Afro-Hispanic people, ‘is one of their own, who can reach out and touch
and kiss them’. The poem’s link, the Song of Songs, in fact, was provided by several
Afro-Hispanic poems written in black confraternities and in poems by villacin-
queros, such as the song (1579) by the white writer Pedro de Padilla, where the
Virgin is black:
the girl-child Maria,

she of the colour black
but so beautiful
extremely so.60
The Black but Human topos has also been appropriated by white literary figures
in Spain and the New World. In New Spain, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz adopted
this proverb in her 1676 Carol VIII to Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception
for the Cathedral of Mexico City and in her 1677 Villancico to St Peter Nolasco
for the Cathedral of Puebla.61 In these songs, the poet employed black speech for
Africans and their descendants, Castilian and Latin for the white population,
57 Swiadon Martínez, ‘Los villancicos de negro y el teatro breve. Un primer acercamiento’, p. 162.
58 Herraiz and Di Franco, ‘Villancicos de negros y otros testimonios al caso en manuscritos
del Siglo de Oro’, pp. 165–6: Morena soys en su boca/y siéndolo, Virgen, vos/a los morenos nos toca
(21 July 1653 in MN3907, f. 326).
Siglo de Oro’, p. 165: la niña María, la del color negro,/pero tan hermosa/que lo fue en extremo, in the
MS 1579, 191v.
61 Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, ‘Villancicos que se cantaron en la S. I. Metropolitana de Méjico en los
maitines de la Purísima Concepción de Nuestra Señora, año de 1676, en que se imprimieron’, in Obras
completas de Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, edited by Alfonso Méndez Plancarte, 2 (Mexico City: Fondo de
Cultura Económica, 1952), p. 27. The verse Aunque neglo, gente somo is embedded in the carol dedi
cated to the founder of the Mercedarian Order, Villancicos que se cantaron en los Maitines del
Gloriosísimo Padre San Pedro Nolasco, fundador de la Sagrada Familia de Redentores de la Orden de
Nuestra Señora de la Merced, día 31 de enero de 1677 años, en que se imprimieron’ (1677) is cited in
24 Black but Human
Náhuatl for the Native Americans characters, and a mixture of Castilian and Náhuatl
for mestizo people.62 Black carols were sung not only in the cathedrals of Spain
but also in the most important royal convents, such as the Descalzas Reales in
Madrid, founded by Juana of Austria, sister of the King of Spain, Philip II, and
in the royal chapels at the Hapsburg court. They were also very popular in the
cathedrals, viceregal palaces, and churches of the New World from New Spain
to La Plata, in present-day cities such as, Bogotá, Cuzco, Caracas, and Buenos
Aires.63 This shows the success of the Tridentine promotion of ‘black sainthood’,
as we will see in chapter 2.
Being Human
The central idea of the Black but Human saying is the Afro-Hispanic belief and
defence of their humanity against the dominant Hispanic beliefs. This proverb
signifies the Afro-Hispanic belief that in spite of their being considered a thing, a
commodity, and forced to become a ‘slave’ or a ‘black’, they deserve to be thought of
and treated as equals, because having a soul is the evidence of their humanity. They
claim in their poem, En guineo, el Sacramento, that they are human, they are gente
(people) and belong to a nasión (nation), a term which refers to their confratern
ities where they are organized independently, as we will see in the next chapter.
They highlight that even if they are considered ‘things’ that are sold and bought,
they are not commodities, as we can see with the association of both concepts:
Although we are a nation

low people and black
since we eat the little lamb
we are great [folk] of the fleece.64
In this poem, where it can be read as:
Obras completas de Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, edited by Alfonso Méndez Plancarte, 2 (Mexico City:
Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1952), pp. 2, 40.
62 For Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’s Carols see, Jorge Sila Castillo, ‘La imagen del negro en los
Villancicos de Sor Juana’, in Jornadas de homenaje a Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán (Veracruz: Instituto
Veracruzano de Cultura, 1988), pp. 95–118, Martha Lilia Tenorio, Los villancicos de Sor Juana (Mexico
City: El Colegio de Mexico, 1999), and Glenn Swiadon Martínez, ‘África en los Villancicos de negro:
seis ejemplos del siglo XVII’, in La otra Nueva España. La palabra marginada en la Colonia, edited
by Mariana Masera (Barcelona: Azul Editorial/Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2002),
pp. 40–52.
63 Samuel Caro, ‘La música virreinal en el Nuevo Mundo’, Revista Musical Chilena, 24 (110) (1970),
pp. 7–31, accessed 18 October 2016, http://www.revistas.uchile.cl/index.php/RMCH/article/viewFile/
11242/11575.
64 See Poem 6, En guineo, el Sacramento: Aunque somo de nasión/gente baxa lo negriyo,/pues
comemo el corderiyo/somo grande del tusón, f. 13, in Herraiz and Di Franco, ‘Villancicos de negros y
otros testimonios al caso en manuscritos del Siglo de Oro’, pp. 178–9.
Black but Human 25
Although we are from the nation

of blackness, lowly folk
or:
Although we are by nation

mere lowly black folk,
the expression ‘eat the little lamb’ or ‘we eat lamb too in our country’ refers to their
own culture. It seems to support Cashner’s suggestion that this is ‘a Eucharistic
reference’ that signifies ‘we take communion, we are Christians too’. This is cer
tainly convincing in post-Tridentine Hapsburg Spain.
In his entry for Gentes (People), Covarrubias repeats the Afro-Hispanic prov
erb Black but Human. A proverb has it ‘Although we are black we are human’ as
an example of the term ‘people’ (gentes) that he defines as ‘what we call the nations
scattered across the Globe’.
The Afro-Hispanic’s claim that ‘they are people of the fleece’, could be a refer
ence to the ‘insignia of the Hapsburg Order of the Golden Fleece’.65 This could be
translated as a renewal of the claim that ‘they are people of quality, in fact, they
are even nobility, because they eat the same lamb, they are subjects of the same
king and communicants in the same church’. I tend to agree with Cashner’s temp
tation to translate this as: ‘We are grandees of the Fleece.’
To be black was to be subjected: to be an enslaved person and a valuable com
modity. But to be black in the Spanish Empire also signified being a Christian or
more specifically a ‘new Christian’. This paradoxical position of Afro-Hispanic
slaves and ex-slaves is at the core of the Black but Human topos.66 The latter, as we
have seen, is a powerful expression of the deep-rooted Afro-Hispanic belief in
their own humanity, associated with the humanity of Christ, the purity of the soul
and the notion that Africans’ souls are white. The Black but Human topos encap
sulates the belief that it is the soul that defines Afro-Hispanic slaves and ex-slaves
as humans, as opposed to slavery as a dehumanizing process; they write that
when Christ who is ‘white’ was born, he came to free Afro-Hispanic people:
Tonight we blacks
are freed
the white child who is born
will atone for everything.67
65 Cashner, ‘Playing Cards at the Eucharistic Table’ p. 406.

66 For this established topos, see Fra-Molinero, La imagen de los negros en el teatro del Siglo de Oro.
67 See the poem Esta noche lo neglo/quedamos horro,/que lo branco que nase/paga por todo, in
Herraiz and Di Franco, ‘Villancicos de negros y otros testimonios al caso en manuscritos del Siglo de
Oro’, p. 173.
26 Black but Human
Or when in their poem Otro guineo, they sing that despite the baby Jesus being
white, he will not be scared away by Afro-Hispanics; the latter see him as a ‘slave’,
as one of them:
I know about the little one

that though he is white
he will not flee
from seeing the black man
For my part
we see him as a slave.68
I agree with Cashner that Afro-Hispanic slaves know ‘about the boy’ because they
saw ‘many babies like him before, born in the midst of animal filth, in a room that
doesn’t belong to him, destined to live a life of suffering for no fault of his own’.69
In the same poem, Correas significantly echoes the identification that Afro-
Hispanics had with the humanity of Christ to legitimize their worth and full
humanity, when they state that Jesus is ‘a man like us’:
Don’t be stupid, then

for if the baby Jesus
is a man like us
and a very good man
in a nonce
we will speak to him, let us go.70
The possession of a soul allowed Africans to feel equal to other Christians and to
demand the recognition of their equality, at least within the spiritual realm, in
theoretical and theological terms, as they convey in their own compositions:
Gasica, I’m happy in all of this

that our cousin María
has given birth to joy
joy of the white and of the black.71
68 See the poem Yo sé del chiquito,/que avnque branco sa,/no se pantará/de ver lo negrico./Que por
mi derito/esclavo lo vemo, fol. 228, in Herraiz and Di Franco, ‘Villancicos de negros y otros testimo
nios al caso en manuscritos del Siglo de Oro’, p. 177. Email correspondence from Andrew Cashner,
9 August 2017.
70 My emphasis. See poem 3: No seas nesio, ben,/que si el niño Dios/home es como nos/y ome muy de
bien/en un santiamén/le habreremo, entremo, in Herraiz and Di Franco, ‘Villancicos de negros y otros
testimonios al caso en manuscritos del Siglo de Oro’, p. 177.
71 See this poem: Gasica, turu me alegro/que nosan prima María/á pariro el alengriya/de ro branco y
de ro negro, in Herraiz and Di Franco, ‘Villancicos de negros y otros testimonios al caso en manuscri
tos del Siglo de Oro’, p. 183. Email correspondence from Andrew Cashner, 9 August 2017.
Black but Human 27
This poem is very complex and conveys clearly the Afro-Hispanic understanding
of their paradoxical position since Christ, ‘himself in his incarnate body [. . .]
unites God and man, mercy and judgment, sin and salvation through his sacrifi
cial and atoning life, death, and resurrection’.72
In their recently discovered poems, Afro-Hispanic writers present a complex
viewpoint about the controversial belief that their blackness stains other people.
The poem Otro guineo en diálogo (f.158) conveys the internalization of the
dominant belief:
It is the child so clean

Who comes to wash away sins
And if we arrive stained
the child will cry forever.73
However, their firm opposition to this belief is expressed in Villancico guineo

(f.178):
Though black, we do not stain

or sully the little child:
we go to see, brother Franchico
the child God
in the portico.74
There is no doubt that the Black but Human proverb cuts against the dominant
beliefs both about the association of blackness and slavery and the bizarre but
subalternizing claim that black people are able to stain other people. Covarrubias
recorded that a person could be stained (tiznado or entiznado) either with ink or
with infamy. In addition, he defines as ‘stained’ any person who spreads harmful
or damaging habits, and, more importantly for us, he claims that it is the stained
person who is responsible for a stained lineage because of sexual intercourse with
a person from the wrong lineage:
to stain black, sticking to it like soot from the chimney, or the black on the kettle
or cooking pot. Whoever spreads harmful habits or through marriage soils the
lineage, is, we say, to have been stained; and when someone who has a fault

73 See this poem number 19: 2°—Es lo niño tan linpito/que viene a limpiar peccado,/y si lleguamo
tisnado/yorará niño infinito, in Herraiz and Di Franco, ‘Villancicos de negros y otros testimonios al
caso en manuscritos del Siglo de Oro’, p. 184.
74 See poem number 9: Avnque negro no tiznamo/ni panteremo ynfantico:/vamos a ver, mano
Franchico/niñón Dios a lo portalico, in Herraiz and Di Franco, ‘Villancicos de negros y otros testimo
nios al caso en manuscritos del Siglo de Oro’, p. 180.
28 Black but Human
hides away from the other, fearing to be damaged by [his sin], we use the
proverb ‘The kettle says to the pot: get lost there, you black’. It is said to be
stained, to have a stain, an ink stain. Stained, sullied with ink, or a tint, or stained
with infamy.75
These interpretations lead directly to the key cultural and political obsessions
that structured the Spanish empire: the ideology of purity of blood (see next
chapter) and the extirpation of heresy. Decisive actions to legalize the ideology
of purity of blood were taken by the Church of Córdoba—‘the first to develop
a purity certification process in 1530’—and by bishop Juan Martínez Silíceo, of
commoner origins, who produced the first statute of purity of blood twenty-five
years later, aiming to exclude Jewish and aristocratic members from Toledo’s
chapter cathedral (second only to St Peter in Rome in terms of power).76 Thus,
those within the purist movement, who were opposed to the aristocracy, pro
ceeded to identify ‘tainted’ or ‘infected’ aristocratic families in notorious books
published in 1507 and 1560, respectively: The Green Book of Aragón, by an official
of the Inquisition in Zaragoza, and the Blot on the Nobility of Spain by Cardinal
Francisco Mendoza y Bobadilla, who confirmed to the dedicatee of his treatise,
Philip II, that the whole of the Spanish nobility was completely infected. María
Elena Martínez explains that the ‘commercialization of nobility’ initiated by the
Catholic Monarchs in the sale of patents of nobility (cartas de privilegio or privi-
legios de hidalguía) to people who provided personal and military services was at the
root of a popular resentment against the aristocracy. This resulted in Philip II’s
1557 prohibiting the sale of these documents to descendants of ‘stained’ ethnic
groups or ‘New Christians’: Jews, heretics and comuneros. Thus, the path was
open to the legal acceptance of the purity of blood statutes and the subsequent
concentration of power in the hands of ‘Old Christians’ in imperial Spain.77 In
addition the Hapsburgs believed they had a providential mission to protect the
Catholic Church and faith.78
The concept of the white soul in the African body is conveyed in their poem
12, Otro [de negros]:
75 See entry Entiznar or Tiznar (Stain), in Covarrubias Orozco, Tesoro de la lengua castellana o
española (1611), p. 524: teñir de negro alpegándolo, como el hollín de la chimenea o la tizne de la caldera
o la sartén. El que pega a otro ruines costumbres, o por casamientio mancha el linaje, deximos averse
entiznado; y quando el que tiene alguna falta se recata del otro, temiendo no le perjudique con la suya,
usamos el proverbio: ‘Dixo la sartén a la caldera: quitáos alla, negra.’ Díxose entiznar, de tizne, y tizne de
tinta. Entiznado, el manchado con tinta o tinte, o notado con infamia.
76 María Elena Martínez, Genealogical Fictions: Limpieza de Sangre, Religion, and Gender in
Colonial Mexico (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2008), pp. 44, 63, 78.
77 Martínez, Genealogical Fictions: Limpieza de Sangre, Religion, and Gender in Colonial Mexico,
pp. 78–9.
78 Martínez, Genealogical Fictions: Limpieza de Sangre, Religion, and Gender in Colonial Mexico
(2008), pp. 77–81.
Black but Human 29
since finishing our dance

grants the mercy
that we could be white
that he can do it well
that the priest said to us thus:
we will dance the guacarandí.79
This concept is also a recurrent poetic topos in the literature of Hapsburg Spain,
as in the 1649 black carol Despielta, helmano Fasico written by an unknown author
for the Royal Chapel in Madrid:
Wake up, brother Francisco:

this miracle
without being God, black, my master will perform
How? Tell me brother
So he knows
Turning me silver when he sells me.80
It is very interesting that in New Spain, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz will insist on
this whiteness of the soul (and of the body) in her black carol dedicated to Our
Lady of the Immaculate Conception in the Cathedral of Mexico City in 1676.
In the words of an enslaved African man, the Black but Human topos will be
transformed into the new proverb, Black but White (or even if we are black, we
are white):
Although, black, white

we are, lela, lela,
the devout soul
is white not black.81
Siglo de Oro’, p. 181: pues acabando el bailar nos á de dar por merced/que podamos branco ser/que bien
lo puede aser,/quel cura lo dijo assí:/bayaremo la guacarandí.
80 The villancico by an anonymous writer, Despielta, helmano Fasico: Este miraglo/sin ser Dioso,
negliyo, le hará mi amo./¿Cómo? Di, hermano/Polque lo sepa./Conviltiéndome en prata quando me
venda, cited by Swiadon Martínez, ‘Fiesta y parodia en los villancicos de negro del siglo XVII’, pp. 298–9.
The dialogue between a slave and a friend, where the former explains that his master is like Jesus,
because he has the miraculous power of transforming blackness into whiteness belongs to the poem
Los negros, que están cansados, Para la capilla real de su Majestad, que se cantaron en los Maytines de
los Santos Reyes (1676), published by Manuel de León Marchante, Obras poéticas póstumas (Madrid:
Gabriel del Barrio 2, 1733), pp. 230–1.
81 Cruz, ‘Villancicos’, in Obras completas de Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, edited by Méndez Plancarte,
2 (1952), p. 27: Aunque negros, blancos somos lela, lela, que el alma devota blanca es, no prieta, in
Cruz, ‘Villancicos que se cantaron en la S. I. Metropolitana de Méjico en los maitines de la Purísima
Concepción de Nuestra Señora, año de 1676, en que se imprimieron’. See also, Glenn Swiadon Martínez,
‘Los Villancicos de negro y el teatro breve. Un primer acercamiento’, pp. 162–3.
30 Black but Human
There is no doubt that humanity and whiteness go hand in hand, as we will

explore in the visual representation of Afro-Hispanic slaves and ex-slaves in early
modern Spain in the following chapters. The belief about the whitening of the
Afro-Hispanic’s soul was also endorsed by Alonso de Sandoval who personally
promoted the baptism of African slaves in Cartagena de Indias in the viceroyalty
of New Granada (Colombia), from 1605 until his death: ‘although they [Africans]
are black to the eye, they can have the innocence and whiteness that Christ’s
blood gives to one who is washed in it.’82
In the frontispiece to Sandoval’s 1647 edition (see Fig. 1.1),83 the whitening
of the Afro-Hispanic body is evident in the depiction of the collective baptism
of Africans, placed on either side of the Adoration of the Magi at the top of the
engraving where, as Stoichita notes, the bodies of the African neophytes are rep
resented as white Europeans, and thus an expression of an ‘internal process’ of
transformation.84
Another popular belief was that Christianity whitens the African body after
death, as in the case of sister Teresa Juliana de Santo Domingo Chicaba, the first
female Afro-Hispanic writer in Castilian. Chicaba (Coast of Mina, western Africa
Gold Coast, 1676–Salamanca, 1748) was from the region comprised by present-
day Ghana, Togo, Benin, and Western Nigeria. She was given by King Charles II of
Spain to the Marquis of Mancera, later viceroy of New Spain and protector of Sor
Juana Inés de la Cruz. Chicaba entered a closed Dominican convent in Salamanca
after her manumission, where she directed Juan Carlos Manuel Paniagua, to write
an account of her life (1749).85 Her hagiographer wrote that after Chicaba’s death,
her contact with God was manifested by an unknown fragrance that emanated
from her body, and by the whitening of her body that was attested to by a surgeon:
‘Various prodigies were seen as Teresa was dying and after her death [. . .] the
colour of her face lost its black character and before she expired turned white,
and stayed like that even for some time after her death. Not all of those who were
82 Alonso de Sandoval, Un tratado sobre la esclavitud (De instauranda Aethiopum salute) (1627),
edited by Enriqueta Vila Villar (Madrid: Alianza, 1987), p. 53: aunque a la vista son negros, pueden
tener la candidez y blancura, que dà la sangre de Christo a quien se lava con ella. The English quotation
is cited in Tanya J. Tiffany, ‘Light, Darkness, and African Salvation: Velázquez’s Supper at Emmaus’,
Art History, 31 (2008), pp. 43–6.
83 Juan de Noort. Frontispiece in Alonso de Sandoval, De instauranda Aethiopum salute. (Madrid:
Alonso de Paredes, 1647).
84 For a discussion on Sandoval’s concept of whiteness, see Victor I. Stoichita, ‘La imagen del
hombre de raza negra en el arte y la literatura españolas del Siglo de Oro’, in Herencias indígenas,
tradiciones europeas y la mirada europea, edited by Helga von Kügelgen (Frankfurt-Madrid:
Vervuet–Iberoamericana, 2002), pp. 259–90 and Victor I. Stoichita, ‘The Image of the Black in Spanish
Art’, pp. 225–34.
85 María Eugenia Maeso, Tshikaba, la princesa negra (Salamanca: Dominicas Dueñas, 1998), pp. 30–1.
See also María Eugenia Maeso, Sor Teresa Chikaba, princesa, esclava y monja (Salamanca: Biblioteca
Dominicana, 2004) and Elvira M. Melián, ‘Chikaba, la primera monja negra en el sistema esclavista
español del siglo XVII’ in Hispania Sacra, 130 (July–December 2012), pp. 565–81.
Black but Human 31
Fig. 1.1. Juan de Noort. Frontispiece, Alonso de Sandoval, De instauranda Aethiopum

salute. (Madrid: Alonso de Paredes, 1647). © the British Library Board, reproduced by
permission.
32 Black but Human
at the Burial witnessed this marvel: a number of religious people did and the
Surgeon who had attended during the illness of the deceased.’86
Black Christmas carols that were written in the eighteenth century and have
survived from the Royal Chapel in Granada, the burial place of the Catholic
Monarchs, show that the association between the Black but Human topos and
the concept of the whiteness of the African’s soul was still active, as in A Belén
han venido. The anonymous writer of poem CDLXII joyfully conveys how Afro-
Hispanic slaves felt that Jesus came to liberate them from slavery and asked to
be given the divine light of grace that in visual terms is depicted as a white light
above Christ or saints, as we shall see in Juan de Pareja’s painting The Calling of
St Matthew (chapter 6). The singers believe that this white light will keep their
souls white and immaculate even ‘if we are black’. They also implore white people
not to mock them and their black speech because baptism has erased their previous
social status and they are no longer slaves:
We declare to all the blacks

and the whites: there is no longer a need to fly
the Law of Laws has arrived
to bring us out of captivity
We ask you [the Child] that although we are black
Give us the grace
to ensure
that our souls stay white
without ever staining them:
not forgetting either Ciólo,
that the whites should not mock the blacks, calling them slaves
because they are all made to speak
All of them
there are no longer slaves
No longer slaves.87
86 Juan Carlos Miguel Pan y Agua, Oración fúnebre en las exequias de la madre Sor Teresa Juliana de
Santo Domingo, de feliz memoria, celebradas el día nueve de enero, en el convento de religiosas domini-
cas, vulgo de la penitencia, de esta ciudad de Salamanca (Salamanca: García de Honorato y San Miguel,
1749), in Maeso, Tshikaba, la princesa negra, p. 31: Algunos prodigios se notaron al tiempo de fallecer, y
después de muerta Teresa [. . .] el color del rostro, o su naturaleza negro, antes de expirar se le puso blanco,
y aun después de muerta persseveró assí no poco tiempo. No todos los que assistieron al Entierro, advirti-
eron esta novedad: observáronla bien algunas religiosas, y el Cirujano, que había assistido a la enferme-
dad de la difunta. See the first English translation of the Compendio in Black Bride of Christ: Chicaba,
an African Nun in Eighteenth-Century Spain, edited by Sue E. Houchins and Baltasar Fra-Molinero
(Vanderbilt: Vanderbilt University Press, 2018).
87 See the poem CDLXII, in Germán Tejerizo Robles, Villancicos barrocos en la Capilla Real de
Granada: 500 Letrillas cantadas (Seville: Junta de Andalucía, 1989), p. 137: Aleglémonos tos los
negliyos/y los biancos: Ya no hay que yola!,/que ha venio el Ley de los Leyes/á sacalnos de cautividad./
Te pedimos [al niño] que, aunque siamo neglos,/nos des glacla pala ploculal/que las almas mantengamos
blancas/sin yegalas jamás a manchal;/no olvidando tampoco, Ciólo,/que los biancos no vengan bullal/de
los neglos hablándonos guachi,/porque a tolos nos hacen labial. /Todos.—No hay más guachi ya, no hay
más guachi ya.
Black but Human 33
The historian Isidoro Moreno rightly claims that both the Crown and the Church
tried to make the buying and selling of African people and their descendants
compatible with the Christian idea of the equality of all human beings, by concep
tualizing Africans as wild, barbarians (salvajes) and pagans (paganos). The former
concept justified the capture of human beings, in this case Africans, and their
commodification as merchandise, while the latter made them worthy of redemp
tion by God through the sacrament of baptism and conversion to Christianity.
This was the paradoxical position of African slaves and ex-slaves in Imperial
Spain that I believe is perfectly encoded in the Afro-Hispanic Black but Human
topos that emerged in the exclusively black confraternities in the kingdoms of
the Hapsburgs.
2
What Is Human about Slavery?
The Soul of Africans in Imperial Spain
As we have previously seen, the Black but Human topos encodes the Afro-Hispanic
defence of their humanity, which is defined by the possession of a soul. This
concept was also embedded in the intellectual and religious thought in Hapsburg
Spain. In the Chronicles of the Discovery and Conquest of Guinea (c.1450), the
Portuguese Gomes Eannes de Zurara (c.1410–73) re-appropriates this concept when
he claims that ‘even if they [Africans] were black they have souls’.1 Subsequently
he recommends that Africans—whom he considers to be slaves in their souls as
well as their bodies because of their sins—should be brought onto the path to
salvation. The Portuguese chronicler identified the roots of slavery in sin, as most
Christian theologians will do following St Augustine of Hippo (354–430) and
Thomas of Aquinas (c.1224–74). The former sees slavery as originating in divine
punishment for sin and expounds this view in his Concerning the City of God
against the Pagans (De Civitate Dei, fifth century ad).2
Nevertheless, for the most part Spanish and colonial theologians and intellec-
tuals seem not to have been concerned with whether Africans had a soul. Most of
them condemned different aspects of the practices and consequences of slavery
from the fifteenth century onwards, although they were mostly silent about the
validity of the institution of slavery as such. The commodification of Africans was
legalized and supported by the Crown and the Church in imperial Spain, where
civil and canonical laws, Holy Scripture, and writers on slavery helped to justify
and legitimize the institution of slavery.3 Andrés-Gallego and García Añoveros
recently analysed the work of 334, mainly European, writers, 37 per cent of whom
were Hispanic, and could identify only three Hispanic authors from the New
World who condemned the institution of slavery in the early modern period:
Bartolomé Frías de Albornoz (1573) and the Capuchin friars Francisco José de
1 Liliana Crespi, ‘Cristianismo y esclavitud. Discusiones sobre la evangelización de los esclavos en

Hispanoamérica’, Memoria y Sociedad, 7 (15) (2003), p. 134.
2 A.C. de C.M. Saunders, A Social History of Black Slaves and Freedmen in Portugal, 1441–1555
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 38 and Jesús María García Añoveros, El pensami-
ento y los argumentos sobre la esclavitud en Europa en el siglo XVI y su aplicación a los indios america-
nos y a los negros africanos (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 2000), p. 127.
3 See García Añoveros, El pensamiento y los argumentos sobre la esclavitud en Europa en el siglo
XVI, pp. 143, 167–80, 214.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198767978.001.0001
What Is Human about Slavery? 35
Jaca (1681) and Epifanio de Moirans (1682).4 Several popes also condemned
the institution from 1462 to 1686, with a final bull of condemnation in 1814.5
Instead, most Hispanic theologians were preoccupied with the souls of the Native
Americans of the New World, because it was pressing and ‘problematic’. García
Añoveros believes that this discrepancy in their approach towards non-European
people was due to the different social, religious, and juridical status that Africans
and Native Americans had. Unlike the Native Americans, Africans were not
considered vassals of the King of Spain, because most of Africa did not belong to
the kingdoms of Castile and Aragon.6 The Spanish historian concludes (though
acknowledging that further research is needed) that Native Americans were
initially enslaved, but their conversion to Christianity played an essential role in
freeing them from slavery. Africans, however, were baptized after they were bought
as slaves and their conversion to Christianity became the condition for their
acculturation but not of their freedom. Evidence of such a differential approach to
non-Europeans is that the official abolition of Native (Indian) slavery was ratified
by the Leyes Nuevas (New Laws) of 1542 by the Spanish Crown,7 three centuries
before the final abolition of the institution of slavery in the Spanish empire in
1886, with its termination in Cuba.8
We should remember that the fifteenth century in Spain was marked by doctri-
nal conflicts about Muslims and Jews and the missionary evangelical approach to
Native Americans in the New World, and that these conflicts were to be settled
by a theology that had come to be seen as a science. The tradition of Hispanic
thought known as ‘Late Scholasticism’ or the ‘School of Salamanca’, recently
defined by Miguel Anxo Pena González as a Christian orthodox humanism, was
originally developed in the two most important universities in the kingdom of
Castile: in Salamanca and Alcalá de Henares, the latter founded by Cardinal,
4 José Andrés-Gallego and Jesús María García Añoveros, La Iglesia y la esclavitud de los negros
(Pamplona: Eunsa, 2002), pp. 39–53, 69–92, 121. The treatises identified by both authors are ‘De la
esclavitud’, in Arte de los Contratos (Valencia, 1573) by Bartolomé Frías de Albornoz; Resolución
sobre la libertad de los negros y sus originarios, en el estado de paganos y después ya cristianos
(1681). La primera condena de la esclavitud en el pensamiento hispano by Francisco José de Jaca,
edited by Miguel Anxo Pena González (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas,
2002) and Siervos libres o la justa defensa de la libertad natural de los esclavos (1682) by Epifanio de
Moirans, edited by Miguel Anxo Pena González et al. (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones
Científicas, 2007).
5 García Añoveros, El pensamiento y los argumentos sobre la esclavitud en Europa en el siglo XVI,
pp. 193, 207.
pp. 205–16.
p. 171. Esteban Mira Caballos, Indios y mestizos americanos en la España del siglo XVI (Madrid:
Vervuert-Iberoamericana, 2000), p. 95.
8 Andrés-Gallego and García Añoveros, La Iglesia y la esclavitud de los negros. On the same date,
a royal decree provided freedom for any slave reaching Spanish soil, see William D. Phillips, Jr,
Slavery in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014),
pp. 158–9.
36 Black but Human
Statesman, and Grand Inquisitor Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros (1436–1518).9

The influence of the ‘School of Salamanca’ was also very strong in Valladolid
in the Colegio de San Gregorio, where the most extraordinary debate about the
souls of Native Americans of New Spain took place between 1550 and 1551.10
Thus, this development of Hispanic thought was the result of the gradual ‘inter-
nationalization’ of the kingdom of Castile with a strong Scholastic influence from
Bartolomé de las Casas (1474–1566) and Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda (1490–1573),
which found its apologetic response in the Counter-Reformation.11 The encoun-
ter with non-Europeans and more specifically with Native Americans led to the
crisis of Aristotelian philosophy and gave a greater role to theology by shifting
the role of religion to the centre of intellectual thought in imperial Spain. The
Dominican Francisco de Vitoria (1483–1546), the leading figure in the School of
Salamanca, followed St Thomas Aquinas’s interpretation of Aristotle’s comments
on natural slavery in his acknowledgement of a ‘natural’ inequality of persons.12
However, in his De Indis (De Indis prior, 1532 and De Indis posterior sive de iure
belli, 1539), Vitoria departed from Aristotle, when he identified evil and sinfulness
(el mal y el pecado) as the roots of slavery.13 Sinfulness will become the explanation
for the institution of slavery and the latter will be justified by the Christianization
of enslaved Africans.14 The theologian agreed on this point with Aquinas and
St Augustine. Basing his arguments on St Paul and Genesis, Augustine considered
the ‘mental incapacity of the barbarians’ as providing lawful and appropriate
grounds for enslavement. However, Vitoria’s condition for this justification was ‘if
everything is done for the benefit and good of the barbarians, and not merely for
9 See Miguel Anxo Pena González, La Escuela de Salamanca: De la Monarquía hispánica al Orbe
católico (Madrid: Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos, 2009), pp. 9, 13 and Henry Kamen, The Spanish
Inquisition: An Historical Revision (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1997), pp. 214–15.
10 Alfonso Maestre Sánchez, ‘ “Todas las gentes del mundo son hombres”. El gran debate entre Fray
Bartolomé de las Casas (1474–1566) y Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda (1490–1573)’, Anales del Seminario de
Historia de la Filosofia, 21 (2004): p. 96; Lewis Hanke, Aristotle and the American Indians: A Study in
Race Prejudice in the Modern World (London: Hollis & Carter, 1959), p. 37, and Daniel Castro, Another
Face of Empire: Bartolomé de las Casas, Indigenous Rights, and Ecclesiastical Imperialism (Durham, NC
and London: Duke University Press, 2007).
11 Pena González, La Escuela de Salamanca, p. 13.
12 Francisco de Vitoria, ‘Carta del maestro fray Francisco de Vitoria al padre fray Bernardino de
Vique acerca de los esclavos con que trafican los portugueses, y sobre el proceder de los escriba-
nos’, in Relecciones sobre los Indios y el Derecho de Guerra (Madrid: Espasa Calpe, S.A., 1975), p. 23:
A la otra duda, de los que en sus tierras fueron hechos esclavos en la guerra, tampoco veo por dónde
les facer grand escrúpulo, porque los portugueses no son obligados a averiguar las justicias de las
guerras entre los bárbaros. Basta que éste es esclavo, sea de hecho o de derecho, y yo le compro llana-
mente. See also Andrés-Gallego and García Añoveros, La Iglesia y la esclavitud de los negros,
pp. 24–5, 120.
p. 209.
14 Vitoria, Relecciones sobre los Indios y el Derecho de Guerra, p. 23: Que si los tratasen humana-
mente, sería mejor suerte la de los esclavos inter cristianos, que no ser libres en sus tierras; demás que es
la mayor bienaventuranza venir a ser cristianos.
the profit of the Spaniards. But it is in this latter restriction that the whole pitfall
to souls and salvation is found to lie.’15 Baltasar Fra-Molinero identifies an
Augustinian approach to baptism in El santo negro Rosambuco de la ciudad de
Palermo (1612), where Lope de Vega has Rosambuco say that baptism freed him
from his guilt and condemned heart. The Spanish literary critic explains that
Rosambuco’s ‘guilt’ and ‘condemned heart’ are references to his Muslim past and
his anti-Spanish feelings:
Since blessed baptism

Has from guilt and condemned heart
Freed me.16
The Scholastic structure identified in Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae (1265–74) was

also adopted by the Spanish Dominican Domingo de Soto (1494–1560) in his De
iustitia et iure libri decem (1553–4).17 This treatise on justice and law (Tratado de
la justicia y el derecho) shaped Hispanic theologians’ interests in economic and
social justice, and inaugurated the type of manuals that became essential concep-
tual and defensive tools against the Protestants. Scholastic method and discipline
were instrumental in bringing the Catholic Reformation to fruition, and one of its
ideological and pragmatic outcomes was the evangelization of African slaves and
ex-slaves throughout the Spanish empire.18 Soto believed in natural as opposed to
legal servitude as proposed by Aristotle, since the corrupted nature produced by
original sin was the origin of slavery. The main aim then will become the conver-
sion of non-Europeans in Europe and the New World.19 In this case, the aim was
to help enslaved Africans to overcome the corrupted nature produced by sin and
encourage their conversion to Christianity.20 In 1571, only five years after the
Council of Trent, the Dominican theologian and economist Tomás de Mercado
15 Vitoria, Relecciones sobre los Indios y el Derecho de Guerra, pp. 24–6. Joseph E. Capizzi, ‘The
Children of God: Natural Slavery in Aquinas and Victoria’, Theological Studies, 63 (2002), p. 50.
16 Baltasar Fra-Molinero, La imagen de los negros en el teatro del Siglo de Oro (Madrid: Siglo
Veintiuno de España Editores, 1995), p. 89: Ya que el bautismo bendito/De la culpa me ha librado,/Y del
corazón maldito.
17 Domingo de Soto, Tratado de la justicia y el derecho, vertido al castellano por Jaime Torrubiano
Ripoll (Madrid: Editorial Reus, S.A., 1922), p. 245: no hay nada más inícuo que la igualdad, cuando las
personas no son iguales. See also Andrés-Gallego and García Añoveros, La Iglesia y la esclavitud de los
negros, pp. 26–8.
18 The treatise by Tomás Mercado, Tratos y contratos de mercaderes y tratantes descididos y determi-
nados, published in 1569 in Salamanca by Mathías Gast, was revised by the Dominican friar in 1571
with the new title: Suma de tratos y contratos. Andrés-Gallego and García Añoveros, La Iglesia y la
esclavitud de los negros, pp. 35–9.
19 Soto, Tratado de la justicia y el derecho, p. 106: la culpa borró del corazón de los infieles la ley de la
justicia. Andrés-Gallego and García Añoveros, La Iglesia y la esclavitud de los negros, pp. 99–100.
20 Soto, Tratado de la justicia y el derecho, p. 245: Mas los Apóstoles, por especial encargo del mismo,
dispensaron en la fórmula del bautismo, para que se diese en el nombre de Cristo.
38 Black but Human
(1525–75), in his Suma de Tratos y contratos de mercaderes y tratantes descididos y

determinados (1569) (Manual of Deals and Contracts), promoted the sacrament of
baptism for the African slaves who were newly arrived in the Spanish territories.21
However, two years later the Spaniard lawyer Bartolomé Frías de Albornoz
powerfully claimed in his Arte de los Contratos, 1573 (Art of Contracts) that
Christianity could not justify the violence of the slave trade and the slavery ‘of the
body’ as sources for ‘the liberty of the soul’: ‘But I do not believe that the law of
Jesus Christ says that the freedom of the soul has to be paid for with the body’s
servitude. For, all those whom Our Saviour cured of the illnesses of the body he
first cured of the illnesses of the soul.’22
This approach from Frías de Albornoz, the first professor of Civil Law at the
University of Mexico, would not be followed by most Spanish and Portuguese
intellectuals and theologians.23 Instead most of them will agree with the Jesuit Luis
de Molina (1535–1600), who in his De Iustitia et Iure (Of Justice and Law, 1593),
identified the conversion of infidels as the only benefit of slavery. His association
between economics and moral Scholastic theology led him to the main reason for
the evangelization of Afro-Hispanics. It was the threat of Muslim contamination
and the fear that the soul of the newly arrived Africans (bozales) would be eter-
nally condemned if they were not baptized.24
Thus, the Church and the Crown tried to find the means to integrate African
slaves and their descendants (and at the same to keep them separate) by address-
ing the issue of the salvation of their souls. Theologians addressed the ways of
administering the sacrament of baptism, even ensuring that those slaves who did
21 The Dominican friar went to New Spain when he was young. Tomás Mercado, Suma de tratos y
contratos, in Biblioteca Virtual Universal, http://www.biblioteca.org.ar, accessed 29 July 2018: ¿Quién
supiera ser necesario el bautismo para la remisión del pecado original si en el evangelio no se dijera:
Quien no fuere bautizado con agua y Espíritu Santo no podrá ver el reino de Dios? A estos tales actos, es
justo, cuando obligaremos a los fieles, nos pregunten donde o cuándo los reveló o mandó Dios o su Iglesia,
porque no estamos obligados a más de a los que Él o ella nos oblige and porque en la ribera, al tiempo de
embarcarlos [los negros en Cabo Verde], los bautizan a todos juntos con un hisopo, que es otra barbari-
dad grandísima.
22 Bartolomé Frías de Albornoz, ‘De la esclavitud’, in Arte de los Contratos (Valencia: en casa de
Pedro de Huete, 1573), digitalized version at the Biblioteca de la Universidad de Sevilla: http://www.
cervantesvirtual.com/obra/arte-de-los-contractos-0.
‘De la esclavitud’, in Arte de los Contratos (1573), p. 271: mas no creo que me daran en la Lei de Iesu
Christo, que la libertad de la Anima se haía de pagar con la servidumbre de el cuerpo, Nuestro Salvador
a todos los que sano de las enfermedades corporales, curó primero de las de el anima. See also Andrés-
Gallego and García Añoveros, La Iglesia y la esclavitud de los negros, pp. 124–5 and García Añoveros,
El pensamiento y los argumentos sobre la esclavitud en Europa en el siglo XVI, p. 215.
23 Andrés-Gallego and García Añoveros, La Iglesia y la esclavitud de los negros, p. 37.
24 Luis de Molina, De iustitia et iure, Moguntiae, I, 1659. disputación 34, de los modos en que se
hacen esclavos en África, n. 6, col. 169–70, and disputación 35, del comercio de los esclavos que llevan a
cabo los portugueses, n. 2, col. 180 : los esclavos que se compran son bautizados y se les hace cristianos, lo
cual es un bien impagable, y, además, se benefician en su vida material, pues antes vivían desnudos y se
alimentaban miserablemente, in Jesús María García Añoveros,‘Luis de Molina y la esclavitud de los
negros africanos en el siglo XVI. Principios doctrinales y conclusiones’, Revista de Indias, 60 (219)
(2000), pp. 323–4. Robin Blackburn, The American Crucible: Slavery, Emancipation and Human Rights
(London, New York: Verso, 2011), p. 47.
not know their catechism were baptized for the second time.25 It is significant that
the branding ritual—most commonly with the letter S and a nail or with a fleur de
lis or a star—often took place at the same time as the slaves were being baptized,
as we will see in chapter 4.26
Baptism of Africans
The offering of baptism to Africans (or its forcible imposition on them) follows the
long Spanish tradition of conversion of the infidel or heretic in its territories. The
image of The Baptism of a Moor produced between 1290 and 1310 (see Plate 2.1),
made with tempera colours, gold leaf, and ink on parchment, possibly by the
scribe Michael Lupi de Çandiu shows a black man in the baptismal font.27 This is
one of the earliest depictions of this subject from the kingdoms of Castile and
Aragon still extant. It is the historiated initial ‘S’ of the Aragonese Code of Law
(fuero) that King James I of Aragon and Catalonia established by 1247 after the
Reconquest of large areas of Spain from the Moors. This image is one of hundreds
of decorated initials in this illuminated manuscript related to the provision that
would grant baptism to any Jew or Muslim who desired to be converted to
Christianity, which is now at the J. Paul Getty Museum, in Los Angeles. The motif
of The Baptism of a Black Moor by Lupi de Çandiu spread after 1250 in both the
kingdoms of Aragon and Castile but, as yet, there are no studies of the ways in
which this specific iconography was generated and circulated in Western Europe.
However, one of the consequences of the Christian recapture of the kingdom
of Granada in 1492 and the subsequent Morisco rebellion was the enforced mass
conversion of Muslims to Christianity. It was legalized by the royal decree of
2 February 1502 and implemented by Cardinal Cisneros.28 By 1525, the Muslim
religion had officially ceased to exist in Spain as a consequence of the order of
25 Saunders, A Social History of Black Slaves and Freedmen in Portugal, 1441–1555, p. 42 and
Isidoro Moreno, La antigua hermandad de los negros de Sevilla: Etnicidad, poder y sociedad en 600
años de Historia (Seville: Universidad de Sevilla, 1997), pp. 50–5.
26 María Carmen Gómez García and Juan María Martín Vergara, La esclavitud en Málaga entre los
siglos XVII y XVIII (Málaga: Diputación Provincial de Málaga, 1993), pp. 23–5, 29. Luis Méndez
Rodríguez, Esclavos en la pintura sevillana de los Siglos de Oro (Seville: Universidad de Sevilla, Ateneo
de Sevilla, 2011), p. 22.
27 See http://www.getty.edu/art/collection/objects/4566/unknown-michael-lupi-de-candiu-initial-
q-a-woman-with-bread-loaves-before-a-man-holding-a-scale-initial-s-the-baptism-of-a-moor-spanish-
about-1290-1310/?dz=0.5000,0.8051,0.77, accessed 22 July 2018. The Spanish artist Michael Lupi de
Çandiu was active in Pamplona, from 1297 to 1305. Jean Devisse, ‘The Black and his Color: From
Symbols to Realities’, in The Image of the Black in Western Art: From the Early Christian Era to the
‘Age of Discovery’. From the Demonic Thread to the Incarnation of Sainthood, edited by David Bindman
and Henry Louis Gates, Jr, 2. 1 (Cambridge, Mass., London: Harvard University Press, 2010), pp. 83,
86, fig. 53, 29.
28 See Henry Kamen, The Spanish Inquisition: An Historical Revision (London: Weidenfeld and
Nicholson, 1997), pp. 214–15 and Jean Michel Massing, ‘Weiditz and Costume Books’, in The Image of
the Black in Western Art: From the ‘Age of Discovery’ to the Age of Abolition: Europe and the World
40 Black but Human
Charles V during his campaign with Cardinal Cisneros in the conquest of Africa.
These steps against Iberian Muslims would eventually lead to their final expulsion
from Spain between 1609 and 1614.29 The collective baptism of Hispanic-Muslims,
both women and men, is represented in the main polychromed wooden altar-
piece at the Royal Chapel in the Cathedral of Granada, produced between 1520
and 1522. The Baptism of Iberian Muslims, however, is represented as a peaceful
event in stark contrast to the enforced mass Christianization of Muslims and its
aftermath in Spain. The choice of the dignified and orderly collective baptism is
interesting, since the sculptor Felipe Vigarny, who carved the bas-reliefs in two
separate panels, does not shy away from violent depictions in his works. He will
offer us one of the more violent images of the in vivo mutilated black man to be
found in the kingdoms of Castile, ten years after his work at the burial place of the
Catholic Monarchs in the Cathedral of Granada, as we will see in chapter 5.30
The baptism of Afro-Hispanics who became human commodities in the
Spanish territories following the great discoveries was in the tradition that had
already been established with the conversion of ‘the infidel’ and ‘the ignorant’. The
instruction of ‘children and the ignorant’ was an integral part of the mission of
the Jesuit order or the Company of Saint Ignatius founded by Ignatius of Loyola
on 21 July 1540. In true Spanish fashion, Loyola chose Aquinas as ‘the principal
theological guide for the Society (of Jesus)’, where a ‘special vow to God to obey
the pope ‘concerning missions’ was added to their Formula and they explicitly
described their aim as ‘the help of souls’ (their leitmotif).31 However, in the king-
doms of Castile and Aragon, regional Synods had already been taking measures
to baptize Africans and their descendants.32 This was in keeping with the trad
itional Hapsburg stance towards the evangelization of the first Native American
chiefs (caciques) who arrived in the kingdom of Castile with Columbus after his first
expedition; according to Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, this group was baptized
Beyond, edited by David Bindman, Henry Louis Gates, Jr, and Jean Michel Massing, 3.2 (Cambridge,
Mass., London: Harvard University Press, 2011), p. 45.
29 Antonio Domínguez Ortiz, El Antiguo Régimen: los Reyes Católicos y los Austrias (Madrid:
Alianza Editorial, 1978), pp. 186–7.
30 Felipe Vigarny, The enforced baptism of the Moorish of the kingdom of Granada, 1520–2, main
altarpiece, Royal Chapel. Cathedral of Granada, Spain. See Antonio Fernández Puertas, ‘Sobre los
relieves en la predela del retablo de la Capilla Real de Granada’, Anales de la Historia del Arte, 4 (1994),
pp. 377–9.
31 See Francisco de Borja Medina, S.J., ‘La experiencia sevillana de la Compañía de Jesús en la
evangelización de los esclavos negros y su representación en América’, in La esclavitud negroafricana
en la Historia de España. Siglos XVI y XVII, edited by Aurelia Martín Casares and Margarita García
Barranco (Granada: Comares, 2010), pp. 80–1, and John W. O’Malley, S.J. ‘Saint Ignatius and the
Cultural Mission of the Society of Jesus’, in John W. O’Malley, S.J., Gauvin Alexander Bailey, and
Giovanni Sale, S.J., The Jesuits and the Arts 1540–1773 (Philadelphia: Saint Joseph’s University Press,
2005), pp. 3, 4, 6.
32 Rocío Periáñez Gómez Cáceres, La esclavitud en Extremadura (Siglos XVI–XVIII) (PhD disserta-
tion, Universidad de Extremadura, 2008), pp. 198, 327, 329 and Gómez García and Martín Vergara,
La esclavitud en Málaga, pp. 41–3.
Fig. 2.1. Anonymous Flemish artist, Baptism of the Ethiopian Eunuch by St Philip. The
Book of Hours of Charles V, fol. 82r. Brussels or Malines, c.1519, Vienna Österreichische
Nationalbibliothek.
in the Monastery of Guadalupe in 1493.33 The Emperor was also personally involved,
by 1537, in trying to set up procedures for the clergy in the New World to admin-
ister the sacrament of baptism to the black and mixed-race population.34 It is sig-
nificant that one of the images of the 1519 devotional prayer book, today known
as The Book of Hours of Charles V, by an anonymous Flemish artist, in folio 82r.
Brussels or Malines, is The Baptism of the Ethiopian Eunuch by St Philip (see Fig 2.1),
now at the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek in Vienna.35 The prayer was to be
33 Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo: Historia General y Natural de las Indias, .1 (Madrid: Atlas, 1992),
p. 3. Esteban Mira Caballos and I.E.S. Mariano Barbacid, ‘Indios nobles y caciques en la corte real
española, siglo XVI’, Temas Americanistas, 16 (2003), pp. 6–7, and Mira Caballos, Indios y mestizos
americanos en la España del siglo XVI, p. 67.
34 José Luis Cortés López, Esclavo y Colono (Introducción y sociología de los negroafricanos en la
América Española del siglo XVI) (Salamanca: Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca, 2004), pp. 19–20.
35 Jean Devisse and Michel Mollat, ‘The African Transposed’, in The Image of The Black in Western
Art: From the Early Christian Era to the ‘Age of Discovery’, Africans in the Christian Ordinance of the
World, edited by David Bindman and Henry Louis Gates, Jr, 2. 2 (Cambridge, Mass., London: Harvard
42 Black but Human
read at noon to focus on the evangelization of the Christian message throughout

the world. It depicts the conversion of an official of the Ethiopian Queen related
in Chapter 8 of the New Testament book Acts of the Apostles, verses 26–40. It nar-
rates the way in which the apostle Philip has been instructed by an angel of the
Lord to travel from Jerusalem to Gaza where he met an important official from
Meroe, a kingdom in Nubia, then known as Ethiopia (nowadays covering upper
Egypt and lower Sudan), ruled over by Queen Candace Amanitare.36 Philip
instructed the Ethiopian minister in the faith and then baptized him. This icon-
ography will play a significant role in the visual representation of the emergence
of the emancipatory ‘subject’, in Hapsburg Spain, as we will see in chapter 6. It is
worth mentioning that the visual articulation of this belief in Spain became
ubiquitous during the Enlightenment and following the establishment of the
Bourbon dynasty in 1701, as is shown by the representation of the sacrament of
Baptism (1723–31) by Pedro Moreno at the Baptistery Chapel of the Mosque-
Cathedral in Córdoba (see Fig 2.2). This decoration, commissioned from the
city’s bishop Marcelino Siuri (1654–1731), was one of the very few trompe d’oeil
altarpieces in Spain. The emphasis of the iconographic programme is on the
whitening of the soul of Afro-Hispanic people, achieved by use of symbols of
purification and renewal, and complemented by Latin inscriptions from the Bible
and verses written in Spanish by the Jesuit Juan de Santiago. The three scenes
depicted are arranged in the main space and, in the upper part of the altarpiece,
Moses is represented on the left, and David, on the right, with the inscription from
Psalm 51: ‘Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin.’37
In the central area, the depiction of God spraying a semi-naked neophyte with
rain water is based on the conversion of the first minister of Candace. In this
altarpiece, there are no mediators between God and the neophyte. Instead, the
written verse from Psalm 51:7, ‘Wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow’ links
their meeting gazes. On the left of the central scene, the inscription from Psalm 42:1
‘As a deer longs for flowing streams, so my soul longs for you, O God’ is written
to accompany the image of a deer drinking water from a fountain, while on the
right, the scene was the Rock at Horeb (Exodus 17:1–7) that narrates God’s inter-
vention through Moses to relieve the thirst of the Israelites in the desert, an
imagery complemented by the inscription from St John 4:14: ‘but those who
drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water that I will
give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.’ On the top
of this scene, in the upper part of the retable, two angels hold bishop Siuri’s coat
of arms with the inscription ‘Rain in abundance, O God, you showered abroad;
you restored your heritage when it languished’, from Psalm 68:10.
36 Accessed 13 July 2016, https://www.theroot.com/an-image-of-inclusion-or-colonialism-

1790896074
37 Francisco Manuel Fernández Chaves and Rafael Mauricio Pérez García, ‘Las intervenciones del
obispo Marcelino Siuri en la Catedral de Córdoba’, De Arte, 14 (2015), pp. 90–103.
Fig. 2.2. Pedro Moreno, Allegory of Baptism, 1723–31, Chapel of St Marina, St Matthias
and Baptistery, Mosque-Cathedral, Córdoba.
44 Black but Human
The Christianization of African slaves through baptism and the learning of the
catechism was promoted by the archbishop of Seville, Pedro Vaca de Castro y
Quiñones (Roa, 14 May 1534–Seville, 20 December 1623) in his Instrucción para
remediar y asegurar, quanto con la divina gracia fuere posible, que ninguno de los
Negros que vienen de Guinea, Angola, y otras Provincias de aquella costa de África,
carezca del sagrado Baptismo, published in Seville in 1614.38 He was the son of the
jurist Cristóbal Vaca de Castro, General Captain and Governor of Peru (1540–5);
therefore, he was certainly aware of the indoctrination system and the importance
of the baptism of Native Americans in the New World.39 When Castro y Quiñones
was Archbishop of Seville (1610–23), he actively protected the black community
against the termination of their confraternities.40 His attitude was in line with his
previous commitment towards the conversion of the moriscos, slaves and freed
slaves and the poor, when he was archbishop of Granada (1589–1610).41 In the
spirit of the Counter-Reformation and with his background in Law from the
University in Salamanca, Castro y Quiñones took charge of the project to ascer-
tain the validity of baptism of Afro-Hispanics and their subsequent indoctrin
ation. It was based on the results of previous experience with Afro-Hispanic
slaves in Seville by the theologian Diego Ruiz de Montoya (Seville, 1562–Seville,
1632), whose conclusion was that African slaves had no knowledge of Christian
doctrine, or at best a rudimentary one.42 The sacrament was directly targeted at
Africans originally coming from today’s Cacheu (Cacheo) in Guinea-Bissau and
not at those from Congo and Angola and so it was crucial to identify the place
of origin of the newly arrived Africans (bozales) and the language they spoke in
order to decide on the validity of baptism. However, in 1627, Castro y Quiñones
extended imposed baptism to those slaves coming from ‘Angola’.43 The archbishop
complemented Montoya’s work with information about the state of Africans and
38 Pedro de Castro y Quiñones’s Instructions for Remedying and Ensuring that None of the Blacks is
Lacking in Sacred Baptism in Tanya J. Tiffany, ‘Light, Darkness, and African Salvation: Velázquez’s
Supper at Emmaus’, Art History, 31 (2008), pp. 41–6. See also Borja Medina, S.J., ‘La experiencia sevil-
lana de la Compañía de Jesús en la evangelización de los esclavos negros y su representación en
América’, p. 87.
39 The poet Calvete de Estrella praises the epic events of the archbishop’s father as Governor of
Peru, see Manuel Antonio Díaz Gito, ‘Calvete de Estrella y Pedro de Castro y Quiñones, arzobispo de
Granada’, in Benito Arias Montano y los humanistas de su tiempo, edited by José María Maestre
Maestre, et al., vol. 2 (2006), pp. 792–3.
40 Moreno, La antigua hermandad de los negros de Sevilla, p. 91; Enriqueta Vila Vilar, ‘La evangeli-
zación del esclavo negro y su integración en el mundo americano’, in Negros, Mulatos, Zambaigos.
Derroteros africanos en los mundos ibericos, edited by Berta Ares Queija and Alessandro Stella (Seville:
Escuela de Estudios Hispanoamericanos, 2000), p. 193 and Díaz Gito, ‘Calvete de Estrella y Pedro de
Castro y Quiñones, arzobispo de Granada’, pp. 789–90, 802.
41 Borja Medina, S.J., ‘La experiencia sevillana de la Compañía de Jesús en la evangelización de
los esclavos negros y su representación en América’, pp. 82–3. Moreno, La antigua hermandad de los
negros de Sevilla, p. 91.
42 Borja Medina, S.J., ‘La experiencia sevillana de la Compañía de Jesús en la evangelización de los
esclavos negros y su representación en América’, p. 83.
43 Ignacio Camacho Martínez, La Hermandad de los Mulatos de Sevilla: Antecedentes históricos de
la Hermandad del Calvario (Seville: Ayuntamiento de Sevilla, 2001), p. 57.
their baptism in their place of origin, which was provided by fellow Jesuits and
the network they had established between the Portuguese Jesuits in Cape Verde
and Angola, Lisbon and Seville, and between Brazil and Cartagena de Indias. The
theologians of the Jesuit College of St Hermenegildo in Seville approved Castro y
Quiñones’s Instructions.44 On 20 February 1614, the archbishop issued an edict
about the administration of baptism and the other sacraments to Afro-Hispanic
slaves in all the parish churches in the kingdoms of Castile and Aragon.45 A
Catalogue (Catálogo or Padrón) of Afro-Hispanic slaves and freed slaves was kept
to record their name, sex, social condition (slave or freed; bozal or ladino), name
of slave owner, and, more importantly, if they had been baptized in Spain.46 In
January 1617, Castro y Quiñones sent an account of this mission to Pope Paul V
and suggested the baptism of Afro-Hispanic slaves in the kingdoms of Castile and
Aragon, in Europe, and in the New World be administered following the example
of Seville.47 The result of his campaign in Seville was the registration of more than
6,000 baptisms, and in the Spanish colonies, where his Instructions were adopted
by 1625, 100,000 baptisms were registered.48
Baptism allowed Afro-Hispanics and mixed-race people and their descendants
to join the category of ‘New Christians’.49 The Spanish conception of human
diversity that had already been established across religious lines in the societies of
imperial Spain through the categories of ‘Old Christians’ and ‘New Christians’
coexisted with the persistent belief that darkness or blackness tended to connote
slavery. This categorization was legally formalized from the middle of the sixteenth
century, when the chapter of the Cathedral of Toledo approved the policy of
purity of blood on 23 July 1547.50 Archbishop Juan Martínez Silíceo declared that
from that moment on, members of the high clergy must always belong to the
category of ‘old Christian’, so excluding the active participation of ‘new’ Christians
and the descendants of the lineages of Jews, Moors, or heretics, even if they were
esclavos negros y su representación en América’, pp. 76, 83–5.
45 Antonio Domínguez Ortiz, ‘La esclavitud en Castilla durante la edad moderna’, in Estudios de
historia social de España, edited by Carmelo Viñas y Mey et al., 2 (Madrid: Consejo Superior de
Investigaciones Científicas, 1952), pp. 392–4. Vila Vilar, ‘La evangelización del esclavo negro y su inte-
gración en el mundo americano’, pp. 193–5.
46 Vila Vilar, ‘La evangelización del esclavo negro y su integración en el mundo americano’, p. 193.
47 Joaquín Rodríguez Mateos, ‘De los esclavos y marginados: Dios de blancos y piedad de negros.
La cofradía de los morenos de Sevilla’, in Actas del II Congreso de Historia de Andalucía. Córdoba,
1991, I (Córdoba, Junta de Andalucía and Obra Social y Cultural Cajasur, 1995), p. 575 and Vila Vilar,
‘La evangelización del esclavo negro y su integración en el mundo americano’, p. 193.
esclavos negros y su representación en América’, pp. 85–8.
49 Claudio Lomnitz-Adler, Exits from the Labyrinth. Culture and Ideology in the Mexican National
Space (Berkeley, Los Angeles, Oxford: University of California Press, 1992), p. 263. See also María
Elena Martínez, Genealogical Fictions: Limpieza de Sangre, Religion, and Gender in Colonial Mexico
(Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2008).
50 John H. Elliott, Imperial Spain 1469–1716 (London: Penguin, 2002), pp. 107, 221.
46 Black but Human
university-educated members of the nobility.51 The Jesuits firmly opposed this

legal categorization and the policies of purity of blood, and proposed a different
approach to traditional understandings of faith by highlighting the ‘experience’
of God and charitable practices as the sources of the newly reformed Catholic
faith.52 Their inclusive approach was also embraced by Las Casas. who believed
that the conversos should be included in the Church based on the universal
benefits given by Christ in his Passion.53 However, between 1555 and 1556,
Pope Paul IV and Philip II King of Spain confirmed the policy of purity of blood
at the same time as the Council of Trent was re-defining the nature of Catholic
faith.54 In the last session, on 3 December 1563, the French Cardinal Charles de
Guise defined true faith as a ‘pure and healthy doctrine’, after claiming that ‘this
is the faith of St Peter. This is the faith of the Fathers of the Church. This is the
orthodox faith.’55
The correlation between ‘blackness’ and unorthodox Christianity, reinforced
by the permanent tribunal of the Inquisition, which from 1480 had its seat in
Seville,56 contributed to the exclusion of Afro-Hispanics from the urban religious
and aristocratic confraternities, which in Spain ‘tend to be independent of guild
sponsorship.’57 In these institutions there were special committees ‘sworn to secrecy,
51 Juan Hernández Franco and Antonio Irigoyen López, ‘Cristianos viejos y cristianos nuevos: ¿una
misma fidelidad al rey y a la religión cristiana?’, in Les minorités face au problème de la fidélité dans
l’Espagne des XV-XVII siècles, edited by Rica Amran (Reims: Indigo/Université de Picardie Jules
Vernes, 2013), p. 120.
52 Archbishop Silíceo suspected the Jesuits of being heretics because of their opposition to legisla-
tion around purity of blood. Hernández Franco and Irigoyen López, ‘Cristianos viejos y cristianos
nuevos: ¿una misma fidelidad al rey y a la religión cristiana?’, p. 127 and Bartolomé Escandell Bonet,
‘La Reforma de Cisneros y su influencia en el pensamiento de Ignacio’, in San Ignacio de Loyola en
Alcalá de Henares, edited by Rafael M. Sanz de Diego (Madrid: Institución de Estudios Complutenses,
1991), pp. 13–50.
53 Hernández Franco and Irigoyen López, ‘Cristianos viejos y cristianos nuevos, edited by Amran
(2013), p. 139. Francisco de Borja Medina, S.J., ‘Ignacio de Loyola y la limpieza de sangre’, Encuentro
Islamo-Cristiano, 339–40 (2000): pp. 2–16. Albert A. Sicroff, Los estatutos de limpieza de sangre:
Controversias entre los siglos XV y XVII (Madrid: Taurus, 1979), pp. 315–36; Antonio Domínguez
Ortiz, Los judeoconversos en España y América (Madrid: Istmo, 1971), pp. 101–4; Robert A. Maryks,
The Jesuit Order as a Synagogue of Jews. Jesuits of Jewish Ancestry and Purity-of-Blood Laws in the Early
Society of Jesus (Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, 2010).
54 In Spain, the Catechism of the Council of Trent was not translated into Spanish until the
Catecismo del Santo Concilio de Trento para los párrocos ordenado por disposición de San Pío V
(Madrid, Imprenta de la Compañía de impresores y libreros del Reino, 1860), cited by Hernández
Franco and Irigoyen López, ‘Cristianos viejos y cristianos nuevos’, pp. 117–44.
55 Cardinal Guise’s definition of true faith and his claims are cited in Hernández Franco and
Irigoyen López, ‘Cristianos viejos y cristianos nuevos’, p. 131, Ronnie Po-Chia Hsia, El mundo de la
renovación católica (1540–1770) (Madrid: Akal, 2010), pp. 42–3 and Catecismo Romano promulgado
por el Concilio de Trento (Barcelona: Editorial Litúrgica Española, 1926), p. 21.
56 See also Camacho Martínez, La Hermandad de los Mulatos de Sevilla, p. 58, who mentions the
records of mixed-race victims of the Inquisition.
57 Isidoro Moreno, Cofradías y hermandades andaluzas: estructura, simbolismo e identidad (Seville:
Editoriales Andaluzas Unidas, 1985), p. 53 and Susan Verdi Webster, Art and Ritual in Golden-Age
Spain: Sevillian Confraternities and the Processional Sculpture of Holy Week (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1998), p. 16.
to review testimonies on the qualifications of candidates’.58 Exclusion of members

was not necessarily based on class, as the wealthiest confraternities in Seville laid
out regulations about how to join them, as we can see with those of Santa Caridad
(Holy Charity) in 166159 or the Cristo de la Expiración y María Santísima del
Patrocinio in 1691, where the category Indians was added to the restrictive list of
those barred from admission:
We command that the Persons who might become Brothers of this Confraternity
be good Christians and not Moors, Jews, Mulattoes, nor Slaves, nor those
newly converted to our holy faith, nor the sons of such [persons], nor still less
condemned to shameful penalties by the Court, nor Indians, but honorable
People of good reputation lifestyle and habits [about] whom information is
collected by the Officials of our Confraternity [and] about whom we search
our consciences.60
‘Old Christians’, cleansed of ‘bad race’ (cristianos viejos limpios de mala raza)
could learn any profession and have access to any guild, as is shown by the request
from members of a less wealthy confraternity in cosmopolitan Seville, like the
Tres Caídas, de San Isidoro in the Parish of Santiago. Founded in 1605, the broth-
ers who were ‘Old Christian’ coach drivers (cocheros) successfully pleaded with
Philip V of Spain in 1733 that they be given the guarantee, protection and the
right to learn their profession.61 The association of the word ‘black’ and ‘slave’ and
the policies of purity of blood (limpieza de sangre) also imposed social restric-
tions on Afro-Hispanic people such as barring them from carrying arms unless
‘in the performance of their regular duties’ or when they were with their masters,
and limiting the number of slaves and ex-slaves that could gather in ‘taverns, inns,
and cheap restaurants’.62
To conclude, to be a black ‘New Christian’ meant exclusion from the centres of
power and the concepts associated with ‘good lives, reputation, and customs’. Yet
it also meant inclusion in Spanish Catholic society where Afro-Hispanics were
allowed to create their exclusively religious black institutions.
58 Maureen Flynn, ‘Rituals of Solidarity in Castilian Confraternities’, Renaissance and Reform,

13 (1) (1989), p. 63.
59 Moreno, La antigua hermandad de los negros de Sevilla, p. 53.
60 This quotation is in Verdi Webster, Art and Ritual in Golden-Age Spain, p. 39.
61 Antonio Domínguez Ortiz, ‘Aspectos sociales de las cofradías sevillanas. Un Memorial de la
Cofradía de las Tres Caídas, de San Isidoro, en defensa de los cocheros’, Archivo Hispalense (1959),
93–4, pp. 167, 168–9.
62 Ruth Pike, Aristocrats and Traders: Sevillian Society in the Sixteenth Century (London and
Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1972), p. 184 and Aurelia Martín Casares, ‘Free and freed black
Africans in Granada in the time of the Spanish Renaissance’, in Black Africans in Renaissance
Europe, edited by Thomas F. Earle and Kate J. P. Lowe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2005), p. 256.
48 Black but Human
Black Confraternities
To avoid the threat of Muslim contamination and to ameliorate the paradoxical

position of enslaved and liberated Afro-Hispanics and the horror of their everyday
experiences, by the end of the fourteenth century the Crown and the Church
had created the first exclusively black confraternities of Western Europe. Black
confraternities became, as the Spanish anthropologist Isidoro Moreno rightly
argues, the only place for the black community formally to assert their collect-
ive identity with dignity even if these congregations were also intended to con-
trol the social behaviour of the enslaved and freed Afro-Hispanic population
in imperial Spain. According to Flynn, the confraternities were ‘the first self-
consciously democratic organizations in Castile, founded upon the religious
concept of universa fraternitas’.63 I believe that the roots of the emergence of
both the emancipatory subject in imperial Spain, and the formation of black
solidarity and resistance in Spain are to be found in these black institutions
(chapter 6). The Black but Human topos, as we have previously seen, was articu-
lated in the newly discovered Afro-Hispanic work songs in these exclusively
‘black’ religious institutions.
It is therefore important to analyse the nature, aims, and organization of the
very first black confraternity in Western Europe. This was founded in Seville, dur-
ing the reign of King Enrique III of Castile (1393–1406), by Cardinal-Archbishop
Gonzalo de Mena y Roelas of Seville in the last decade of the fourteenth century
(1394–1401) as the historian Diego Ortíz de Zúñiga recorded in his Anales (1677).64
Afro-Hispanic freedmen and slaves were intensely and hierarchically organized.
The confraternity was originally dedicated to Our Lady of the Kings and the day
of the Epiphany on 6 January was the most important festival for its members. It
was also the day they elected their own king, and in 1504 Juan de Castillo became
the institution’s first designated king.65 In 1587, this Marian devotional brother-
hood merged with the black Confraternity of Our Lady of Piety, a penitential
group in Seville, founded in 1554 in the chapel of the hospital of St Antony Abbot,
63 Flynn, ‘Rituals of Solidarity in Castilian Confraternities’, p. 66.

64 This confraternity was founded ‘before 1400’: see Diego Ortíz de Zúñiga, Annales eclesiásticos y
seculares de la Muy Noble, y Muy Leal ciudad de Sevilla, metrópoli de la Andalucía, que contienen sus
más principales memorias desde el año de 1246, en que emprendió conquistarla del poder de los Moros,
el gloriosísimo Rey S. Fernando Tercero de Castilla, y León, hasta el 1671 en que la Católica Iglesia le
concedió el culto y título de Bienaventurado (Madrid: Imprenta Real. Por Juan García Infançon, 1677),
pp. 77–8: Los Negros tienen su capilla y ermita de nuestra Señora de Gracia, vulgarmente de los Ángeles,
frontera a la nueva parroquia de San Roque, cerca de la puerta del Osario; es la fundación de antes de
1400, y del tiempo del Arzobispo Don Gonzalo de Mena: de ella hace su estación su Cofradía el Viernes
Santo por la mañana y en estos años se ve reparada por el tesón piadoso de recoger menudas limosnas sus
pobres y humildes hermanos, cuyo cornado acaso es más grato al Cielo que ofrendas más ricas de otros
más ostentosos y menos sencillos. See also Moreno, La antigua hermandad de los negros de Sevilla,
pp. 27, 49–56.
65 Moreno, La antigua hermandad de los negros de Sevilla, pp. 50–3 and Moreno, Cofradías y
hermandades andaluzas, p. 55.
named after the third-century African saint born in Egypt.66 The name of Our
Lady of the Angels was chosen for the newly amalgamated confraternity.67 On
11 July 1784, the denomination of ‘little blacks’ (vulgo de los Negritos) was added
to this confraternity for the first time, and it is still currently in use.68 Only Afro-
Hispanic freedmen were originally admitted to it as is clearly specified in the first
chapter of their 1554 regulations. Slaves were welcome to join as members, but
they had to provide a written license from their owners with their signature and if
they could not write, they needed to provide witnesses.69
The Catholic Monarchs named the first steward (mayoral) of black and mixed-
race slaves and freed slaves in Seville on 8 November 1475. He was their royal
servant Juan de Valladolid, an African of noble descent who served in the royal
chambers, as Ortiz de Zúñiga recorded:
For the many good, loyal and signal services that you have done, and do every
day, and because we know your competence, talent and availability, we make
you steward and judge of all the Blacks, Mulatos, free and captive, that are cap-
tive and free in the very noble and loyal City of Seville, and in all its archbishop-
ric, and that the said Black men and women, and Mulatto men and women,
make neither festivities nor tribunals among them, save before you, the said
Juan de Valladolid, Black, our judge and Mayoral of said Blacks, Mulato women
and men: and we order that you be familiar with the debates and petitions and
marriages and other matters that might happen among them, and nothing else,
since you are an adequate person for it, or who is within your power, and you
know the laws and ordinances that there have to be, and we are informed that
you are of noble lineage among said Black men and women and we know that
according to your capacity you merit becoming Steward.70
66 Saint Anthony (251–356) was a Christian monk from Egypt, revered since his death as a saint.
He sold all his possessions and gave the proceeds to the poor and lived in the desert, where he created
the first Christian monastic community. His visual attributes are summarized ‘as a venerable old man
with a long beard wearing a monk’s habit with a T printed on the left side of the hood, holding a book
and a staff in one hand and a bell in the other, and having a pig at his feet. Also a brightly burning fire.’
See http://www.christianiconography.info/anthonyAbbot.html. In Seville there was another confra
ternity dedicated to Our Lady of the Rosary founded in 1584 for negros, indios y mulatos; see Camacho
Martínez, La Hermandad de los Mulatos de Sevilla, p. 59.
67 The full name of the new black confraternity is Antigua, Pontificia y Franciscana Hermandad y
Cofradía de Nazarenos del Santísimo Cristo de la Fundación y Nuestra Señora de los Ángeles. See Verdi
Webster, Art and Ritual in Golden-Age Spain, pp. 33, 34, 35, and 38, and Moreno, Cofradías y herman-
dades andaluzas, p. 195.
68 This name was added after the name of the confraternity ‘Hermandad de Nuestra Señora de los
Angeles’ in a document from the Cathedral Chapter, see Moreno, La antigua hermandad de los negros
de Sevilla, pp. 25, 141.
70 Ortiz de Zúñiga, Anales eclesiásticos, p. 78, quoted in Moreno, La antigua hermandad de los
negros de Sevilla, pp. 43–4: Sobresaliendo algunos en capacidad, se daba a uno título de Mayoral,
que patrocinaba a los demás con sus amos y con las Justicia componía sus rencillas. de Noviembre de
este año [1475], en que dieron título a uno llamado Juan de Valladolid, su Portero de Cámara: ‘Por
los muchos buenos, é leales, é señalados servicios que nos habeis fecho, y fazeis cada día, y porque
50 Black but Human
Juan de Valladolid was known as the ‘Black Count’ (Conde Negro) and his presence
has been immortalized in the name of the Conde Negro Street that still exists today
behind the confraternity’s chapel.71 His main duty was to represent the Afro-
Hispanic population before municipal and royal authorities, to intervene in the
judicial system and to help slaves to go to court if their masters had reneged on
their promised manumission.72 In fact, the confraternity had a set of social aims.
These included running the Casa-Hospital (House-Hospital), founded at the same
time to serve the black population, and especially concerned with caring for the
sick, the elderly, and the disabled, offering decent burials for their dead, and
supporting their widows.73 Collective, practical solidarity was encouraged and
organized by members and lack of solidarity was penalized.74
The mayordomo also had to invigilate the mechanisms for the annual election
of their stewards who would handle their administration, such as collecting their
income, membership fees, the costs of masses for the dead, burials, and meetings.
He also regulated and punished immoral behaviour of members involved in
gambling, blasphemy, adultery, prostitution, concubinage, and fights, and had the
authority to expel ‘the brother involved in conflicts’ from their confraternities.75
Juan de Valladolid was also responsible for the organization of their religious fes-
tivals, dances (zarabanda and paracumbé), weddings, feast day celebrations, and
processions on Corpus Christi and in Holy Week.76 Members met periodically
to organize and control their finances and their membership, and officers were
chosen annually by general election. These included: a supervisor to collect money
from their members, a secretary to keep the books, a treasurer, a caretaker of the
chapel, images and altars, four deputies, various magistrates, and a collector of
conocemos vuestra suficiencia y habilidad y disposición, facemos vos Mayoral e Juez de todos los Negros e
Loros [mulatos], libres o captivos, que estan é son captivos é horros [libertos] en la muy noble e muy
leal Ciudad de Sevilla, é en todo su Arzobispado, é que no puedan fazer ni fagan los dichos Negros
y Negras, y Loros y Loras, ningunas fiestas nin juzgados entre ellos, salvo ante vos el dicho Juan de
Valladolid, Negro, nuestro Juez y Mayoral de de los dichos Negros, Loros y Loras; y mandamos que
vos conozcais de los debates y pleitos y casamientos y otras cosas que entre ellos hubiere é non otro
alguno, por cuanto sois persona suficiente para ello, o quien vuestro poder hobiere, y sabeis las leyes é
ordenanzas que deben tener, é nos somos informados que sois de linage noble entre los dichos negros,
y negras y conocemos que segun vuestra suficiencia mereceys ser mayoral. The last line of this document
from the Archivo Municipal de Sevilla (Tumbo de los Reyes Católicos, I, fol.197 ff.) was completed
and published by Juan R. Castellano, ‘El negro esclavo en el entremés del Siglo de Oro’, Hispania, 4 (1)
(1961), p. 64.
71 Pike, Aristocrats and Traders, p. 174 and Moreno, La antigua hermandad de los negros de Sevilla,
pp. 43, 53.
73 Moreno, La antigua hermandad de los negros de Sevilla, pp. 25, 35, 39, 47, 59–67. See also Verdi
Webster, Art and Ritual in Golden-Age Spain, pp. 36–7.
74 Moreno, La antigua hermandad de los negros de Sevilla, pp. 66–7.
75 In the 1554 regulations of the oldest confraternity, it is specified that a brother must be a good
example to the community, see Moreno, La antigua hermandad de los negros de Sevilla, p. 63.
76 Moreno, La antigua hermandad de los negros de Sevilla, pp. 43–4, 54. Pike, Aristocrats and
Traders, pp. 178–9.
alms from the public.77 The confraternity of Our Lady of the Angels was poorer
than more traditional and wealthier institutions, but a series of individuals helped
their members financially. One of their benefactors was the Duke of Medina
Sidonia,78 as a series of documents dated from 1550 regarding donations in wills
of money, properties, or belongings to the institution show.79 Members also
contributed to the funds of the confraternity with entry and annual fees, as well
as fines.80 They paid an annual tribute of 6 hens and a fee to Francisco de Vargas,
Marqués of Castellón until 12 December 1604 and to his successors until 1722
and thereafter to the Convent of St Agustín.81 This income enabled members of the
confraternity to hire white priests to celebrate mass and perform the sacraments,82
to maintain and commission devotional images and altars, and to meet the
confraternity’s charitable aims and social functions.
Members had the legal right to sign contracts, and thus could buy the land
where they had originally built their institution in the parish of San Bernardo,
named after Saint Bernard of the Cistercian Order in the middle of the fifteenth
century.83 The name of this extramural district, where most black people lived,
comes from the confraternity of San Bernardo, who managed the cemetery near
the hermitage that had been confiscated in 1482 from the Converso population
(the Jews who had converted to Christianity). The original buildings of this insti-
tution were demolished in 1964 to erect the one that survives to this day.84
Instead, inside the city walls, mixed-race people (pardos or loros) founded
their own confraternity in 1572 (Nazarenos del Santo Ecce Homo, Santo Cristo
del Calvario y Nuestra Señora de la Presentación) with the authorization of
Cristóbal Rojas y Sandoval (1502–80), archbishop of Seville from 1571 until his
death.85 In the same year, Rojas y Sandoval issued synodal provisions to curtail
the common practice of amancebamiento or the union between black slave
77 Pike, Aristocrats and Traders, pp. 188–9 and Verdi Webster, Art and Ritual in Golden-Age Spain,
pp. 140–1.
78 Moreno, Cofradías y hermandades andaluzas, p. 47.
79 Moreno, La antigua hermandad de los negros de Sevilla, p. 45, in Libro de Cuentas de Mayordomos
(1675–1723), p. 23. See also Ortiz de Zúñiga, Anales eclesiásticos (Madrid, 1677), Book XVI, 4, p. 260.
82 Moreno, La antigua hermandad de los negros de Sevilla (1997), p. 72: The first priest to officiate at
the service of the confraternity was Hernando de Aldana, named Cura de los Ángeles and from
1584–1585 his successors were called Cura de los Ángeles y del Señor San Roque.
83 Saint Bernard from Burgundy (c.1090–1153) was the founder and Abbot of Clairvaux. He aided
the foundation of the Cistercian order and is one of the Doctors of the Church. He was an adviser to
the kings of France and England and was instrumental in the undertaking of the Second Crusade. In
art, he is usually depicted as a Cistercian monk with his white robe, with a book or pen in his hand or
with a chained devil ‘to represent his defeat of heresy’ or with a beehive as a signifier of his eloquence
that it ‘is said to have been as sweet as honey.’ See George Ferguson, Signs & Symbols in Christian Art
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961), pp. 12, 108–9.
84 Moreno, La antigua hermandad de los negros de Sevilla, pp. 45, 71–2.
85 See Camacho Martínez, La Hermandad de los Mulatos de Sevilla, p. 62, Verdi Webster, Art and
Ritual in Golden-Age Spain, p. 222.
52 Black but Human
women and white slave owners (80 per cent of female slaves had one or two
mixed-raced children):
We are informed that in this city and arch-diocese many people have slaves,
many of whom are used as concubines and what is most scandalous is that their
masters, with no fear of God and in grave danger to their souls, consent to this
for the interest that accrues from the slaves giving birth.86
The confraternity for pardos was dedicated to Our Lady of the Presentation in the
parish of San Ildefonso. It was named after the seventh-century archbishop of
Toledo (657–67) and patron saint of Spain, known for his writings against the
infidels (On the perpetual virginity against three infidels) and the biblical origins of
baptism and Hispanic baptismal practices (De cognitione baptism).87 This made
him a key Tridentine Spanish saint and his cult was spread worldwide by Iberian
missionaries. This confraternity (Hermandad de mulatos) was linked to the parish
of St Ildephonsus until 1908.88
There was a proliferation of black penitential confraternities in Spain after the
reforms initiated by the Council of Trent (1545–63), fulfilling both the evangel
ical mission that demanded the spiritual integration of all slaves and the decree
that those ‘sent to the New World be Christians’.89 Our Lady of the Angels became
the blueprint for all black and mixed-race confraternities founded subsequently
in the Spanish empire in key slave cities in the kingdoms of Castile and Aragón
and in the colonies. The oldest institutions to follow Seville’s model were the con
fraternity of Sant Jaume in Barcelona90 and La Casa dels Negres in Valencia. Both
were founded by the end of the fifteenth century.91 In Cádiz, the black confraternity
86 Camacho Martínez, La Hermandad de los Mulatos de Sevilla, p. 53: Somos informados que en esta
ciudad y Arçobispado muchas personas tienen esclavas, las quales por la mayor parte están amancebadas,
y lo que mas escandaliza es, que sus amos como poco temor a Dios, y en grave perjuizio de sus animas, lo
consientan por el interés que se les sigue, de los partos de las esclavas.
87 St Ildephonsus, Benedictine abbot and archbishop of Toledo is usually depicted when the Virgin
Mary appeared to him on his episcopal throne and presented him with a chasuble. Flynn, ‘Rituals of
Solidarity in Castilian Confraternities’, p. 30.
88 The full name of the confraternities of mulatos is Nazarenos del Santo Ecce Homo, Santo Cristo
del Calvario y Nuestra Señora de la Presentación. Camacho Martínez, La Hermandad de los Mulatos de
Sevilla, p. 66.
89 Verdi Webster, Art and Ritual in Golden-Age Spain, p. 34.
90 Iván Armenteros Martínez,‘De hermandades y procesiones. La cofradía de esclavos y libertos
negros de Sant Jaume de Barcelona y la asimilación de la negritud en la Europa premoderna (siglos
XV–XVI)’, Clio—Revista de pesquisa histórica, 29 (2) (2011), pp. 1–23; José Luis Cortés López, Los
orígenes de la esclavitud negra en España (Madrid: Mundo Negro, 1986), p. 175, and Phillips, Jr,
Slavery in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia (2014), p. 94.
91 Debra Blumenthal, ‘ “La Casa dels Negres”: Black African Solidarity in Late Medieval Valencia’,
in Black Africans in Renaissance Europe, edited by Thomas F. Earle and Kate J. P. Lowe, pp. 225–46 and
Miguel Gual Camarena ‘Una cofradía de negros libertos en el siglo XV’, Estudios de Edad Media de la
Corona de Aragón, 5 (1952), pp. 457–66. In the case of Valencia, one aim of their confraternity was the
manumission of their fellow slaves and the funds available for this came from their own members
dedicated to Our Lady of the Rosary and Our Lady of Health for slaves and
freedmen and freedwomen was created in the church of Santa Misericordia
before 1575 while the confraternity for ‘mulattoes’, dedicated to Santo Ecce Homo
was founded in the middle of the seventeenth century in the women’s hospital.92
In the eighteenth century, this cosmopolitan port would have the highest con-
centration of enslaved Africans and ex-slaves registered in Spain. Other black
confraternities emerged in Granada, in Madrid, the seat of the Hapsburg court
from 156193 and in the previous royal administrative capital of Valladolid, which
in the middle of the sixteenth century had at least one hundred confraternities
(mostly for whites) for a population of 30,000.94 Most of these institutions were
dedicated to Our Lady of the Rosary and Saint Benedict of Palermo, while the
confraternity of Seville, and others, such as those in Jaén, Jerez de la Frontera95
and in Lima (Peru) were dedicated to Our Lady of the Kings (Nuestra Señora de
los Reyes), a tradition also adopted by the black confraternities in the Caribbean
and in New World.96
There were, however, interesting local differences between confraternities, in
terms of the ethnicity and gender of their members, their urban location and
their material wealth. In the first quarter of the sixteenth century, black freedmen
(de color moreno) from the New World included Native Americans who came to
Spain with their slave owners and were integrated into the black confraternity of
Jaén;97 and in Las Palmas in Gran Canaria, there are records both of exceptional
coexistence with ‘Old Christians’ in Our Lady of the Rosary in the Convent of
with, paradoxically, the economic assistance of a few of the slave owners. Armenteros Martínez,
‘De hermandades y procesiones.’ (2011), p. 13.
92 In Cádiz, the confraternity dedicated to Our Lady of the Rosary and Our Lady of Health for
slaves and freedmen and women was created in the church of Santa Misericordia and moved in the
last decade of the sixteenth century to the church of the Candelaria: see Joaquín Álvaro Rubio, La
esclavitud en Barcarrota y Salvaleón en el período moderno (Siglos XVI–XVIII) (Badajoz: Diputación de
Badajoz, 2005), p. 174 and Moreno, Cofradías y hermandades andaluzas, pp. 194–7; Hipólito Sancho
de Sopranis, ‘Estructura y perfil demográfico de Cádiz en el siglo XVI’, in Estudios de historia social de
España, edited by Carmelo Viñas y Mey et al., 3 (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones
Científicas, 1955), pp. 533–612. The first documents about this confraternity date from 1575, see
Arturo Morgado García, La diócesis de Cádiz: de Trento a la desamortización (Cádiz: Universidad de
Cádiz, 2008), p. 11. For the confraternity of mixed-race freedmen, see Camacho Martínez, La
Hermandad de los Mulatos de Sevilla, p. 59.
93 Elena Sánchez de Madariaga, ‘Las cofradías en el Madrid Moderno’, in Madrid: Atlas Histórico de
la Ciudad. Siglos IX–XIX, edited by Virgilio Pinto Crespo and Santos Madrazo Madrazo (Madrid:
Fundación Caja de Madrid y Lunwerb Editores, 1995), pp. 350–6; Milagrosa Romero Samper, Las
cofradías en el Madrid del siglo XVIII (PhD dissertation, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, 1998).
95 Camacho Martínez, La Hermandad de los Mulatos de Sevilla, p. 59.
97 This institution was founded in 1600 by Juan de Cobo defined in the confraternity’s rules as color
moreno and prioste y hermano mayor until 1611. See Rafael Ortega Sagrista, ‘La Cofradía de los
Negros en el Jaén del Siglo XVII’, Boletín del Instituto de Estudios Jienenses, 4 (1–2) (1957), pp. 125–34
and Moreno, La antigua hermandad de los negros de Sevilla, pp. 50, 51–2, 54.
54 Black but Human
San Domingo and the presence of Morisco freedmen and freedwomen in the
confraternity of the Holy Spirit (Espíritu Santo).98 Records of women’s role in
these institutions show how freedwomen paid for the right to be buried by the
black confraternity of Our Lady of Rosary in the church of the Convent of Santo
Domingo. Similarly, freedwomen from the brotherhood of the Holy Spirit donated
money for the candles, alms and goods in exchange for the right to be buried in
the grounds of the black confraternity of Our Lady of Rosary, and in 1589 women
from the two confraternities in Telde did the same.
Juana Peraza decided ‘that she be given to the Virgin of the Rosary of Telden
of which she is a Sister’; Isabel de Betancor, who was a slave in Lanzarote and
then moved to Telde, sent money for alms and for candles, and Juana Pérez from
Las Palmas, also asked in her will to be buried in the Rosary chapel in Santo
Domingo in Las Palmas, for which she donated twenty reales.99 The available
documentation reveals that from the eighteenth century on Berbers and mixed-
race slaves coexisted with slaves and ex-slaves in the black Confraternity of the
Virgin of the Mercy in Málaga,100 although the explanation could be that most
black and mixed-race brotherhoods lost their exclusivity during the reforms
implemented by Charles III between 1777 and 1783 to dissolve these institutions.101
By contrast, the brotherhoods for gypsies, founded in the eighteenth century, are
still in existence.102
Black confraternities were generally poor, but the wealth of the Confraternity
of St Benedict of Palermo in the church of Santa Escolástica in the city of Granada
was an exception: this was founded in 1501 in the centre of the city and its mem-
bers served their congregation with ‘great ostentation’.103
The first black confraternity of Seville also became the prototype for the Native
American and black confraternities in the New World from the second half of the
sixteenth century onwards, these being mainly promoted by the Franciscan and
Carmelite orders as means of evangelization, and reflecting the deep belief in the
98 Both institutions were founded in the first quarter of the sixteenth century. Manuel Lobo
Cabrera, Los libertos en la sociedad canaria del siglo XVI (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones
Científicas, 1983), p. 110.
99 Lobo Cabrera, Los libertos en la sociedad canaria del siglo XVI (1983), pp. 110–14 and Manuel
Lobo Cabrera, ‘Cofradías en Gran Canaria. La Cofradía de los “Mancebos Solteros” de Telde’, Anuario
de Estudios Atlánticos, 41 (1995), pp. 389–90.
100 In Málaga, the confraternity was dedicated to Our Lady of the Rosary and it changed its name
to the brotherhood of the Santo Ángel Custodio in the eighteenth century: Álvaro Rubio, La esclavitud
en Barcarrota y Salvaleón en el período moderno (2005), p. 174. Aurelia Martín Casares, La esclavitud en
la Granada del siglo XVI: Género, raza y religión (Granada: Universidad de Granada, 2000), p. 423.
101 Camacho Martínez, La Hermandad de los Mulatos de Sevilla, p. 145.
102 Moreno, Cofradías y hermandades andaluzas, pp. 47, 196–7.
103 See Francisco Henríquez de Jorquera, Anales de Granada: Descripción del reino y ciudad de
Granada. Crónica de la Reconquista. (1482–1492). Sucesos de los años 1588 á 1646 (Granada: University
of Granada, 1987). See http://apaibailon.blogspot.co.uk/2012/12/la-hermandad-de-los-negros-y-
mulatos-de.html, accessed 22 January 2015.
universality of the Catholic Counter-Reformation Church and in its charitable

evangelical mission.104 In New Spain there were confraternities dedicated to
St Benedict of Palermo founded in the period from 1599 to 1646 in the following
centres: México City, Puebla, Veracruz, Querétaro, and San Miguel el Grande.105
They were also founded in the city of Guatemala City, Lima, Girón (New Granada),
Quito, Buenos Aires, and Córdoba, in Argentina, but also in Brazil (Minas Gerais,
Pernambuco, Bahía, and São Paulo), as well as in Lisbon, Seville, Cádiz, Granada,
Jaén, and Galicia.106
As we shall see in the next chapter, in post-Tridentine Spain, ‘black sainthood’
or the institutionalization of black people as saints was promoted in those very
religious black institutions, where the Black but Human topos had emerged. The
Hapsburg Crown and the Church fervently believed that images of African saints
aided the identification and conversion of Afro-Hispanic slaves and freedmen
to Christianity.
104 For an account of native and black confraternities in colonial Mexico and a bibliography on the
subject, see Moreno, Cofradías y hermandades andaluzas, pp. 197–203. For an impressive bibliography
on the subject, see Rafael Castañeda García, ‘Devociones y construccion de identidades entre los
negros y mulatos de la Nueva España (s. XVIII)’, in Fundación Visión Cultural, Memoria del VI
Encuentro Internacional sobre el Barroco. Imagen del Poder (Bolivia: Visión Cultural, 2012), pp. 241–7.
For an account of the confraternities in the New World, see Faith’s Boundaries: Laity and Clergy in
Early Modern Confraternities, edited by Nicholas Terpstra (Turnhout: Brepols, 2012).
105 Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán, La población negra de México: 1519–1810: Estudio etnohistórico
(Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1972), p. 431.
106 Rafael Castañeda García, ‘Santos negros, devotos de color. Las cofradías de San Benito de
Palermo en Nueva España. Identidades étnicas y religiosas, siglos XVII-XVIII’, in Devoción y paisan-
aje: las cofradías, congregaciones y hospitales de naturales en España y América, edited by Óscar Álvarez
Gila, Alberto Angulo Morales, Jon Ander Ramos Martínez (Bilbao: Universidad del País Vasco, 2014),
p. 147; Bernard Vincent, ‘Le culte des Saints Noirs dans le monde ibérique’, in Ritos y ceremonias en el
mundo hispano durante la Edad Moderna, edited by David González Cruz (Huelva: Universidad de
Huelva, 2002), pp. 121–32.
3
Visual Culture and Slavery
Tridentine Visual Culture
The reformed Catholic approach to religious imagery that was discussed at the
Council of Trent (1545–63) was responsible for the deep transformation of the
iconography, production, and reception of the visual form in Hapsburg Spain.
The debates on the aims, role, and functions of Catholic visual images were
articulated in the last session of the Council, in December 1563, and written
down in the decree ‘On the invocation, veneration, and relics, of saints, and on
sacred images’.1 Against the Protestants, the use of images was legitimized and
promoted by claiming a historical link with the ‘apostolic era’:
The holy Synod enjoins on all bishops, and others who sustain the office and
charge of teaching, that, agreeably to the usage of the Catholic and Apostolic
Church, received from the primitive times of the Christian religion, and agree
ably to the consent of the holy Fathers, and to the decrees of sacred Councils,
they especially instruct the faithful diligently concerning the intercession and
invocation of saints; the honour (paid) to relics; and the legitimate use of images.2
The emphasis on the use of images was justified, according to the Tridentine
bishops and contrary to the Protestants’ belief, because images do not replace the
prototype: ‘the images of Christ, of the Virgin Mother of God, and of the other
saints, are to be had and retained particularly in temples, and that due honour
and veneration are to be given them [. . .] because the honour which is shown
them is referred to the prototypes which those images represent.’3 The bishops
believed that the main function of images was to instruct the believer and there
fore to support religious teaching:
And if at times, when expedient for the unlettered people; it happen that the
facts and narratives of sacred Scripture are portrayed and represented; the
1 Ricardo García-Villoslada, Historia de la Iglesia en España (Madrid: Biblioteca de Autores

Cristianos, 1980), The Canons and Decrees, edited and translated by H. J. Schroeder (St Louis: B. Herder,
1950), and ‘The Council of Trent: The Twenty-Fifth Session’, in The canons and decrees of the sacred and
oecumenical Council of Trent, edited and translated by J. Waterworth (London: Dolman, 1848),
pp. 232–89, Hanover Historical Texts Project, scanned in 1995, online https://history.hanover.edu/texts/
trent/ct25.html, accessed 29 March 2017.
2 See ‘The Council of Trent’, p. 235. 3 ‘The Council of Trent’, p. 235.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198767978.001.0001
Visual Culture and Slavery 57
people shall be taught, that not thereby is the Divinity represented, as though it
could be seen by the eyes of the body, or be portrayed by colours or figures.4
Therefore, contrary to the Protestants, images and their didactic nature became
essential tools for the Catholic evangelization of the non-Europeans in the Iberian
empire:
teaching them [images of Christ, of the Virgin Mother of God], that the saints,
who reign together with Christ, offer up their own prayers to God for men; that
it is good and useful suppliantly to invoke them, and to have recourse to their
prayers, aid, (and) help for obtaining benefits from God, through His Son, Jesus
Christ our Lord, who alone is our Redeemer and Saviour.5
This educational aim was not new. It was anchored by the well-established value
given to Christian education promoted by Erasmus and the Humanist schools
across Europe and also by those founded by the Jesuits in the Catholic world. In
fact, in 1556, the Jesuit Pedro de Ribadeneira (1527–1611) wrote to Philip II,
who sent his best twenty-four Spanish bishops to Trent: ‘all the well-being of
Christianity and of the whole world depends on the proper education of the
youth.’6 This purpose was reiterated in the Council of Trent where the intercon
nectedness between faith and charity, which was seen to be inherently Catholic,
was highlighted: ‘And the bishops shall carefully teach this,—that, by means of
the histories of the mysteries of our Redemption, portrayed by paintings or other
representations, the people is instructed, and confirmed in (the habit of) remem
bering, and continually revolving in mind the articles of faith.’7 In order to achieve
these aims, the bishops had to set up a series of rules to establish the decorum of
the religious image. It followed that the Catholic visual form was to be intensely
scrutinized and monitored from conception to consumption. The result was that
any aspect of the religious form that was considered ‘inappropriate’, ‘harmful’, or a
‘distraction’ to the believer’s engagement with ‘piety’ had to be eliminated: ‘in the
invocation of saints, the veneration of relics, and the sacred use of images, every
superstition shall be removed, all filthy lucre be abolished; finally, all lascivious
ness be avoided; in such wise that figures shall not be painted or adorned with a
beauty exciting to lust.’8
The emerging reformed Catholic ‘realistic’ image also had to overcome and
transcend the prevailing highly intellectualized, anti-classical, ambiguous, and
4 ‘The Council of Trent’, p. 235. 5 ‘The Council of Trent’, p. 234.

6 John W. O’Malley, Trent: What Happened at the Council (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London,
England: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2013), pp. 45, 172–73, 244.
7 ‘The Council of Trent’, p. 235. 8 ‘The Council of Trent’, pp. 235–6.
58 Black but Human
homoerotic language of Mannerism at the European courts.9 Instead, the Tridentine

sacred image aimed to display ‘(i) clarity, simplicity, and, intelligibility, (ii) realistic
interpretation, and (iii) emotional stimulus to piety’, as Wittkower brilliantly
summarized it.10 Artists such as El Greco (Domenikos Theotocopoulos, 1541–1614)
or the Tuscan painter Federico Zuccaro (c.1540/3–1609), who were working for
Philip II at El Escorial near Madrid, had their paintings rejected by the King and
replaced by less-known painters in 1585 because of their ambivalent and unclear
compositions. Thus a painting by Romulo Cincinnato (1583–4) replaced The
Martyrdom of St Maurice by El Greco (1579–82), because of the latter’s emphasis
on the intellectual conversation about the martyrdom of this third-century ad
saint between St Maurice himself and three sixteenth-century generals of Philip II
of Spain, and a work by Pellegrino Tibaldi (1527–96) replaced the Adoration of
the Shepherds by Zuccaro, because of the latter’s inclusion of a basket of eggs, a
visual motif considered ‘inappropriate’ to the intended religious message.11
Mechanisms of iconographic control established a hierarchical monitoring of
the functions of images and their abuses and subsequently shifted responsibility
from clients and artists to the clergy:
let so great care and diligence be used herein by bishops, as that there be nothing
seen that is disorderly, or that is unbecomingly or confusedly arranged, nothing
that is profane, nothing indecorous, seeing that holiness becometh the house of
God. And that these things may be the more faithfully observed, the holy Synod
ordains, that no one be allowed to place, or cause to be placed, any unusual
image, in any place, or church, howsoever exempted, except that image have
been approved of by the bishop.12
Thus, in Hapsburg Spain, the production of the Catholic religious visual form
was achieved and implemented by a censor of religious art appointed by the
Inquisition,13 a move especially supported by Velázquez’s father-in-law, Francisco
Pacheco (1564–1644). This post was considered a public guarantee of limpieza de
sangre. He recorded his own appointment as an artistic censor for the Inquisition
in his treatise Arte de la pintura: antigüedad y grandeza, 1649, although completed
by 1638 (The Art of Painting, its Antiquity and Greatness): ‘I have been expressly
honoured by the Holy Tribunal of the Inquisition in being granted a special per
mission to examine the faults committed in such paintings, either through the
9 John Shearman, Mannerism (London: Penguin, 1967).

10 Rudolph Wittkower, Art and Architecture in Italy 1600–1750 (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books,
1990), pp. 21–2.
11 Rosemary Mulcahy, Philip II of Spain: Patron of the Arts (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2004),
pp. 34–6, 66–8.
12 ‘The Council of Trent’.
13 The Canons and Decrees, edited and translated by H. J. Schroeder (1950), Session 22, p. 157.
inadvertence or malice of the artists concerned, a responsibility officially laid

upon me on 7 March 1618.’14
The Tridentine definition of the functions of the religious visual form is echoed
in Pacheco’s treatise in Book 1, Chapter 11: On the Purpose of Painting and of
Holy Images, and the Good they do, and on the Authority they hold within the
Catholic Church, in his Arte de la pintura:
painting here is elevated to a supreme purpose in looking to eternal glory. And

in serving thereby to turn men’s faces away from every kind of vice, painting
itself leads them rather towards the true veneration of God our Lord. Thus, we
can see that Christian images are directed not only towards God, but also
towards ourselves and our fellow men. For there is no doubt that all virtuous
works are capable of serving at once the glory of God, our own instruction, and
the edification of our fellow men.15
There is no doubt that the bishops at the Council of Trent, and in particular those
from Spain, understood and foresaw the universal power of images to enable the
process of indoctrination and the inclusion of all imperial subjects. This process,
on the other hand, as we shall see in the next chapters, will also show the ways in
which images were also manipulated by clients and artists to implement mech
anisms of exclusion and domination of ‘New Christian’ subjects, such as the
Afro-Hispanic people in the vast Spanish empire:
But I claim that the principal purpose, as far as Christian images are concerned,
will always be to persuade men to piety and raise them towards God [. . .] it follows
that their proper function is to move men to obedience and subjection.16
14 Francisco Pacheco, Arte de la pintura: antigüedad y grandeza, in Art in Theory 1648–1815. An
Anthology of Changing Ideas, edited by Charles Harrison, Paul Wood and Jason Gaiger (Malden, MA;
Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2007), p. 34. See also Bonaventura Bassegoda i Hugas, ‘Observaciones
sobre el Arte de la Pintura de Francisco Pacheco como tratado de iconografía’, Cuadernos de Arte e
Iconografía, 2 (3) (1989), p. 192: por la satisfacción que temenos de la persona de Francisco Pacheco,
vecino de esta ciudad, pintor excelente y hermano de Juan Pérez Pacheco, familiar de este santo oficio’ it
is decided to give him a comisión para mirar y visitar las pinturas de cosas sagradas que estuvieran en
tiendas y lugares públicos.
15 Pacheco, Art of Painting, edited by Harrison, Wood and Gaiger (2007), p. 31. See Francisco
Pacheco, El Arte de la Pintura, edited by Bonaventura Bassegoda i Hugas (Madrid: Cátedra, 1990),
pp. 249–50: Libro Primero de la Pintura: su antigüedad y grandezas: Capítulo XI: Del fin de la pintura y
de las imágines y de su fruto y la autoridad que tienen en la iglesia católica: la pintura [ . . .] se levanta a
un fin supremo, mirando a la eterna gloria; y procurando apartar los hombres de los vicios, los induce al
verdadero culto de Dios Nuestro Señor. También vemos que las imágines cristianas no solo miran a Dios,
mas a nosotros y al próximo. Porque no hay duda, sino que todas las obras virtuosas pueden servir, jun-
tamente, a la Gloria de Dios, a nuestra enseñanza y a la edificación del próximo.
16 Pacheco, Arte de la pintura, edited by Harrison, Wood and Gaiger (2007), p. 33 and Pacheco, El
Arte de la Pintura, edited by Bonaventura Bassegoda i Hugas, p. 253: Mas hablando de las imágines
cristianas, digo que, el fin principal será persuadir los hombres a la piedad y llevarlos a Dios; [. . .] se sigue
que el oficio de ellas sea mover a los hombres a su obedencia y sujección.
60 Black but Human
Legislation to inspect the decorum of religious images and the financial activities
of confraternities were also passed in the last sessions of the Council of Trent in
the years 1562 and 1563.17
Black Sainthood
In the history of the confraternity of Our Lady of the Angels in Seville, the
original image representing Our Lady of the Kings did not survive, but it was re-
appropriated by successive confraternities, such as the black institution of Jaén,
dedicated to the same Virgin. The description of their sculpture clearly indicates
that the iconography of Our Lady of the Kings did not refer to the Kings of Spain
but to the Adoration of the Magi.18 It is well known that the presence of Africans
in Early Modern Europe had as a consequence their visual presence in religious
representations, of which the most popular was the Adoration of the Magi.19 The
identification of Afro-Hispanic slaves and ex-slaves with the African wise man,
known as either Balthasar, Melchior, or Gaspar in the Adoration of the Magi, was
promoted by the Church to accelerate their spiritual inclusion. This feast was
doubly important for members of black confraternities in the Spanish empire
because the day of the feast of the Epiphany on 6 January was also the day they
elected their own King, as we saw in the previous chapter. The magus in the
Adoration of the Magi became one of the patrons and protectors of black confra
ternities. The traditional reference to the three Wise Men is in the Gospel of
St Matthew (2:1–12), the only evangelist ‘to record the coming of the Magi to
Bethlehem’: ‘And entering into the house, they found the child with Mary his
mother, and falling down they adored him. And opening their treasures they pre
sented unto him gifts: gold, frankincense and myrrh.’20 However, Matthew, who
17 Susan Verdi Webster, Art and Ritual in Golden-Age Spain: Sevillian Confraternities and the
Processional Sculpture of Holy Week (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), pp. 23–24, 48.
The Canons and Decrees, edited and translated by Schroeder (1950), Session 25, p. 157 and https://
history.hanover.edu/texts/trent/ct25.html, accessed 29 March 2017. Maureen Flynn, Sacred Charity:
Confraternities and Social Welfare in Spain, 1400–1700 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989),
pp. 116–19.
18 Isidoro Moreno, La antigua hermandad de los negros de Sevilla: Etnicidad, poder y sociedad en
600 años de Historia (Seville: Universidad de Sevilla, 1997), pp. 51–2.
19 Jean Devisse, ‘The Black and his Color: From Symbols to Realities’, in The Image of the Black in
Western Art: From the Early Christian Era to the ‘Age of Discovery’. From the Demonic Thread to the
Incarnation of Sainthood, edited by David Bindman and Henry Louis Gates, Jr, 2. 1 (Cambridge,
Mass., London: Harvard University Press, 2010), pp. 73–137 and Joseph Leo Koerner, ‘The Epiphany
of the Black Magus’, in The Image of the Black in Western Art: From the ‘Age of Discovery’ to the Age of
Abolition: Artists of the Renaissance and Baroque, edited by David Bindman and Henry Louis Gates, Jr,
1 (Cambridge, Mass., London: Harvard University Press, 2010), pp. 7–92.
20 Paul H. D. Kaplan, ‘Introduction to the new edition’, in The Image of the Black in Western Art:
From the Early Christian Era to the ‘Age of Discovery’. From the Demonic Thread to the Incarnation of
Sainthood, edited by David Bindman and Henry Louis Gates, Jr, 2. 1 (Cambridge, Mass., London:
Harvard University Press, 2010), pp. 17–25.
was known as the Apostle of Ethiopia, never mentioned the ethnicity of the
Wise Men. The latter emerged as the consequence of the association that the early
Christian writer Tertullian established between Matthew’s text and Psalm 71:10–11:
‘The kings of Tharsis and the islands shall offer presents: the kings of the Arabians
and of Sabah shall bring gifts. And all kings of the earth shall adore him: all
nations should serve him.’21 The belief that the Queen of Sheba was associated
with Egypt and Ethiopia ‘led to the idea that one of the kings was African’.22
The first text to articulate this belief was the Excerptiones Patrum attributed to the
Venerable Bede (673–735):
The first is said to have been called Melchior, an old man, white-haired, with
flowing beard and locks [. . .] he presented gold to the Lord the King. The second
was named Caspar, young, beardless, and, ruddy [. . .] he honoured God with
frankincense, as an offering worthy of God. The third was Balthasar, dark-
skinned, with a full beard [. . .], and by means of myrrh he signified that the Son
of Man should die.23
Balthasar was—for the first time—described as ‘dark’ (fuscus) and in the eleventh
century, he was defined as ‘black’ (niger) in an early Irish text.24 The first reference
to a darker magus who is explicitly defined as a ‘black Ethiopian’ and Caspar as a
King who came from India is to be found in the fourteenth-century text History
of the Three Kings by John of Hildesheim. This source also refers to the idea that
the Wise Men represented the powers of the three continents of Asia, Africa,
and Europe.25
The iconography of the Adoration of the Magi was already established and had
become very popular in Western Europe since its use in the second century ad in
the Christian catacombs. However, in early modern Europe, the presence of the
Black King in the Adoration of the Magi was first articulated in Germany from the
mid-1400s onwards, as the relics of the Magi were in Cologne, and from here it
circulated to the rest of northern Europe, Italy, and to the kingdoms of Castile
and Aragon, where only by the 1520s was it universally adopted by Spanish painters
and sculptors.26 The resistance to the inclusion of the Black Magus in compositions
21 Jean Michel Massing, ‘The Black Magus in the Netherlands from Memling to Rubens’, in Black is
beautiful: Rubens to Dumas, edited by Elmer Kolfin and Esther Schreuder (Zwolle: Waanders
Publishers, 2008), p. 34.
22 Jean Michel Massing, ‘The Black Magus in the Netherlands from Memling to Rubens’, p. 35.
23 Elizabeth McGrath, ‘Rubens and his black kings’, in online Rubens Bulletin (2008); p. 93:
https://www.kmska.be/export/sites/kmska/content/Documents/Collectie/Rubensbulletin_2008/Rube
nsbulletin_2008/09x20Rubensx20andx20hisx20blackx20kings.
24 Jean Michel Massing, ‘The Black Magus in the Netherlands from Memling to Rubens’, p. 35.
25 McGrath, ‘Rubens and his black kings’, pp. 87–101.
26 Paul H. D. Kaplan, ‘Introduction to the new edition’, in The Image of the Black in Western Art,
pp. 17–25.
62 Black but Human
of the Adoration of the Magi in Spain mirrors the lack of theological and
artistic debates about his presence, as in Book 3, Chapter 12 in the Art of Painting
by Pacheco:
The painting will be composed in this manner: The Holy Virgin seated at the
mouth of a cave, as described by [the Jesuit Jerónimo Nadal] Nadal, very happy and
beautiful, dressed as has been said (in tunic and cloak), and similarly St Joseph
standing at her side, rejoicing and marvelling and the Infant Jesus very beautiful
and smiling in his Mother’s arms; and, contrary to common practice, wrapped
in his swaddling-clothes and shawls, as St Bernard has said [. . .]. The holy Kings,
all three prostrate on the ground or kneeling, dressed with elegance and author
ity; the first one kissing the Child’s right foot, which is uncovered, the wrappings
removed: but no one should be standing, not even the nearby servants. The old
King who is the first to adore should be bare-headed and his head-dress with
Crown and his offering or gift beside him on the ground; the others should hold
their hands and wear their head-dresses and Crowns; the two animals should
appear in the darkness inside the cave. The star should be low and radiating light
on the Child.27
Pacheco’s iconographic rules that became the post-Tridentine prescription for a

clear and realistic image, with a direct message, were with the advice of the theo
logian Nadal.28 It took a long time for Spanish artists to depict black people and
to adopt the iconography of the black magus, and when they did, they opted for
the display of exoticism.29 This is not surprising, as Devisse and Mollat noticed:
‘in regions where there was a dense slave population, the image of the black
27 For the English translation, see Velázquez in Seville, edited by David Davies and Enriqueta
Harris (Edinburgh: National Gallery of Scotland, 1996), p. 162. For the original text in Spanish, see
Pacheco, Libro Tercero: Adiciones a algunas imágenes. Capítulo XII: en que se prosiguen las advertencias
de las historias sagradas. In Arte de la pintura, edited by Bonaventura Bassegoda I Hugas, p. 616: La
pintura será en esta manera: La Santísima Virgen sentada a la boca de la cueva, como la puso Nadal,
muy alegre y hermosa, vestida como se ha referido, y San Josef de la misma manera a su lado en pie, con
regocijo y admiración y el Niño Jesús bellísimo y risueño en brazos de su Madre; y añado contra la común
pintura, envuelto en sus pañales y mantillas, como ha dicho San Bernardo [. . .] Los santos Reyes, todos
tres postrados en tierra o de rudillas, vestidos con gala y autoridad; el primero besando el pie derecho al
Niño, que le tenga descubierto, alzadas las envoluras; pero ninguno esté en pie ni los criados que están cerca.
El viejo que adora primero tenga descubierta la cabeza y el tocado con su corona y el presente, o don,
junto a sí, en el suelo; los otros dos tengan los dones en las manos y sus tocados y coronas puestas, pares-
can en lo oscuro, dentro de la cueva, los dos animales. La estrella esté baxa y rayando luces sobre el Niño.
28 Pacheco refers to the Evangelicae Historiae Imagines (Antwerp, 1593) by the Jesuit Jerónimo
Nadal (1507–1580), one of the first Tridentine iconographic collections.
29 Jean Devisse and Michel Mollat, ‘The Appeal to the Ethiopian’, in The Image of the Black in
Western Art: From the Early Christian Era to the ‘Age of Discovery’. Africans in the Christian Ordinance
of the World, edited by David Bindman and Henry Louis Gates, Jr 2. 2 (Cambridge, Mass., London:
Harvard University Press, 2010), pp. 136–40 and Jean Devisse and Michel Mollat, ‘The Frontiers in
1460’, in The Image of the Black in Western Art: From the Early Christian Era to the ‘Age of Discovery’.
Africans in the Christian Ordinance of the World, edited by David Bindman and Henry Louis Gates,
Jr, 2. 2 (Cambridge, Mass., London: Harvard University Press, 2010), pp. 171–84.
occurs less frequently.’30 The high number of Afro-Hispanic slaves and ex-slaves
in the Spanish kingdoms would have exacerbated the contrast between the illu
sion of equality conveyed by the depiction of the Black Magus and their daily
reality of subjection, humiliation, lack of freedom, and violence.31 One has to be
reminded of the anxiety suffered as the consequence of being dominated by the
‘Moors’ for eight centuries. The growth of the presence of Africans as labourers
from 1450 in Sicily, Southern Italy, Majorca and Valencia signal the transition and
marks a clear difference from ‘Saracens’, who were mainly of Muslim origin and
‘black’ people who became Christians. Thus, the depiction of the Black King had
different connotations in Spain where the contact of Africans was real. The trans
formation of one of the white magi into a black magus, and therefore his inclusion
in the traditional representation of the Adoration of the Magi, questioned the
functions of the visual arts where the poor was not yet considered a worthy
subject of representation, except for the bodegones (kitchen scenes or taverns) by
Velázquez, as we shall see in the last chapter of this book.32
The inclusion of the Black King in the Spanish Adoration of the Magi was made
possible by the influence of Flemish work that increased in the Spanish kingdoms
in the second half of the fifteenth century. One of the earliest depictions of this
composition that was introduced to Spain was by Hans Memling with the central
panel of the Adoration of the Magi triptych (1480) on the altar of Charles V’s
chapel in the castle of Aceca, near Aranjuez, and now in Museo del Prado, in
Madrid. Memling’s main contribution was to make the glamorous Orientalized
black magus evident and this was the key for the popularity of his innovation in
Spain.33 However, even if the imaginary black magus were the individualized
portrait of an Afro-Hispanic man, he would represent a visual distance from
the daily reality of Africans and Afro-descendants in Early Modern Europe.
The result was the generic depiction of the black king as an Ethiopian with ‘asso
ciations of eastern exoticism and luxury’.34 This is the case in Juan Bautista
Maíno’s painting (1612–1614), originally for the main altarpiece of the church of
the Dominican Friary of St Peter Martyr in Toledo, where he joined the
Dominican Order in this monastery in 1613, and now at the Museo del Prado, in
Madrid (see Plate 3.1).
30 Jean Devisse and Michel Mollat, ‘The African Transposed’, in The Image of the Black in Western
Art: From the Early Christian Era to the ‘Age of Discovery’. Africans in the Christian Ordinance of the
World, edited by David Bindman and Henry Louis Gates, Jr, 2. 2 (Cambridge, Mass., London: Harvard
31 Jean Devisse and Michel Mollat, ‘Conclusion’, in The Image of the Black in Western Art: From the
Early Christian Era to the ‘Age of Discovery’. Africans in the Christian Ordinance of the World, edited by
David Bindman and Henry Louis Gates, Jr, 2. 2 (Cambridge, Mass., London: Harvard University
Press, 2010), p. 282.
32 Devisse and Mollat, ‘The Frontiers in 1460’, in The Image of the Black in Western Art, pp. 182–4.
33 Devisse and Mollat, ‘The Frontiers in 1460’, pp. 161–2 and Devisse and Mollat, ‘The African
Transposed’, in The Image of the Black in Western Art, 185–8, 198–200.
34 McGrath, ‘Rubens and his black kings’, p. 95.
64 Black but Human
In his work, Balthasar is holding a nautilus shell with myrrh and he is wearing
a silk and linen costume and a small turban over a red cap with yellow and white
ostrich feathers.35 These oriental elements would have been present in the
sixteenth-century cabinets of curiosity at the European courts or in the collections of
exotic objects amassed by the aristocracy, artists, travellers, and scientists.36 Juana
of Austria, sister of Philip II, had in her collection a pair of earrings in the shape
of black men made of gold and black enamel (dos negros de oro, esmaltado de
negro).37 It was fashionable to collect casts from ancient sculptures especially after
the archaeological discoveries in Rome during the Renaissance. The nobility had
impressive collections of casts such as the twenty-two pieces of ‘black people,
monkeys and children heads’ belonging to the 7th Marquis of Astorga, Alonso
Osorio (d.1592), who lived in Madrid, at the Hapsburg Court for most of his life.
His casts, probably brought from Seville, were recorded in his 1593 inventory.38
Already in the sixteenth century, the Flemish Humanist traveller, Enrique Cock
(1540–98), who also lived in Madrid, had in his collection a white cast of a black
person.39 These collections were augmented by exotic animals from all the terri
tories of the Spanish empire that were taken care of by enslaved people from
Africa, the New World and the Philippines, as we will see in the next chapter.
In Seville, there were important institutional and private collections, such as the
personal museum of the historian Gonzalo Argote de Molina (1548–96), author
of Nobleza de Andalucía (Seville, 1588), with his art, books and collection of
‘curiosities’ (plants, animals, and objects) ‘brought from the East Indies as well as
the West Indies and other parts of the world’.40 The House of Trade also became
35 Izaskun Álvaro Cuartero, ‘Gentes de color, gentes de placer y otras rarezas: una aproximación a
su estudio en la pintura europea y americana de los siglos XVII y XVIII. En torno a las Antillas
Hispánicas. Ensayos en homenaje al profesor Paul Estrade’, Tebeto. Anuario del Anuario del Archivo-
Histórico de Fuenteovejuna, 5 (2004), pp. 465–8.
36 In European courts, dwarfs, who were considered ‘wonders of nature’, were guides for Cabinets
of Curiosities and also custodians of art collections, such as in Prague, at the Hapsburg court of the
Emperor Rudolf II who had a Spanish heritage: see Patrick Mauriès, Cabinet of Curiosities (London:
Thames & Hudson, 2011), pp. 109, 147.
37 Annemarie Jordan Gschwend, ‘Las dos águilas del emperador Carlos V. Las colecciones y el
mecenazgo de Juana y María de Austria en la corte de Felipe II’, in La monarquía de Felipe II: A Debate,
edited by Luis Antonio Ribot García (Madrid: Sociedad Estatal para la Conmemoración de los
Centenarios de Felipe II y Carlos V, 2000), p. 443 and Victoria Bosch Moreno, ‘Juana de Austria: obje
tos exóticos y coleccionismo femenino. América y Oriente’, in Iberoamérica en perspeciva artística:
transferencias culturales y devocionales, edited by Inmaculada Rodríguez Goya, María de los Ángeles
Fernández Valle and Carme López Calderón (Castellón de la Plana: Universitat Jaume I (UJI), 2016),
pp. 373–92.
38 Manuel Arias Martínez, El marquesado de Astorga. Siglos XVI y XVII. Arquitectura, coleccionismo
y mecenazgo (Astorga: Centro de Estudios Astorganos ‘Marcelo Macías’, 2005), p. 203.
39 Alfredo Alvar Ezquerra, ‘Enrique Cock. Humanista, corógrafo de Madrid, cronista de los arche
ros reales’, web http://www.proyectos.cchs.csic.es/humanismoyhumanistas/sites/proyectos.cchs.csic.
es.humanismoyhumanistas/files/COCK_DEFINTIVO%20listo%20para%20web_0.pdf, p. 35.
40 Antonio Barrera-Osorio, Experiencing Nature: the Spanish American Empire and the Early
Scientific Revolution (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006), pp. 132–3 and for the Spanish text
see http://www.mcnbiografias.com/app-bio/do/show?key=argote-de-molina-gonzalo, accessed
31December 2017.
the institution for ‘experts to produce knowledge about the New World’ and a
publishing centre during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.41
By contrast with Maíno, who also worked at the Hapsburg court, Diego
Velázquez attempts a more realistic contextualization of the Adoration of the Magi
(1619) by depicting an unusually sober black magus, dressed as a seventeenth-
century Spanish nobleman in contemporary costume (see Plate 3.2), now at the
Museo del Prado, in Madrid. Into this religious subject, Velázquez introduced
portraits of his own family, framed in a nocturnal setting and elements of con
temporary costume and failed to include many of the visual motifs required
by Pacheco. The recent discovery of the latter’s self-portrait confirms that the
oldest magus, Melchior, is the portrait of Pacheco, and that the Virgin is the
portrait of Juana Pacheco, Velázquez’s wife who is holding their daughter Francisca
(born that year and depicted as baby Jesus), while Velázquez himself is por
trayed as the younger King Caspar.42 Balthasar was probably a portrait of one
of the Afro-Hispanic slaves owned by the Pacheco and Velázquez families.43
For Javier Portús, this coexistence in the religious form of universal Christian
subjects and contemporary portraits is one of Velázquez’s trademarks.44 This
painting was for a chapel at the Jesuit Novitiate of San Luis founded in 1609 in
the city of his birth.
The popularity of the Adoration of the Magi also extended to portable objects of
devotion, such as the engraved triptych with silver frame and oil painting on cop
per, made by an artist of the Flemish-Spanish school, c.1550 and now at the
Victoria & Albert Museum, in London. When this triptych on a chain—small
enough to be attached to a rosary—is open (width: 16.20 cm), one can see The
Adoration of the Magi (see Fig 3.1). It is interesting that the Magi, representing
Africa and Asia, respectively, are placed on the lateral panels outside the main
scene of the Adoration at the centre with the oldest king traditionally representing
Europe.
41 Barrera-Osorio, Experiencing Nature, pp. 8, 147–50 and Vicente Lleó Cañal, ‘The Cultivated Elite
of Velázquez’s Seville’, in Velázquez in Seville, pp. 25–6.
42 I do not agree with Stoichita’s suggestion that Velázquez’s brother might have been the model
for Balthasar, indicating that he was not ‘really black’. See Victor I. Stoichita, ‘The Image of the Black
in Spanish Art’, in The Image of the Black in Western Art: From the ‘Age of Discovery’ to the Age of
Abolition: Artists of the Renaissance and Baroque, edited by David Bindman and Henry Louis
Gates, Jr, 3, part 1 (Cambridge, Mass., London: Harvard University Press, 2010), p. 208. See also:
https://www.museodelprado.es/en/the-collection/art-work/the-adoration-of-the-magi/7c00aa01-
3162-49a7-9e75-4f885a4a2c83, accessed 13 October 2017.
43 Tanya J. Tiffany, ‘Light, Darkness, and African Salvation: Velázquez’s Supper at Emmaus’, Art
History, 31 (2008), p. 42.
44 Javier Portús, in Fábulas de Velázquez. Mitología e Historia Sagrada en el Siglo de Oro (Madrid:
Museo Nacional del Prado, 2007), p. 31. See also the Adoration of the Magi (2.04 x 1.26 cm) by
Velázquez on the Prado Museum Online: https://www.museodelprado.es/coleccion/obra-de-arte/
adoracion-de-los-reyes-magos/7c00aa01-3162-49a7-9e75-4f885a4a2c83?searchid=175de137-ae99-
328a-134a-3990f5e536db, accessed 29 May 2016.
66 Black but Human
Fig. 3.1. Flemish-Spanish Anonymous artist, Adoration of the Magi, c.1550. © Victoria &
Albert Museum, London.
The Adoration of the Magi is an allegory for the unique and universal true
religion and it fulfilled the didactic aim of inclusion of non-Europeans in the
economy of Christian salvation. The Wise Men who came from the ‘Orient’ were
wealthy and powerful and they knelt before the infant Jesus to convey the fact
that they were humbled before the true king. The inclusion of a black magus in
this religious iconography meant that in spiritual terms, free, enslaved and freed
people were all equally subordinated to the same King of Peace. As discussed in
the previous chapter, this concept of equality in terms of ‘humanity’ was at the
core of what the Black but Human topos encoded in the Christmas carols written
by Afro-Hispanic slaves and the reason they felt empowered to claim their equal
ity with Europeans or more specifically with Christian Spaniards.
Afro-Hispanics regarded their saints ‘as the resident patrons of their commu
nities’ and their cult gave a sense of social continuity and corporal identity to
members of the same confraternity.45 The cult of black saints in black and mixed-
race confraternities was promoted by the clergy in Spain, as a result of the
decrees issued by the Council of Trent to consolidate doctrinal points against the
Protestants.46 The post-Tridentine period was marked by beatifications and
45 Fernando Cervantes, The Devil in the New World: The Impact of Diabolism in New Spain (New
Haven and London, 1994), pp. 57–8.
46 ‘The Council of Trent’, pp. 232–89.
canonizations that generated sermons, Diocesan synods, hagiography, and prints.47

The act of imitating, as in a mirror, the exemplary lives of saints was one of the
main functions for the popularity of the cult of black saints:
great profit is derived from all sacred images, not only because the people are
thereby admonished of the benefits and gifts bestowed upon them by Christ, but
also because the miracles which God has performed by means of the saints, and
their salutary examples, are set before the eyes of the faithful; that so they may
give God thanks for those things; may order their own lives and manners in
imitation of the saints; and may be excited to adore and love God, and to culti
vate piety.48
This main aim of the new institutionalization of black people as ‘saints’ was the
integration of Afro-Hispanic slaves and ex-slaves into the societies of this vast
empire. In the rulebooks of the confraternities there are records of their cult,
religious rituals, the role of women in the care of images, and the dates of their
most important saints’ feast days and processions.49 In Our Lady of the Angels,
the oldest black confraternity in Seville, known today as the Cofradía de
Nazarenos del Santísimo Cristo de la Hermandad de los Negritos (Brotherhood of
the Little Blacks), recorded the presence of several processional sculptures and
paintings hanging on the walls in their newly built chapel in the middle of the
sixteenth century that reveal their cults:
First of all dedication is made by the aforementioned to Our Lady and Holy
Mother Maria of the Angels, dressed and placed on her altar, in a robe of black
velvet and wearing her Crown. Also, to the holy Christ lying on a cross placed on
the altar, on a pink and yellow canopy. Also, to Saint Benedict of Palermo. Also,
a small statue in the image of the Virgin of joy.50
These included: Our Lady of the Kings and Our Lady of the Nativity; The
Flight into Egypt; The Immaculate Conception of Mary; and saints, such as
47 Flynn, Sacred Charity), p. 54 and Rafael Castañeda García, ‘Introducción’, in Entre la solemnidad
y el regocijo: fiestas, devociones y religiosidad en Nueva España y el mundo hispánico, edited by Rafael
Castañeda García and Rosa Alicia Pérez Luque (Zamora, Michoacán: El Colegio de Michoacán, 2015),
p. 12.
48 ‘The Council of Trent’, p. 235.
49 For the oldest confraternity in Seville and their earliest surviving rules from 1554, see Moreno,
La antigua hermandad de los negros de Sevilla, pp. 65–67, 116–18.
50 Moreno, La antigua hermandad de los negros de Sevilla, pp. 119–20: Primeramente, se le entrega
al susodicho—here the name of new steward—a nuestra Señora y Madre Santa María de los Angeles,
vestida y puesta en su altar, con un vestido de terciopelo negro y su corona. Más, al Santo Christo puesto
en la cruz y en el altar, sobre un docel rosado y amarillo. Con más, a San Benito de Palermo. Con más,
una imagen de bulto pequeñita—que era la Virgen de los Angeles de alegría. See description of these
images and changes of garments for different processions in pp. 123–4.
68 Black but Human
St Ferdinand III,51 John (possibly the Baptist); St Rosa and St Michael. The most
venerated images in the second half of the seventeenth century and even today
are: Our Lady of the Angels, their patron figure (see Fig 3.2); Christ on the Cross
(1622) known as Cristo de la Fundación by the well-known sculptor and art col
lector Andrés de Ocampo (1560–1623, see Fig 3.3);52 and St Benedict the Moor of
Palermo. The latter was the first Afro-European saint and he was called Benedict
the African or the Moor or Benedict da San Fratello.53 He became a Franciscan
lay friar in the convent of Santa Maria di Gesù in Palermo, after a life as a hermit.
Fig. 3.2. Anonymous artist, Our Lady of the Angels, seventeenth-century, Cofradía
de Nazarenos del Santísimo Cristo de la Fundación y Nuestra Señora de los Ángeles
(Los Negritos) (Brotherhood of the Little Blacks), Seville. © Photo: Adrián Sarmiento.
51 St Ferdinand III was King of Castile and León (1217–1230), canonized in 1671 and responsible
for the Reconquista against the Moors in 1248. In art, his emblem is a greyhound.
52 Benito Navarrete Prieto, La pintura andaluza del siglo XVII y sus fuentes grabadas (Madrid: Ed.
Fundación de apoyo a la Historia del Arte Hispánico, 1998), pp. 68–9.
53 St Benedict of San Fratello (1526–1589) was born in San Fratello in the province of Messina in
Spanish Sicily. He was the son of the Ethiopian Cristoforo Manasseri, a slave of Vincenzo Manasseri
and his wife Diana, Christianized African slaves or possibly ex-slaves: see Salvatore Bono, ‘Due santi
negri: Benedetto di San Fratello e Antonio da Noto’, in Africa, 21(1) (1966), p. 77.
Fig. 3.3. Andrés de Ocampo, Cristo de la Fundación, 1622, Cofradía de Nazarenos

del Santísimo Cristo de la Fundación y Nuestra Señora de los Ángeles (Los Negritos)
(Brotherhood of the Little Blacks), Chapel of Our Lady of the Angels, Seville.
© Photo: Adrián Sarmiento.
Two major factors contributed to his popularity in early modern Spain soon after
his death on 4 April 1589.
In 1606, part of his relics arrived in the kingdoms of Castile and Aragon and, in
1611, Philip III donated a ‘costly silver casket’ to reinter St Benedict’s body in
Rome.54 Relics had powerful spiritual effects because the fragments of a saint’s
body conjured the eternal presence of the saint in question and thus overcame any
sense of horror produced by the dismemberment and dissolution of real bodies.55
Relics also fulfilled a didactic function through the emotional and physical impact
they had on the believers-viewers. In 1569, as he described the Reliquary built
54 Nelson H. Minnich, ‘The Catholic Church and the pastoral care of black Africans in a
Renaissance Italy’, in Black Africans in Renaissance Europe, edited by Thomas F. Earle and Kate J. P. Lowe
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 299 and Joaneath Spicer, ‘Free Men and Women of
African Ancestry in Renaissance Europe’, in Revealing the African Presence in Renaissance Europe,
edited by Joaneath Spicer (Baltimore: The Walters Art Museum, 2012), p. 85.
55 Caroline Walker Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body
in Medieval Religion (New York: Zone Books, 1992), pp. 269–80.
70 Black but Human
behind the main altarpiece in the church of the Convent of the Poor Clares
(Descalzas Reales) in Madrid, Friar Juan López de Hoyos testified that:
Beside the escutcheons that support the retable were two doors of walnut wood
carved with gold and black arabesques; these doors open into a reliquary cham
ber in a vault behind the retable [. . .] filled with a marvellous number of relics
[. . .] all which incite to such devotion that one enters this vault and sees the
relics through a small window through which the nuns receive the most holy
Sacrament would say that they are so deeply moving as to penetrate the soul and
cause the body to tremble.56
The handling of relics was also a matter of discussion in the Council of Trent,
where it was established:
that no new miracles are to be acknowledged, or new relics recognised, unless

the said bishop has taken cognizance and approved thereof; who, as soon as he
has obtained some certain information in regard to these matters, shall, after
having taken the advice of theologians, and of other pious men, act therein as he
shall judge to be consonant with truth and piety.57
The Franciscan promotion of St Benedict of Palermo should be seen, as Bernard

Vincent claims, in the context of the post-Tridentine success of the beatification
and canonization of a group of Spanish saints in 1622: St Theresa of Avila, Ignatius
of Loyola, Francis Xavier and Isidore the Farmer followed by the canonization of
other Iberian saints from the Crowns of Castile, Aragon and Portugal in the first
quarter of the following century: Raymond of Pennafort (1600), Salvador of
Horta (1606), Luis Bertrán (1608), Thomas of Villanova and Pascual Bailón (1618),
Francis Borgia (1624), Queen Elizabeth of Portugal (1625), Peter of Alcantara
(1627), Peter Nolasco and Raymond Nonato (1628), and John of God (1630).58
Following St Benedict’s death in 1589, a compilation of letters sent to the King of
Spain about the saint written by the merchant Giovanni Dominico Rubbiano
in 1591, La vita, l’operi et miracoli fatti cum la grazia d’Iddio per lo venerando patri
Benedetto di San Fratello,59 and in 1611, the first official chronicle of the
Franciscan Order, Crónica general del nuestro padre San Francisco y de su apostólica
56 See Juan Carrillo, Relación histórica de la Real Fundación de las Descalzas de S. Clara de la Villa
de Madrid (Madrid: Por Luis Sánchez, 1616) in Nora De Poorter, The Eucharistic Series, in Corpus
Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard, I (London, Philadelphia, Brussels: Harvey Miller-Heyden & Son, 1978),
pp. 423, 427.
57 ‘The Council of Trent’, p. 236.
58 Bernard Vincent, ‘San Benito de Palermo en España’, Studia Historica. Historia moderna, 38 (1)
(2016), pp. 25–6.
59 Giovanna Fiume, Il Santo Moro: I processi di canonizzazione di Benedetto di Palermo (1594–1807)
(Milan: FrancoAngeli, 2002), pp. 35–50.
orden (Valladolid) by Antonio Daza, where he dedicated part of his history of the
Franciscans in Spain to St Benedict of Palermo, would become important mater
ial adopted by Lope de Vega in his play El santo negro Rosambuco (c.1611–12).60
It was played in Madrid at the arrival of the saint’s relics.61 The author portrays, as
Baltasar Fra-Molinero shows, the paradoxes of being a saint and a black person
and having a black body and a white soul. In this play-template, Lope resolves this
paradox by adopting the Afro-Hispanic Black but Human topos and consequently
highlighting the whitening of his body and soul, as the angels sing:
Although you are black, there will come a day

When you are beautiful, gorgeous and white.62
It is almost impossible to explain the extant iconography of St Benedict of

Palermo before the eighteenth century, when the church made this cult official
with his beatification in 1743 and canonization in 1807.63 However, he was known
during his lifetime as ‘The Black Saint’ and adopted as the patron saint of black
slaves in Spain, Portugal, and the New World. The first images of Saint Benedict
are those found in Palermo, in Santa Maria di Gesù.64 The Franciscan oral trad
ition about these earliest images of the black saint in Sicily after his death circu
lated and reached Madrid with the Sicilian friar Bartolomeo Cortese, a relative of
the conquistador of New Spain, Hernán (or Fernando) Cortés, who might have
described images of the saint in his Sicilian Convent. Here, he is depicted as a
labourer with rays over his head, either as cooking with the help of angels and
holding herbs in one hand (dipinto in forma di cuciniero con due angioli che
l’assistino) or as working in the garden.65 Early seventeenth-century painted por
traits of him are also found in the kitchen of the convent and a sculpture in the
60 Larissa Brewer-García, ‘Imagined Transformations: Color, Beauty, and Black Christian Conversion
in Seventeenth-Century Spanish America’, in Envisioning Others: Race, Color, and the Visual in Iberia
and Latin America, edited by Pamela A. Patton (Leiden & Boston: Brill, 2016), pp. 118–19.
61 Erin Kathleen Rowe, ‘Vizualizing Black Sanctity in Early Modern Spanish Polychrome Sculpture’,
in Envisioning Others: Race, Color, and the Visual in Iberia and Latin America, edited by Pamela A. Patton
(Leiden & Boston: Brill, 2016), p. 68 and Bernard Vincent, ‘San Benito de Palermo en España’, Studia
Historica, p. 27.
62 In Spanish: Que aunque eres negro, habrá día/Que estés bello, hermoso y blanco. See Baltasar
Fra-Molinero, La imagen de los negros en el teatro del Siglo de Oro (Madrid: Siglo Veintiuno de España
Editores, 1995), pp. 90–1 and Frida Weber de Kurlat, ‘El negro en el teatro de Lope’, Nueva Revista de
Filología Hispana, 19, 2 (1970), pp. 348–9: Bernard Vincent, ‘San Benito de Palermo en España’, Studia
Historica, p. 27.
63 Bernard Vincent, ‘San Benito de Palermo en España’, Studia Historica, pp. 23–38; Giovanna Fiume
and Marilena Modica, San Benedetto il Moro: Santità, agiografia e primi processi di canonizzazione
(Palermo: Città di Palermo, 1998); Tesoros del Museo Nacional de Escultura (Valladolid: Ministerio de
Cultura, 2005), pp. 138–9.
64 Giovanna Fiume, Il Santo Moro: I processi di canonizzazione di Benedetto di Palermo (1594–1807),
pp. 208–9, 237–41.
pp. 208–9.
72 Black but Human
sacristy, where St Benedict is portrayed as kneeling and holding baby Jesus in his
arms.66 While the latter will be more popular in Latin American, a new iconog
raphy of the black saint from Sicily was developed in Spain. In Seville, in the
confraternity of Our Lady of the Angels, the original sculpture of St Benedict of
Palermo was recorded as a processional sculpture ‘to be dressed’, with only the head
and hands carved to enable it to be covered with clothing.67 This image stood in
an altarpiece dedicated to St Benedict until the eighteenth century; however,
following the disappearance of the altarpiece in 1964 due to the refurbishment
of the chapel, the sculpture was modified. Besides, most sculptures representing
St Benedict in the twenty-six known Spanish black confraternities, and those depict
ing other ‘black’ saints, did not survive, mainly due to the financial inability of
these poor black institutions to afford the maintenance of their images.68 However,
the sculpture of San Benito from the Franciscan Monastery of San Diego in
Valladolid by an anonymous artist in the first quarter of the eighteenth-century,
and now at the Museo Nacional de Escultura in the same city, shows the traditional
Spanish iconography of this saint: dressed in his Franciscan robe, he is holding a
crucifix in his left hand and a flaming heart which signifies the flames of divine
love with seven drops in his right hand, referring to his virtues: faith, hope, charity
and justice, prudence, temperance and fortitude (the three theologian virtues
and the four cardinal virtues, respectively) in his right hand (see Plate 3.3).69
Documentary evidence from the black confraternity in Seville also recorded
that in the original altarpiece dedicated to St Benedict there were two paintings
representing the East Africans (‘Ethiopian’) Saint Iphigenia with St Matthew and
St Elesbaan.70 It is very likely that Iphigenia was ‘a ninth-century Carolingian inven
tion’ who, according to the Golden Legend, was a ‘Nubian princess’, the daughter
of the King Egippus of Ethiopia that Matthew converted to Christianity and
‘consecrated her a nun’,71 Elesbaan (d. c.540), was instead a historical character,
p. 239.
67 Moreno, La antigua hermandad de los negros de Sevilla, pp. 120, 123: [St Benedict of Palermo]
con su hábito de holanda, aforrada la capilla y los mangos en tafetán, y su rosario.
68 Bernard Vincent, ‘San Benito de Palermo en España’, Studia Historica, pp. 29–30.
69 St Benedict of Palermo would usually be depicted with a lily, crucifix, scourge, and a flaming
heart as a symbol of his purity and religious devotion. For a useful bibliography on the iconography of
St Benedict, see Rafael Castañeda García, ‘Santos negros, devotos de color. Las cofradías de San Benito
de Palermo en Nueva España. Identidades étnicas y religiosas, siglos XVII–XVIII’, in Devoción, pai-
sanaje e identidad. Las cofradías y congregaciones de naturales en España y en América (siglos XVI–XIX),
edited by Óscar Álvarez Gila, Alberto Angulo Morales, Jon Ander Ramos Martínez (Bilbao:
Universidad del País Vasco, 2014), p. 147 and Bernard Vincent, ‘San Benito de Palermo en España’,
Studia Historica, pp. 30–1.
70 Bernard Vincent, ‘Devoción a Santa Ifigenia en España’, in Mujeres esclavas y abolicionistas en la
España de los siglos XVI–XIX, edited by Aurelia Martín Casares and Rocío Periáñez Gómez (Madrid
and Frankfurt: Iberoamericana-Vervuert, 2014), p. 102.
71 See Erin Kathleen Rowe, ‘Vizualizing Black Sanctity in Early Modern Spanish Polychrome
Sculpture’, pp. 65–6. See the life of St Matthew in Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend: Readings on
the Saints, translated by W. Granger Ryan, 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012),
a sixth-century Christian and King of Ethiopia who ruled over the Axoum people
and was considered a protector of Christians.72 In accordance with the Tridentine
requirements saints should be immediately identifiable by believers by visual
motifs depicting their proper attributes: the iconography of St Iphigenia are a
cross on her right hand and a house in flames on her left hand, while those for
St Elesbaan who is dressed as a monk, are a ship in his left hand and, under his feet,
the Arabian King of the Hamerites whom he has defeated. In early modern Spain
Iphigenia and Elesbaan were usually represented together as a pair, as in the
church of the Discalced Carmelites in Madrid and Seville (lost); in the Cathedral
of Tuy and in El Carmen Church in Antequera (Málaga) by Diego Márquez y
Vega in 1740 for the altarpiece of Cristo de las Penas (see Figs 3.4 and 3.5). In
mid-seventeenth-century Cádiz, however, the cult of St Iphigenia was instead
paired with that of St Benedict of Palermo in the black confraternity of Nuestra
Señora de la Salud y San Benito y Santa Ifigenia, in the altar of Nuestra Señora de
la Salud (Our Lady of Health) in the church Nuestra Señora del Rosario (Our
Lady of the Rosary).73 In chapter 6, we will concentrate on the ways in which
these Ethiopian saints and other black biblical characters, such the African man
baptized by Saint Philip (see chapter 2), and Zipporah, the second wife of Moses
(Shepphora, mujer de Moisén), both included in Sandoval’s list of ‘Ethiopians’,
become crucial referents in the articulation of freedom and the emancipatory
pp. 570–2: St Matthew Apostle went to Egypt and then to Ethiopia where he converted to Christianity
and baptized Iphigenia, the daughter of the King Egippus of Ethiopia and her family. When her uncle
Hirtacus succeeded the King, he promised the Apostle half of his kingdom if he could persuade his
niece to marry him. When the latter explained to him that Iphigenia was espoused to God, Hirtacus
sent a swordsman to kill Matthew and he tried to destroy her convent with fire, but God saved them
all. Iphigenia evangelized Ethiopia and died on 21 September 46 ad. Bernard Vincent, ‘San Benito de
Palermo en España’, Studia Historica, p. 27; Moreno, La antigua hermandad de los negros de Sevilla,
pp. 120–3; Rafael Castañeda García, ‘Devociones y construcción de identidades entre los negros y
mulatos de la Nueva España (s. XVIII)’, in Fundación Visión Cultural, Memoria del VI Encuentro
Internacional sobre el Barroco. Imagen del Poder (Bolivia: Visión Cultural, 2012), pp. 241–2.
72 The life of Elesbaan (d.555) is not written by Voragine, but it is known through chronicles of the
kingdom of Axum: he was the King of Ethiopia at the time of the Roman emperor Justinian and he
rejected his Crown to distribute all his possessions to the poor to become a monk in Jerusalem. His
enemy who he defeated was the Arabian King of the Hemerites, Dhu-newas and persecutor of
Christians. See Erin Kathleen Rowe, ‘Vizualizing Black Sanctity in Early Modern Spanish Polychrome
Sculpture’, pp. 53–68; Opulence and Devotion: Brazilian Baroque Art, edited by Catherine Whistler
(Oxford: Ashmolean Museum, 2001), p. 93; Bernard Vincent, ‘San Benito de Palermo en España’,
Studia Historica, p. 27.
73 The black confraternity of Our Lady of the Rosary was founded at the end of the sixteenth-
century and it was established in the following century with the new name of Nuestra Señora de la
Salud (Our Lady of Health) when the confraternity moved to the church of Nuestra Señora del Rosario
(Our Lady of the Rosary), see Erin Kathleen Rowe, ‘Vizualizing Black Sanctity in Early Modern
Spanish Polychrome Sculpture’, pp. 69–71. Joaquín Álvaro Rubio, La esclavitud en Barcarrota y
Salvaleón en el período moderno (Siglos XVI–XVIII) (Badajoz: Diputación de Badajoz, 2005), p. 174
and Iván Armenteros Martínez, ‘De hermandades y procesiones. La cofradía de esclavos y libertos
negros de Sant Jaume de Barcelona y la asimilación de la negritud en la Europa premoderna
(siglos XV–XVI)’, Clio—Revista de pesquisa histórica, 29 (2) (2011), p. 15.
74 Black but Human
Fig. 3.4. Diego Márquez y Vega, Saint Elesbaan, 1740, Altarpiece of Cristo de las
Penas, El Carmen Church, Antequera (Málaga). © Photo: Adrián Sarmiento.
Fig. 3.5. Diego Márquez y Vega, Saint Iphigenia, 1740, Altarpiece of Cristo de las
Penas, El Carmen Church, Antequera (Málaga). © Photo: Adrián Sarmiento.
76 Black but Human
subject in Juan de Pareja’s monumental painting The Calling of St Matthew (1661),

now at the Museo del Prado, in Madrid.
The cult of St Benedict of Palermo and ‘Ethiopian’ saints was also promoted as
a ‘model of black sanctity’ by Sandoval in his 1627 Treatise on Slavery.74 The aim
was to gather support for his campaign to convert and baptize slaves in Cartagena
de Indias in the Viceroyalty of New Granada (in present-day Colombia). The
engraver of his title-page depicts the portrait of St Benedict as wearing an ‘altar
boy dress’ that, by comparison with the other three portraits of the Jesuits Loyola,
Xavier and an anonymous figure, Benito is portrayed as a ‘humble, infantilized
black Christian servant’.75 The Roman Martyrologium (1586) by Cardinal Historian
Cesare Baronio includes black saints, such as St Balthasar, the black magus;
St Philip, the prime minister of Candace; the Queen of Ethiopia; and the Ethiopian
saints Iphigenia and Elesbaan.76 Ethiopia was intended to be synonymous with
Africa, although in strict geographical terms it refers to the northern area of the
continent. In the European social imaginary, Ethiopia was associated both with
classical antiquity, where the word ‘Ethiopian’ was used with reference to African
people and to Christianity since Ethiopia was considered to have been the first
Christian nation.77 The cult of saints was also associated with rituals performed
inside and outside the black confraternities. These included processions and fes
tivities in public and private spaces, such as the presence in the Hapsburg court of
a female black singer who belonged to the Princesa that is recorded in a 1620
document related to material bought for her dresses.78 The Council of Trent spe
cified the aims of these processions and made clear that ‘the celebration of the
saints, and the visitation of relics’ should not be ‘perverted into revellings and
drunkenness; as if festivals are celebrated to the honour of the saints by luxury
and wantonness’.79
In Seville, Afro-Hispanic people were allowed to have their collective meetings
near the church of Santa María la Blanca on Sundays and during religious festivities,
so that they could meet to dance with their drums and other musical instruments
in public spaces.80 Their music and dances were very popular, as Philip II of Spain
74 Spicer, ‘Free Men and Women of African Ancestry in Renaissance Europe’, pp. 85–6.
75 Larissa Brewer-García, ‘Imagined Transformations: Color, Beauty, and Black Christian
Conversion in Seventeenth-Century Spanish America’, pp. 118–19.
España de los siglos XVI–XIX, p. 102.
77 See Kate Lowe, ‘The Lives of African Slaves and People of African Descent in Renaissance
Europe’, in Revealing the African Presence in Renaissance Europe, edited by Spicer (Baltimore: The
Walters Art Museum, 2012), p. 16.
78 José Moreno Villa, Locos, enanos, negros y niños palaciegos. Siglos XVI y XVII: Gente de Placer que
tuvieron los Austrias en la Corte Española desde 1563 a 1700 (Mexico City: Ed. Presencia, La Casa de
España en México, 1939), p. 157. See also Maureen Flynn, ‘Rituals of Solidarity in Castilian
Confraternities’, Renaissance and Reform, 13 (1) (1989), p. 54.
79 ‘The Council of Trent’, pp. 235–6.
recorded in his Letter 21, from Lisbon on 4 June 1582 to his daughters Isabel
Clara Eugenia and Catalina Micaela. He sent them a message from their servant
Magdalena Ruiz to the effect that she was too busy to correspond with them as
she was spending time watching black slaves dancing from the window of her
bedroom.81 Afro-Hispanics introduced their dances to early modern Spain,
including the guineo, zumbė, ye-ye and zarambeque, and the most popular were
the zarabanda, the paracumbé, and the chacona. Afro-Hispanics who came from
the New World to the kingdoms of Castile and Aragon also contributed their
African and Native American dances and songs to the Spanish confraternities.82
From the middle of the sixteenth to the middle of the seventeenth century, this
demand created at least twenty-one groups of dancers in Seville.83 The presence
of Afro-Hispanic musicians and dancers was depicted in eighteenth century
Seville in the painting Carro del Aire by Domingo Martínez (Seville, Museo de
Bellas Artes.1688–1749), one of his series Máscara de la Real Fábrica de Tabacos
produced in 1747 to celebrate the coronation of Fernando VI, as well as in the
contemporaneous tile decoration in the monastery of the Encarnación at Osuna.84
Afro-Hispanic musicians, whether freedmen or slaves, were deployed to prepare
the entry of members of the monarchy, aristocracy, and high clergy into cities of
the Spanish empire.85 In his Trachtenbuch, his book of costume and occupations
of 1529, Christopher Weiditz (Strasbourg, c.1500–Augsburg, 1559) depicts for
Charles V an elegant Afro-Hispanic drummer in profile wearing earrings and a
blue cap sitting on a mule and playing two drums on each side of his animal at the
entry of the Emperor to a Spanish city in his plate 10, entitled ‘Army drummer at
the entry of the Emperor’, and on which the artist wrote: ‘Thus ride the army
drummers in Spain when the Emperor rides into a city.’86 There are several
examples that deal with the participation of Afro-Hispanic slaves and ex-slaves in
processions, fiestas, and public acts. These include the entry of Queen Isabella I of
81 Cartas de Felipe II a sus hijas, edited by Fernando Bouza (Madrid: Ediciones Akal, 1998), p. 86.
82 Glenn Swiadon Martínez, ‘Fiesta y parodia en los villancicos de negro del siglo XVII’, Anuario de
Letras: Lingüística y filología, 42–3 (2004–2005), pp. 291–5. Afro-Hispanic work songs included songs
in black speech by wet nurses while breastfeeding their white owners’ children in the colonies, see
Weber de Kurlat, ‘El negro en el teatro de Lope’ (1970), p. 337 and Catálogo de villancicos de la
Biblioteca Nacional. Siglo XVII (Madrid: Ministerio de Cultura, 1992).
84 Luis Méndez Rodríguez, Esclavos en la pintura sevillana de los Siglos de Oro (Seville: Universidad
de Sevilla-Ateneo de Sevilla, 2011), p. 62.
85 See Rafael Ramos Sosa, ‘Fiestas sevillanas del siglo XVI: Diversiones aristocráticas y regocijos
populares’, Laboratorio de Arte, 7 (1994), pp. 41–50.
86 See plate X in T. Hampe (ed.), Das Trachtenbuch des Christoph Weiditz von seinen Reisennach
Spanien (1529) und den Niederlanden (1531–32) (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1927). The drawing is
published in Christoph Weiditz, Authentic Everyday Dress of the Renaissance. All 154 Plates from the
‘Trachtenbuch’ (New York: Dover Publications, 1994), which is a republication of Das Trachtenbuch
des Christoph Weiditz, plate X, p. 27, and Jean Michel Massing, ‘Weiditz and Costume Books’, in The
Image of the Black in Western Art: From the ‘Age of Discovery’ to the Age of Abolition: Europe and the
World Beyond, edited by David Bindman, Henry Louis Gates, Jr and Jean Michel Massing, 3.2
(Cambridge, Mass., London: Harvard University Press, 2011), pp. 45–54.
78 Black but Human
Castile into Seville on 24 July 1477; the entry into Valencia of Pedro González de
Mendoza, the Bishop of Sigüenza who was promoted to Archbishop of Seville,
and that of the Chancellor of Castile the following year. In Barcelona, the presence of
black musicians is documented at the entry of Philip II on 6 February 1564, and
that of Philip III on 18 May 1599, and at the celebrations of the victory over
the Turks at Lepanto on 18 November 1571, and, in the same year in December,
in the celebrations for the birth of Fernando, son of Philip II.87 In Seville, the
steward of the confraternity of Our Lady of the Angels, Juan de Valladolid was
also responsible on behalf of the black and mixed-race confraternities for the
organization and the running of processions: ‘and they cannot hold any festivals
or judgments among themselves save in your presence, the said Juan de Valladolid,
Black, our judge and steward of those Blacks, and Mixed-Race people.’88
The most important procession where Afro-Hispanic musicians, dancers, and
theatre performers are recorded is the feast of Corpus Christi, or the Blessed
Sacrament, that became central to Tridentine theology.89 The presence of mem
bers of the black confraternities in processions of Corpus Christi in Salamanca,
Jaén, and Seville are documented at least from the beginning of the sixteenth cen
tury. On Good Friday, contrary to all expectations, members of the confraternity
of Our Lady of the Angels played music and sang, and there are records of pay
ments made to the brothers-musicians.90 Most of their income covered the
expenses related to the cult of saints and their celebrations, such as music, food,
drinks, and gunpowder.91 Music was one of the most costly elements of the pro
cession, employing instrumental, choral and dance groups, and black carols were
also sung. Afro-Hispanic slaves and ex-slaves occupied a privileged place in front
of the Host in the Corpus procession, wearing their dance costumes and playing
their instruments such as castanets and bagpipes (castañuelas y dulzaínas). They
were either members of the procession or represented the secular traditional fig
ures of ‘Giants’ (Gigantes) in the Holy Week commemorations. Descriptions of
this procession exist from 1454 and it barely changed in the course of the seven
teenth century, as is apparent if we consider the better-known description of the
hierarchical order occupied by people and performers in the processional space
87 Armenteros Martínez, ‘De hermandades y procesiones’, pp. 16, 18.

88 Diego Ortíz de Zúñiga, Annales eclesiásticos y seculares de la Muy Noble, y Muy Leal ciudad de
Sevilla, metrópoli de la Andalucía, que contienen sus más principales memorias desde el año de 1246, en
que emprendió conquistarla del poder de los Moros, el gloriosísimo Rey S. Fernando Tercero de Castilla, y
León, hasta el 1671 en que la Católica Iglesia le concedió el culto y título de Bienaventurado (Madrid:
Imprenta Real. Por Juan García Infançon, 1677), pp. 77–8: é que non puedan facer ni fagan [. . .] ningu-
nas fiestas nin juzgados de entre ellos, salvo ante vos el dicho Juan de Valladolid, Negro, nuestro Juez y
Mayoral de los dichos Negros, Loros y Loras. Moreno, La antigua hermandad de los negros de Sevilla,
pp. 54–55, 75.
provided by Abbot Alonso Sánchez Gordillo (1561–1644).92 The procession

generally started from the Cathedral, and wound its way through the most
important streets and squares of the city. It had the Tarasca, a seven-headed
dragon figure, and the representations named Giants, which were followed by
members of the confraternities, religious orders, other religious dignitaries, a ser
ies of relics and the Silver Monstrance. Behind, the most important religious
authorities followed the bishop, members of the Tribunal of the Inquisition, and
officials from the town hall. The procession alternated with dances and plays.
Slaves and freedmen were also forced to dress and perform as little devils (diablil-
los/diablitos), who danced and sang by the side of the Host during the procession,
so that the audience could grasp the transformative effects of the Sacrament in
saving and redeeming the diablillos, as well as the Giants and the Tarasca, who
personified the disorder that originated in sin.93 In the Enlightenment, these fes
tive elements were later considered irreverent and ridiculous for the Corpus
Christi procession and therefore banned by Charles III, with a royal decree in 1780.94
The association between evil/disorder and ethnicity, especially as embodied in
visual representations of Jews and Afro-Hispanics, is still present in processions
today in Spanish cities, such as in Valladolid, where every year the four life-size
polychromed wood sculptures of the Float for Preparations for the Crucifixion are
paraded in Holy Week at the Museo Nacional de Escultura of this city (see Fig 3.6,
1641).95 They were attributed to Francisco Alonso de los Ríos and Juan de Ávila
in the first half of the seventeenth century. In these sculptures, the three men—
one Afro-Hispanic and two Jews—who represent Christ’s torturers are portrayed
as excessively repulsive caricatures to convey ‘the incarnation of evil’. The three
executioners were meant to be perceived as evil so as to show how the Sacrifice of
Christ would save all humanity from evil (see Fig 3.7, 1641). The presence of such
figures, then, ‘could be motivated by an allusion to the evil embodied in those
miscreants of every race or even to refer to the fact that the suffering of Christ was
for the redemption of the sins of all mankind, that is of every race’.96 Thus, con
temporary Spanish art historians still see this particularly disturbing feature of
92 Santiago Valiente Timón, ‘La fiesta del “Corpus Christi” en el Reino de Castilla durante la Edad
Moderna’, Ab Initio 3 (2011), pp. 45–57; María Jesús Sanz, ‘La procesión del Corpus en Sevilla.
Influencias sociales y políticas en la evolución del cortejo’, Arts Longa 16 (2007), pp. 55–72.
94 See Santiago Valiente Timón, ‘La fiesta del “Corpus Christi” en el Reino de Castilla durante la
Edad Moderna’, p. 47, María Jesús Sanz, ‘La procesión del Corpus en Sevilla. Influencias sociales y
políticas en la evolución del cortejo’, pp. 55–72, and Méndez Rodríguez, Esclavos en la pintura sevil-
lana de los Siglos de Oro, pp. 44–62.
95 Susan Verdi Webster, ‘Sacred Altars, Sacred Streets: The Sculpture of Penitential Confraternities
in Early Modern Spain’, Journal of Ritual Studies, 6 (1) (1992), p. 163.
96 Javier Baladrón Alonso, ‘Cofradía de Nuestro Padre Jesus Nazareno: Preparativos para la
Crucifixión’ in El Redopelo, 25 March 2016. See http://artevalladolid.blogspot.co.uk/2016/03/,
accessed 6 November 2017.
80 Black but Human
Fig. 3.6. Attributed to Francisco Alonso de los Ríos and Juan de Ávila, Float for
Preparations for the Crucifixion, 1641, Museo Nacional de Escultura, Valladolid
(Spain). © Photo: Javier Muñoz y Paz Pastor, A36conjunto.
Fig. 3.7. Attributed to Francisco Alonso de los Ríos and Juan de Ávila, Float for
Preparations for the Crucifixion, 1641, Museo Nacional de Escultura, Valladolid
(Spain). © Photo: Javier Muñoz y Paz Pastor, A36conjunto.
Fig. 3.8. El Greco, Cardinal Don Fernando Niño de Guevara, c.1600. Metropolitan
Museum of Art, New York.
CREDIT LINE: El Greco (Theotokopulos, Domenico 1541–1614), Portrait of a Cardinal, Probably
Cardinal Don Fernando Nino de Guevara (1541–1609), c.1600. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New
York. Oil on canvas, 67 1/4 x 42 1/2 in. (170.8 x 108 cm). Inscribed: Signed (lower center, on paper, in
Greek): Domenikos Theotokopoulos/made this. H. O. Havemeyer Collection, Bequest of Mrs.
H. O. Havemeyer, 1929. Acc.n.: 29.100.5. © 2018 Image copyright The Metropolitan Museum of Art/
Art Resource/Scala, Florence.
the processional sculptures of Holy Week as legitimate, because the figures represent
this specific aspect of Christology.
The last documented year that the confraternity of mulatos participated in the
Corpus Christi procession in Seville was 1735.97 The presence of Afro-Hispanics
slaves in processions or other public events generated ethnic tensions in the
streets, so much so that Cardinal Fernando Niño de Guevara (1601–9), bishop of
Seville (see Fig 3.8), abolished under threat of excommunication the black con
fraternity of Our Lady of the Angels in the Diocesan Synod of December 1604.98
Documentary evidence reveals that ‘rivalry among penitential confraternities
la Hermandad del Calvario (Seville: Ayuntamiento de Sevilla, 2001), pp. 86–91.
98 Moreno, La antigua hermandad de los negros de Sevilla, pp. 81–90.
82 Black but Human
was, and still is, extremely strong’, and that ‘confrontations among them were
frequent’.99 It was Cardinal Guevara who barred the members of the oldest black
confraternity in Western Europe from taking part in processions or in celebrations
of feasts, such as those for the Immaculate Conception that had been celebrated
in the city’s cathedral from the second half of the sixteenth century. In chapter
XIII of the third book of the Diocesan Synod of 1604, Cardinal Guevara refers to
this black institution and to the mixed-race confraternity of St Ildefonso, when he
declared: ‘And having been informed that there is great disorder in this archbishop
ric and principally in this city of Seville, as much in the images and insignia that
are carried in them as in the clothing, profanity and lack of devotion that the
penitents display.’100 Guevara decided, inter alia, to send a Provider (Provisor) to
inspect the images and insignia that were taken out in such processions, and to
remove and reform those that appeared not to have devotion, authority, and
gravity appropriate to such representations.101 The source of this prohibition was
the official litigation against the Cofradía de Nuestra Señora de los Ángeles by the
aristocratic confraternity of Real Cofradía de Nuestra Señora de la Antigua, Siete
Dolores y Compasión. The accusation was that the Afro-Hispanic members of
their confraternity had been physically aggressive towards their members in the
El Salvador Square on Holy Thursday: ‘With great uproar they came over and
broke the Antigua confraternity with force and against their will, beating and
throwing stones at the sisters of the said Antigua confraternity, and wounding the
sisters with arms.’102
The result was that Afro-Hispanic slaves, including members of Our Lady of
the Angels, were prohibited from taking part in processions with confraternities
of white people:
It is contrary to good order and natural reason, that the brothers of the said con
fraternity being slaves, and having been converted without having an Old
Christian heritage, should want to vie with the rest of the white confraternities
[. . .] and that they should never [in future] be in the same place as white confra
ternities, to avoid outrage from the said Blacks.103
99 Verdi Webster, ‘Sacred Altars, Sacred Streets’, p. 172.

100 Moreno, La antigua hermandad de los negros de Sevilla, pp. 80–1: Y por haber sido informado
que es grande el desorden que hay en este Arzobispado y principalmente en esta ciudad de Sevilla, así en
las imágines e insignias que en ellas se llevan como en el hábito y poca devoción y profanidad con que los
penitentes van.
101 Moreno, La antigua hermandad de los negros de Sevilla, pp. 81, 82, 83: las imágenes e insignias
que se sacan en las dichas procesiones, y quiten y reformen las que les pareciere que no tienen la devo-
ción, autoridad y gravedad que conviene para tan santa representación.
102 Moreno, La antigua hermandad de los negros de Sevilla, p. 84: Con mucho escándalo atravesaron
y rompieran la dicha cofradía de la Antigua, por fuerza y contra su voluntad, tirando piedras y dando de
palos a las hermanas de dicha cofradía de la Antigua y con armas hirieron a hermanos de ella.
103 See legal documents from the Archivo del Palacio Arzobispal in Seville in Moreno, La antigua
hermandad de los negros de Sevilla, pp. 84–5: Es contra buen orden y razón natural que siendo los her-
manos de la dicha cofradía esclavos, y que ellos mismos se convirtieron sin que tengan ascendencia de
The reasons are explicit: apart from keeping ‘good order’, they appeal to the lack
of purity of blood, which signifies the lack of faith as ‘natural reason’. The conclu
sions were fuelled by the strongest ethnic prejudice against Afro-Hispanic people
in the witness declarations, where they are defined as:
Drunk and Black: Ignominy against holy religion, the occasion for outrage, and
content with heresies, and people without reason, foolish people, with a natural
inclination towards public misdemeanors and causes of outrage. They mock
them, and say things that at times make them angry and other times have them
guffawing with laughter.104
This official account claims that:
Many people are waiting for them to whistle at them, mock and taunt them:
talking to them in Guinea, and sticking them with pins, which annoyed them
and made them call the whites Jews [the worst offence to white Old Christians
obsessed with the purity of their lineage], which the Black women that accom
panied them did too [. . .] at the same time women and men used wounding
words, speaking to them like Blacks, which affronted them so they responded
with bad language.105
Cardinal Guevara’s views were certainly that:
The said [Blacks] are the crudest people and the most ignorant of religion,
devotion and reverence that it is possible to have on such processions: they do
and say the most ridiculous things [and] are ridiculous people that their pro
cessing serves only to upset and divert the devotion of the faithful who are in the
churches and streets where they pass by, who whistle at them, while they [the
Blacks] kick up such a fuss that it is a dishonour and an outrage, mainly in this
city where there are so many heathens who, if this procession were to take place,
will see the matters of our religion treated with such indecency.106
cristianos antiguos, quieran competir con las demás cofradías de gente blanca [. . .] no salgan en la demás
cosas tocantes a ella con graves penas [. . .] que en ningún tiempo concurra con cofradía de gente blanca,
por evitar escándalo con los dichos negros.
104 Moreno, La antigua hermandad de los negros de Sevilla, pp. 84, 87–9: Borrachos y negros;
Oprobio de la santa religión, ocasión de escándalo, y contento de herejes, and people sin razón, gente
ridícula, natural inclinación a los delitos públicos and causantes de escándalo. Hacen burlas de ello,
peyéndoles y diciéndoles palabras que unas veces los provocan a que se enojen y otras veces provocan risa.
105 Moreno, La antigua hermandad de los negros de Sevilla, p. 85: mucha gente los está aguardando
para silvarles y hacerles otras mofas y escarnios; hablarles en guineo, and picándoles con alfileres, de lo
cual se enojan y llaman a los blancos judíos, lo cual asimismo hacen las negras que los acompañan. To
the latter, asímismo hombres y mujeres decían palabras injuriosas, hablándoles a modo de negros, de que
ellas se afrentaban y respondían malas palabras.
84 Black but Human
The idea was that allowing Afro-Hispanic people to gather in public spaces meant
accepting an act of indecency and a form of attack against ‘our holy religion’.
The conclusion of the trial on 23 March 1606 was that eight slaves were con
demned to prison, and a prohibition imposed on the participation of Afro-Hispanic
people in the city’s processions. Punishment for the infringement of this legal
decision would be a hundred lashes on each slave and total excommunication
from their black confraternities.107 However, Afro-Hispanic members of the con
fraternity of Our Lady of the Angels did not give up and eventually found support
from the bishop Castro y Quiñones, Guevara’s successor who allowed them to be
involved in the defence of the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, and this to
such an extent that, as we saw in chapter 1, they sent a poem to Innocent X in
1653 to show their support for the new dogma.
Francisco Pacheco codified the new Tridentine image of the Immaculate
Conception in the treatise that was immediately adopted as a ‘model for all
Catholic Europe’, including artists in the Spanish empire.108 His recommenda
tions on ‘How to Paint the Immaculate Conception of our Lady’, partly derived
from the Song of Songs and from the Book of Revelation to St John on Mount
Patmos, and reads:
In this most lovely mystery the Lady should be painted in the flower of her
youth, 12 or 13 years of age, as a more beautiful young girl, with fine and serious
eyes, a most perfect nose and mouth and roseate cheeks, wearing loose her most
beautiful golden hair, in short with as much perfection as the human brush is
capable of achieving [. . .]. She should be painted with a white tunic and a blue
mantle [. . .]. She is clothed in the sun, an oval sun of whites and ochres must
surround the whole image, sweetly fusing the latter with the sky. She is crowned
with stars, twelve in all, arranged in an illuminated circle betwixt the rays that
shine forth from Her sacred forehead. The stars are painted as very light spots of
pure, dry white excelling all rays in their brightness [. . .] an imperial Crown
should adorn Her head which should not hide the stars. Beneath Her feet we
behold the moon. Although it is a solid planet, I myself rendered it light and
translucent, hanging over the landscape as a half-moon with the extremities
107 Moreno, La antigua hermandad de los negros de Sevilla, p. 87: Son los sobredichos los mas rudos e
ignorantes de la religión, devoción y reverencia que en hacer tales procesiones se deben tener; hacen y
dicen cosas ridículas [. . .] son gente tan ridícula que su procesión no sirve sino de perturbar y diverter la
devoción de los fieles que están en las iglesias y calles por donde pasan, adonde les silban y ellos se alborotan
de manera que es así gran dishonor y escándalo, mayormente en esta ciudad donde hay tanto concurso
de infieles que verán, si a esta procesión se diese lugar, tratarse con tanta indecencia las cosas de nuestra
religión cristiana.
108 See The Spanish Golden Age Painting: Painting and Sculpture in the Time of Velázquez, exhibition
catalogue (Munich: Hirmer Publishers, 2016), p. 22. For a comprehensive Spanish iconography and
bibliography of the Immaculate Conception by Suzanne L. Stratton-Pruitt, The Immaculate Conception
in Spanish Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
pointing downwards [. . .] the various attributes of the earth will be suitably
distributed in the landscape, and those of heaven will be arranged, if so desired,
amongst the clouds. Seraphim or full-bodied angels bearing some of these attri
butes may also been introduced. I forgot the dragon, the common enemy of
man, whose head the Virgin broke when She triumphed over original sin.109
In the 1616 monumental pragmatic painting Seville honours the Immaculate

Conception of the Virgin in 1615 by Juan de Roelas (1570–c.1625), which he
donated to Philip III (see Plate 3.4) and now at the Museo Nacional de Escultura,
in Valladolid, became ‘a model for all of Catholic Europe’. The painter depicted
members of the Afro-Hispanic communities in the foreground of his canvas. In
the centre of the painting is a tree with the badge of the Franciscan order (who
began the defence of this dogma) that is linked above with the coat of arms of
Philip III to show Hapsburg approval of the doctrine. This tree broadly divides
the canvas into two zones: earth in the lower part and the celestial at the top
where the depiction of the Virgin of the Immaculate Conception with her open
arms closely follows Pacheco’s instructions. She is surrounded by abstract sym
bols and theological writings amid representations of saints, prophets, and fathers
of the church who were involved in the defence of this dogma. They are all pro
tected by sixteen oval-framed litanies at the top of the composition surrounding
the depiction of the Lamb of God at the centre. By contrast, the lower part depicts
the historic procession in Seville on 29 June 1615 to defend and promulgate the
belief of the Immaculate Conception,110 where approximately 20,000 people
attended, amongst them Afro-Hispanic slaves and ex-slaves, to show their belief
that the Mother of God, Mary, had been conceived and born free of original sin.
The popular medieval cult of the immaculata conceptio was promoted by Castro y
Quiñones, with very generous indulgences being offered for participation:
The Archbishop, [was] already so devoted to this mystery [the Immaculate

Conception] and his Dean and cathedral chapter took upon one accord the pri
mary obligation of making great public demonstration to vindicate [. . .] the
Queen conceived without original sin.111
As we saw in chapter 2, Castro y Quiñones wrote Instrucción para remediar y

asegurar, quanto con la divina gracia fuere posible, que ninguno de los Negros que
109 English version: Pacheco, Arte de la pintura, edited by Harrison, Wood and Gaiger (2007),
pp. 35–7 and Pacheco, El Arte de la Pintura, edited by Bonaventura Bassegoda i Hugas, pp. 576–7: en este
aseadísimo misterio esta Señora en la flor de sue dad, de doce a trece años, hermosísima niña, lindos y
graves ojos, nariz y boca perfectisima y roxadas mexillas, los bellísimos cabellos tendidos, de color de oro;
en fin cuanto fuere possible al humano pincel.
110 Rafael Castañeda García, ‘Introducción’, in Entre la solemnidad y el regocijo, p. 13.
111 See quotation from Ortíz de Zúñiga, Anales eclesiásticos by Suzanne L. Stratton, The Immaculate
Conception in Spanish Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 72.
86 Black but Human
vienen de Guinea, Angola, y otras Provincias de aquella costa de África, carezca del
sagrado Baptismo (Instructions for Remedying and Assuring that None of the Blacks
Is Lacking in Sacred Baptism). He intervened in favour of the black confraternity
and supported their campaign to re-open their institution, which had been dis
solved by Cardinal Guevara. There are records of the fervour shown towards the
Immaculate Conception by Afro-Hispanics, and of the great amazement that the
people of Seville felt at the magnificence of their celebration in Our Lady of
the Angels.
Religious processions involving those of African descent are peppered with
accounts of miracles and deep transformations. For example, there is the eighteenth-
century legend of the miraculous blackening of the face of the sculpture of
St Francis of Paula (1416–1507) during a procession in La Habana, in Cuba.112
He was the founder of the Order of the Franciscan Minims in 1435 and their
first monastery was founded by the Catholic Monarchs in 1492, where they were
known as hermanos de la victoria (‘Fathers of the Victory’), owing to the victory
of King Ferdinand over the Moors of Málaga. In 1493, the Minim Bernardo Boil
was appointed the first vicar Apostolic of the New World and he went to New
World with Columbus.113 In the Cuban legend, the miracle signals the support
granted to the black brothers by the patron saint of the black confraternity
founded by Afro-Cuban slaves as they defended their ‘ownership’ of their brother
hood after it had been appropriated by the white nobility:
Seeing the noble whites, the blacks being common, even slaves to whom San
Francisco de Paula provides benefits, working in them by the thousand with the
joyful Blacks congregation, and in a short time, the whites in growing numbers
violently expelled the Blacks from the Congregation, because the proud did not
wish to mingle with the humble. Upset and sad, these bewailed their misfortune
having no one to protect and defend their clear and just cause, that they had in
being only Blacks, those who before all others, were the founders of the
Congregación del Santo Padre S. Francisco de Paula, telling their grief with tears
in their eyes. Heaven heard these just supplications, directing them to the Saint:
it happened that one day when they were already in procession to take him out,
they saw half of the face of the Saint turn as black as tar. They could not work out
112 Don Gómez Arias, El Clarín Armónico de las glorias, y milagros del mínimo máximo taumaturgo
S. Francisco de Paula (Madrid: Imprenta de Joseph González, 1749), pp. 34–48.
113 St Francis of Paula (Paola, Calabria, 1416–1507), founder of the Franciscan Minim Friars, in
1435 and approved in 1474. They were called Minims through humility and gave emphasis to the
monastic aspects of the Franciscan order, extreme austerity and charity. Francis’s fame for his miracles
when he was still alive, and his prophesies brought him to serve King Louis XIV in France for 25 years.
He helped to achieve peace between France and Spain and France and Britain. He is considered
patron of seafarers: The Oxford Dictionary of Saints, edited by David Hugh Farmer (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1992), p. 188. See the entry ‘Minimi’, The Catholic Encyclopedia, X (New York: The
Encyclopedia Press, 1913), p. 325 and P.J.S. Whitmore, The Order of Minims in Seventeenth-Century
France (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1967).
the cause of such an abrupt change, noting how quickly it happened, with his
face showing all his complexion as black: they still could not see when this could
have happened; but looking at his feet and hand, that were already black and
blended with his Habit, they realised that the Blacks were estimable in the Saint’s
eyes, and at once confused and joyful, they once more became parts of the
Congregation. So the Saint made the World understand that virtue was not
served by the High and Mighty, since the humble slave and the commoner,
if he is more virtuous of soul, [he] is greater than exception [all] persons among
the saints.114
According to the account of Gómez Arias in his El Clarín Armónico, published in

Madrid in 1749,115 the black head of the sculpture was sent as a relic to Madrid
where it was kept in the church of the Monastery of La Victoria of the Order of
Minims of San Francis of Paul: ‘After much time had passed the black head of the
Saint was cut off, with people knowing, and replaced by a white one, making a
pilgrimage to the Saint a devotion for Spain, a matter applauded by the Court
of Madrid.’116
In early modern Spanish visual art, the iconography of an enslaved Afro-
Hispanic subject was not created by Spanish artists who concentrated instead on
the depiction of chained white Spanish Christian captives rescued from North
Africa by the religious orders of the Trinitarians and Mercedarians and founded
to defend the Christian faith in the Islamic world. Both Orders collected money
‘in the form of pious donations from ordinary people and as special ransom pay
ments from the families of captives’.117 In 1588, in his Discourses on the Protection
114 Gómez Arias, El Clarín Armónico de las glorias, pp. 45–7: Viendo los blancos nobles, ser los
negros plebeyos, y aun esclavos á quien hace San Francisco de Paula beneficios, obrando en ellos á mil-
lares con los negros felices Congregantes y en breve tiempo, en numero creciendo los blancos, á los negros
con ultrage de la Congregación despide, porque quieren soberbios, con humildes no mezclarse. Afligidos,
y tristes, su desgracia lloraban sin tener quien amparasse la justicia tan clara, que tenían en ser los negros
solos, los que antes que otro alguno, fueron Fundadores de la Congregación del Santo Padre S. Francisco
de Paula, á sus ojos con lágrimas decían sus pesares. Oyó el Cielo las súplicas tan justas poniéndoles al
Santo de su parte: Fuè el caso, cierto día, que ya estaban formando processión para sacarle, medio rostro
del Santo luego al punto negro como la pez vieron mudarse. No advirtieron la causa por entonces de
mutación tan prompta, y admirable mas en breve notaron, que ya negra toda la tez mostraba su sem-
blante: Todavía no daban en el punto de que aquello podía originarse; mas viendo pies, y mano, que yà
negros con el Hábito hacían maridage, cayeron en la cuenta, de que el Santo le serían los negros estima-
bles, y al instante confusos, y gozosos los hicieron de nuevo Congregantes. Dando à entender al Mundo,
nuestro Santo que la virtud no sirven personajes, pues el humilde esclavo, y el plebeyo, si es mejor en el
alma, ese es mas grande que excepciones de personas en los santos.
115 Manuel Arias Martínez, ‘La copia más sagrada’: la escultura vestidera de la Virgen de la Soledad
de Gaspar Becerra y la presencia del artista en el Convento de Mínimos de la Victoria de Madrid’,
Boletín de la Real Academia de Bellas Artes de la Purísima Concepción, 46 (2011), p. 54.
116 Gómez Arias, El Clarín Armónico de las glorias, pp. 48–9: La cabeza del Santo, que por negra,
después de muchos tiempos, ignorantes, la cortaron, poniéndola otra blanca, haciendo para España su
viage un devoto del Santo se la trajo, y en esta Corte de Madrid se aplaude.
117 William D. Phillips, Jr, Slavery in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania University Press, 2014), pp. 51–2.
88 Black but Human
of the Legitimate Poor, Cristóbal Pérez de Herrera (1558–1620)118 defines Africans

as gente bárbara y cruel, sin Dios, sin fe y sin justicia and as gente perversa y ene-
miga de nuestra santa fe católica (‘barbarians and cruel and without God, faith
and justice, perverse people and enemy of our holy catholic faith’).119 Here, Pérez
de Herrera, who was a royal physician in the prisons of Madrid and Valladolid
and served in the Spanish galleys for more than ten years, identified the religious
threat to their souls by the closer contact with their captors as the greatest danger
to Christian captives from the Iberian empire in North Africa. His aim was to
advocate the rescue of Spanish Christian slaves from their hard condition of
enslavement and ‘cruel and excessive punishment’ suffered from the ‘moors’ who
were in his view ‘infidels and enemies of Our Lord’ and ‘heretics’.120
When, by the end of the sixteenth century, after the Battle of Lepanto (1571),
the Hapsburgs provided a juridical and economic support to these two medieval
orders, 6,369 captives were liberated from forty-three redenciones (twenty-three
Trinitarians and fifteen Mercedarians) in Morocco and Algiers, between 1575 and
1692.121 It is known that between 1580 and 1640, 38,500 European captives were
distributed in the slave markets of Tunisia (10,000), Algiers (25,000), Tetouan in
Morocco (3,000), and Tripoli (500).122 The Hapsburgs donated 98,536 ducats
towards this activity, without taking into account the sums donated by Manuela
of Portugal, Margarita of Austria, and Elizabeth of Portugal.123 The founder of the
‘Military Order of Our Lady of Mercy of the Redemption of the Captives’ in 1218
in Barcelona was Peter Nolasco, who in 1230 became the first Superior and
Ransomer to work mainly in Valencia and in Granada. Nolasco was canonized in
1628 and the Mercedarians’ mission was not fulfilled until 1815.124 In the panel of
St Peter Nolasco Ransoming Captives by Pedro de la Cuadra (c.1570–1629) (see
Fig 3.9, 1599), now at the Museo Nacional de Escultura, in Valladolid, Spanish
captives can be seen. This is the only surviving panel from the main polychromed
118 Luis S. Granjel, ‘Vida y Obra del Dr. Cristóbal Pérez de Herrera’, in Luis S. Granjel, Estudios de la
Historia de la Medicina Española (Salamanca: Universidad de Salamanca, 1959), p. 75.
119 Cristóbal Pérez de Herrera, Amparo de los pobres (Madrid, Luis Sánchez, 1598), edited by
Michel Cavillac (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1975), p. 84. The full title of his treatise is Discourses on the
Protection of the Legitimate Poor and Reduction of those Feigning and on the Foundation and Principle
of Shelters in these Realms (1598).
120 Pérez de Herrera, Amparo de los pobres, pp. 84–5: gente bárbara y cruel, sin Dios, sin fe y sin
justicia and as gente perversa y enemiga de nuestra santa fe católica.
121 José Antonio Martínez Torres, ‘El rescate de cautivos cristianos en el norte de África (siglos
XVI–XVIII)’, Historia Social, 49 (2004), pp. 29–31, 37.
122 José Antonio Martínez Torres, ‘El rescate de cautivos cristianos en el norte de África siglos
XVI–XVIII)’, p. 36.
123 José Antonio Martínez Torres, ‘El rescate de cautivos cristianos en el norte de África (siglos
XVI–XVIII)’, pp. 42–3.
124 Jean Michel Massing, ‘The Iconography of Mediterranean Slavery in the Seventeenth Century’,
in The Slave in European Art: From Renaissance Trophy to Abolitionist Emblem, edited by Elizabeth
McGrath and Jean Michel Massing, The Warburg Colloquia Series, 20 (London and Turin: The
Warburg Institute and Nino Aragno Ed., 2012), pp. 90–2.
Fig. 3.9. Pedro de la Cuadra, St Peter Nolasco Ransoming Captives, 1599, Main altarpiece
of the Convent of Our Lady of Mercy (Valladolid). © Museo Nacional de Escultura,
Valladolid (Spain), CE0430.
wood altarpiece of the church of their Convent of Our Lady of Mercy or the
Calced Mercedarians (Merced Calzada) dedicated to their founder, St Peter
Nolasco (1189–1256) in Valladolid, originally commissioned from Isaac de Juní
and completed by de la Cuadra. In this bas-relief, two of the four white Spanish
slaves, dressed with their Muslim robes, are shown with a fetter around their
necks. They are standing to the right of the composition, in the background and
behind an African merchant possibly from Morocco, where the Mercedarian
order was more active. All the depicted characters are looking to Peter Nolasco,
who is in the foreground of the composition wearing his white robe with the
emblem of the Mercedarian order. He is praying to their North African trader to
liberate this group of white Spanish Christian captives.
In the next chapter, instead, we will see how Joris Hoefnagel and Christopher
Weiditz, from the Spanish territories in Europe, coined the sixteenth-century
iconography of an enslaved Afro-Hispanic subject in Hapsburg Spain. This
iconography will be created by Spanish painters and sculptors in the religious
90 Black but Human
form, in the context of the European legend of the miracle of the black leg with a
deeply disturbing and original version in the kingdom of Castile, as we will
explore in chapter 5. The shift from these stereotypical views of Afro-Spanish
slaves to the emergence of the ‘slave subject’ and the ‘emancipatory subject’ will be
the focus of my last chapter.
4
Props and Costume
The Slave Trade
In his gouache with the View of Seville, the Flemish painter and traveller, Joris
Hoefnagel (Antwerp, 1542–Vienna, 1600), codifies the iconographies of captured
Africans as chained slaves (bozales) and as Christianized Afro-Hispanic slaves
(ladinos) in Hapsburg Spain (see Plate 4.1, 1573, Brussels, Bibliothèque Royale
Albert Ier Cabinet des Estampes, 21.6 x 32.3 cm).1 This drawing is signed Georgius
Hoefnagle Antverpianus inventor faciebat Anno MDLXXIII. Natura sola magistra.
His work is part of the views of cities as an autonomous genre that became very
common in Europe from the middle of the sixteenth century.2 Hoefnagel trav-
elled to Spain between 1561 and 1567 and spent most of his time in the south of
Castile (Andalusia), where he also made his earlier View of Seville (c.1565–7),
printed in 1572 for the Civitates Orbis Terrarum (Book of Cities, Cologne, 1572–1617)
of Georg Braun and Frans Hogenberg.3
The economic value of enslaved Africans and their descendants was central to
early modern Spanish slavery. The Crown and Church were directly involved in
the foundation of the House of Trade and the Council of the Indies in Seville,
which financed the first Atlantic voyages.4 These institutions, founded in 1503
and 1592 respectively, were responsible for the licences that allowed Africans
to be transported as slaves to Spain and to the newly discovered lands of the
New World.5
The main aim of the commodification of pagan and/or infidel Africans,
who would become strategic resources for the Spanish colonization, was the
1 See Splendeurs d’Espagne et les villes belges 1500–1700, edited by Jean-Marie Duvosquel and
Ignace Vandevivere, 2 (Bruxelles: Crédit Communal, 1985), pp. 373–4.
2 Arsenio Moreno, Mentalidad y pintura en la Sevilla del Siglo de Oro (Madrid: Electa, 1997), pp. 81–4.
3 Johannes Keuning, ‘The “Civitates” of Braun and Hogenberg’, Imago Mundi, 17 (1963), pp. 41–4.
4 José Luis Cortés López, La esclavitud negra en la España peninsular del siglo XVI (Salamanca:
Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca, 1989), p. 52. Alfonso Franco Silva, La esclavitud en Sevilla y su
tierra a fines de la Edad Media (Seville: Diputación provincial de Sevilla, Servicio de Publicaciones,
1979), pp. 73–103, 193.
5 Enriqueta Vila Villar, Hispanoamérica y el comercio de esclavos (Seville: Consejo Superior de
Investigaciones Científicas, 1977); Robin Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery: From the
Baroque to the Modern 1492–1800 (London, New York: Verso, 1998), pp. 131–2, 135, 141–2. See the
direct involvement of the Catholic Monarchs (1492–1515) and the Regent Cardinal Cisneros
(1516–1518) in the slave trade and authorization of slave licences to the New World, in Isacio Pérez
Fernández, Bartolomé de Las Casas ¿Contra los Negros? Revisión de una leyenda (Madrid: Editorial
Mundo Negro, 1991), pp. 71–86.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198767978.001.0001
92 Black but Human
intensification of ‘labor in order to maximize production’ in the New World.6 The

other aim was to increase the wealth of the kingdoms of Aragon and Castile,
where free slave labour was indispensable in rural and urban centres until the
beginning of the nineteenth century, as the constant advertisements to sell Afro-
Hispanic slaves for domestic purposes in the newspapers Diario de Madrid and
the Gaceta de Madrid, for example, testify. In these advertisements, the term
‘slave’ is explicitly used and it is generally followed by the slave’s name, age, status,
and ethnicity, price of purchase, name of the slave owner, and the address where
the economic transaction will take place, as we shall see in the conclusions of
this book.
In Hoefnagel’s drawing of the View of Seville, dated 1573, as in most of his
Spanish topographic work, the city constitutes the backdrop to a picturesque
depiction of everyday life, where a cross-section of local society, costume, and
dress are depicted: fishermen unloading their catch from the boats in the river,
anonymous citizens walking, talking, or riding in the fields around Seville. The
main difference with his previous topographic views of this city is that the artist
records an elegant ladino or a Christianized Afro-Hispanic enslaved man as walk-
ing on his own behind a wealthier horse-rider. Furthermore, Hoefnagel places
him in the middle of the landscape, at the centre of the composition. He is prob-
ably the page’s own master since one of the functions of enslaved men was to be
their owner’s escort on foot if they were riding.7 The miniaturist’s view of domin
ated nature suggests a friendly environment, where everybody appears happy and
healthy. His anecdotal view of Hispalis or ancient Seville, believed to be founded
by Hercules himself, is contextualized by the extravagant surrounding border
celebrating the wealth and political and maritime power of Seville as the commercial
capital of the sixteenth-century Atlantic world.
At the top centre of the coat of arms of the city, we have Saint Ferdinand or
King Ferdinand III of Castile, who was responsible for the Reconquest of Andalusia
in 1248, and the two early Spanish bishops and saints, Leander and his brother
Isidore, who were accountable for the conversion to Christianity of the Visigothic
Kings of Hispania. Symbolic and exotic motifs in the upper section of the border
glorify the power of Seville, as do the Latin inscriptions around the outer edge of
the drawing: at the top right the tags read: glorious in war (inclyta bello), and fer-
tile in fields (fertilis agris), and at the top left: flowering in peace (pace florens)
and abundant in fruits (fructibus abundans). In the lower half of the border,
we find the inscriptions: famous for trade (mercatura celebris) to the right of the
allegory of Hispania or Spain and to the left, wealthy in riches (dives opum) that
6 David Brion Davis, Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 3.
7 Ruth Pike, Aristocrats and Traders: Sevillian Society in the Sixteenth Century (London and Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1972), p. 178.
Props and Costume 93
correspond to the allegory of India or the New World. In the middle of these
inscriptions are two boats approaching each other, Minerva the goddess of armed
peace is depicted, facing the allegory of Hispania. Above her, a parrot holds a flag
with the personal motto of Imperial Spain: the columns of Hercules holding
Charles V’s personal maxim Plus Ultra signifying the expansion of the Spanish
Empire at the edge of the then known world.
The allegorical boat of India carries silver, gold, pearls, precious woods, dyestuffs,
and most probably hides, from the Viceroyalty of New Spain, and is guarded by
exotic animals and humans, and bizarre figures, some of them representing alle-
gories of America, Dominica, and Hispania Nova or New Spain.8 Opposite, the
allegorical ship of Hispania is also shielded by fantastic characters such as the
black figure riding a sea creature, that are protecting the allegories of Castilla and
Betica or the river Guadalquivir which stands for Seville. Among the objects of
Spanish commerce and commodities, the Hispania boat carries two African men,
depicted as chained slaves (see Fig 4.1). They are seated on boxes between a load
of wineskins and barrels, and are clearly examples of the goods of Spanish com-
merce. The slave on the right has shackles on his right leg and his companion has
both his legs shackled together. In addition, the presence of this human cargo
celebrated by the Latin inscription mercatura celebris (famous for trade) is legit-
imized by the protection of Mercury, god of trade and communication, who
highlights the economic and political power of Hispalis, as Hoefnagel defined
Seville, using its ancient name.
At the bottom of his View of Seville, above Hoefnagel’s signature, is the dedica-
tion of the work to God, who bestows artistic talent (artis largitori Deo opt[imo]
max[imo]). His signature and the date of his drawing are followed by the statement
Natura sola magistra (Schooled by Nature alone), which indicates Hoefnagel’s
fascination with natural history or so-called ‘scientific naturalism’, prevalent at the
period.9 At the end of the fifteenth century, the new art of printing had already
been responsible for the circulation of knowledge of non-European people and
territories opened up by the Portuguese and Spanish conquistadors. In the fol-
lowing century, the development of empirical observation facilitated the emer-
gence and institutionalization of scientific practices that answered the need for
accurate information about the Spanish colonies. The Flemish miniaturist had a
special interest in nature, such as flowers and animals that had just been brought
8 See Esteban Mira Caballos and I.E.S. Mariano Barbacid, ‘Indios nobles y caciques en la corte real
española, siglo XVI’, Temas Americanistas, 16 (2003), pp. 2–3.
9 Antonio Barrera-Osorio, Experiencing Nature: the Spanish American Empire and the Early
Scientific Revolution (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006), pp. 30–1, 47–8. Carmen Fracchia, ‘The
Urban Slave in Spain and New Spain’, in The Slave in European Art: From Renaissance Trophy to
Abolitionist Emblem, edited by Elizabeth McGrath and Jean Michel Massing, The Warburg Colloquia
Series, 20 (London and Turin: The Warburg Institute and Nino Aragno Ed., 2012), pp. 197–8. See
Ingvar Bergström, Dutch Still-Life Painting in the Seventeenth Century, translated by Christina
Hedström and Gerald Taylor (New York: Thomas Yoseloff, 1956), pp. 40–1.
94 Black but Human
Fig. 4.1. Joris Hoefnagel, Detail: Hispania. Joris Hoefnagel, View of Seville, 1573,
Bibliothèque Royale Albert Ier Cabinet des Estampes, S.I 23045, Brussels.
from the New World or other continents to the House of Trade in Seville where
they became the ‘supply of “wonders” that were essential for the emerging cab-
inets of curiosities’.10 Hoefnagel’s fascination with the bizarre and exotic is at the
core of his elaborate border for his View of Seville, which includes the captured
enslaved African men depicted as chained exotic animals that belong to the
precious collections of Hapsburg Spain rather than as human beings.11
The artist had previously paid attention to Afro-Hispanic slaves as part of the
entourages of Spaniards in Flanders, as his 1569 emblem of The Patient Lover from
the Manuscript Patience testifies (Bibliothèque Municipale, Rouen). In the inscrip-
tion for this drawing where a Spaniard slave owner (the Duke of Alba), declaring
his love to a woman (representing Belgica), is escorted by his Afro-Hispanic
slave, the enslaved man embodies the virtue of Patience, something certainly
required by enslaved men and women.12 Hoefnagel, who later worked for Emperor
10 Patrick Mauriès, Cabinet of Curiosities (London: Thames & Hudson, 2011), p. 43.
11 See Carlos Gómez Centurión Jiménez, Alhajas para Soberanos. Los animales reales en el siglo
XVIII: de las leoneras a las mascotas de cámara (Madrid: Junta de Castilla y León, 2011).
12 See Yasui, Ayumi, ‘Belgica, Personification of the Low Countries in Prints during the Eighty
Years’ War’, The Bulletin of Kanazawa College of Art, 53 (2009), p. 14: ‘Belgica as the beloved, saying
Rudolph II in Prague and Vienna, remained in the Hapsburg circle. He became

the leading Flemish illuminator during the second half of the sixteenth century
and an excellent draughtsman, who made several other drawings of Seville.13
In his View of Seville, the visual rendering of captured Africans, as totally dehu-
manized human beings about to be sold in the market in this city as commodities
to become the domestic and rural slaves (bozales) of imperial Spain, is in contrast
to the iconography of an enslaved Afro-Hispanic man (ladino) who occupies the
centre of his View of Seville. In spite of his privileged place, the ladino shares his
isolation with captured Africans. This seems to indicate the price of acculturation
in a society where the institution of slavery and the highly visible Afro-Hispanic
presence are taken as natural features of the urban landscape.
The impact of the slave trade and the presence of Africans and their descend-
ants in imperial Spain are also evident in other topographical views of the slave-
city that were mass-produced for local and colonial audiences.14 In the earliest
topographical painting of the View of Seville of c.1600 the anonymous painter,
who follows the Flemish landscape tradition, presents a high, panoramic view-
point, and the focus is on the port city to display the commercial activity with the
Indies on the river Guadalquivir.15 In addition to the details of everyday social life
in the foreground, the artist depicts the slave galleys as a natural feature of the
topography of this most powerful city of contemporary Spain. Other views of
Seville depict Afro-Hispanic ladinos as assimilated subjects but not in isolation as
in Hoefnagel’s drawings. There is evidence of a certain ethnic tension in the visual
representations of their encounter with the Spaniards, such as in the painting
Three Boys (c.1670) by Bartolomé Esteban Murillo (1617–82). In this canvas, now
at the Dulwich Picture Gallery in London, Murillo depicts a wasteland in Seville
with three children as part of a series of his popular genre paintings that focus on
children at play and eating (see Plate 4.2). Here, the smiling white boy on the left
margin of the picture introduces us to the narrative by his gaze and by pointing to
the black servant at the moment when he has been denied his share of the pie,
“I do not believe you” and resisting the advance of the lover. His name “señor don calf van Lire” is a word
play and an elision of the name of Duc alfa. She escapes cleverly from the dangerous man.’ See O
que dolor es el dolorido Amor, querer y no ser querido (‘O how painful it is for the smitten one to love
and not to be loved’), in Lee Hendrix, Thea Vignau-Wilberg, Joris Hoefnagel, The Illuminator, Mira
Calligraphiae Monumenta: A Sixteenth-Century Calligraphic Manuscript Inscribed by Georg Bocksay
and Illuminated by Joris Hoefnagel, 1 (Los Angeles, California: Getty Publications, 1992), pp. 15–28.
See Janes Tanis and Daniel Horst, Images of Discord: A Graphic Interpretation of the Opening Decades
of the Eighty Years’ War (Philadelphia: Bryn Mawr, 1993), pp. 54–5.
13 Mauriès, Cabinet of Curiosities, p. 1 and Keuning, ‘The “Civitates” of Braun and Hogenberg’, p. 43;
Ingvar Bergström, ‘Georg Hoefnagel, le dernier des grands miniaturistes flamands’, L’Oeil, 101 (1963),
p. 66; Stilleben in Europa, edited by Gerhard Landemeyer and Hans-Albert Peters (Münster:
Aschendorff, 1979), p. 26.
14 Moreno, Mentalidad y pintura en la Sevilla del Siglo de Oro, p. 81.
15 John H. Elliott, ‘The Seville of Velázquez’, in Velázquez in Seville, edited by David Davies and
Enriqueta Harris (Edinburgh: National Gallery of Scotland, 1996), p. 17.
96 Black but Human
held by the white boy on the right. This ethnic tension was first recognized by
Xanthe Brooke in 2001: [Murillo’s painting] ‘remains one of the few occasions
before the art of the nineteenth century that an artist even hints at racial friction’.16
Her views have now been confirmed, eleven years later, by x-rays of the canvas,
which ‘have shown that Murillo’s first intention was to give the “smiling boy” a
much more menacing grin showing bared-teeth’.17 Murillo was a slave owner and
also came from a slave-owning family on his father’s side.18 Brooke believes that
the model for the water seller carrying an earthenware pitcher at the centre of the
painting may have been Murillo’s own slave Juan, who was born in 1658 and
became a freedman in 1676. Juan was the son of the artist’s household slave, Juana
de Santiago. The ethnic tension exposed by Murillo becomes public violence in
the foreground of the Alameda de Hercules by an anonymous Flemish painter (or
perhaps a Spanish painter influenced by Northern landscape paintings) that
belongs to a private collection. The Alameda, a public park and promenade created
in 1574 in the northern part of Seville, was the most popular open public space of
the metropolis, where all classes came together.19 In this canvas, executed in the
middle of the seventeenth century, a fight between two water sellers, a white man
and a black man, is visible by a well in front of the famous columns of Hercules
and Julius Caesar—as representative of Charles V and Philip II, respectively—
while an Afro-Hispanic page watches his master who is about to enter the fight. It
brings to mind the social ‘disorder’ that followed on the regulation and restric-
tions of the use of water from public fountains. Municipal ordinances or edicts
(ordenanzas), such as those in Tenerife in 1557, prohibited slaves, under a penalty
of a hundred lashes, from using water pillars until free people had collected water,
because they were thought to be the cause of public disorder.20 A more violent
encounter is articulated in the foreground of the View of Seville (c.1660) by an
anonymous Flemish painter, which focuses on the Triana area by the port, on the
west side of the city. On the left of the painting, a black man is about to lynch a
white man whom he holds by his shirt. It leaves no doubt that the cause of social
unrest in the public space is the inherently violent behaviour of Afro-Hispanic
16 Xanthe Brooke and Peter Cherry, Murillo: Scenes of Childhood (London: Merrell Publishers,
2001), p. 124.
17 Emily Sharpe, ‘The boy who bared his teeth’, The Art Newspaper, 3 (2012), p. 34.
18 See Carmen Fracchia, ‘Constructing the Black Slave in Spanish Golden Age Painting’, in Others
and Outcasts in Early Modern Europe: Picturing the Social Margins, edited by Tom Nichols (Aldershot:
Ashgate, 2007), pp. 188–90.
19 The View of the Alameda de Hércules (Private Collection, Scotland, 106.7 x 162.5 cm) is classified
as belonging to the mid-seventeenth century Spanish School in Adam Weston-Lewis: ‘A View of the
Alameda de Hércules, Seville’, in Velázquez in Seville, p. 102. See also Pike, Aristocrats and Traders,
pp. 28, 31.
20 Raúl González Arévalo, ‘Ordenanzas municipales y trabajo esclavo en la Corona de Castilla
(Siglos XV–XVI)’, in Schiavitù e servaggio nell’economia europea. Secc. XI–XVIII. Serfdom and Slavery
in the European Economy. 11th–18th Centuries, edited by Simonetta Cavaciocchi (Florence: Firenze
people. By contrast, in the middle of the composition and closer to the spectator
is a very elegant Afro-Hispanic man with a very expensive white lace collar from
Flanders, made of Walleye lace or ‘Wallonne lace’ (valona blanca de encaje) like
the one worn by the slave Juan de Pareja in the portrait by his owner Diego
Velázquez. The palpable ethnic tension in visual depictions of interactions involv-
ing Afro-Hispanics and Spaniards is consistent with the social place of enslaved
communities in Hapsburg Spain, and with the social clashes that took place
between members of the black and white royal confraternities during the Corpus
Christi processions that were discussed in the previous chapter.
It is important to remember that the commodification of slaves and the
exploitation of their exchange value became a source of profit in the emerging
mercantile or capitalist system of early modern Spain.21 The implementation of
institutional chattel slavery was linked to the sugar cane plantation that, accord-
ing to García Añoveros and Andrés-Gallego, was the model for economic exploit
ation that increased from the middle of the fifteenth century.22 Plantations were
originally promoted by the Venetians and the Genoese in Cyprus in the thirteenth
century to provide sugar to the European market as an alternative to the Middle
East and the Maghreb. The Fall of Constantinople at the hands of the Ottoman
Turks and the subsequent lack of access to the slave markets of the Black Sea area
made this system accessible and adaptable to other regions: initiated in Cyprus, it
was adopted in Sicily, and from here to Spain, to the cities of Valencia and Málaga,
and from Spain to the Algarve in the kingdom of Portugal and to Cape Verde in
Africa. In the sixteenth century, this plantation system spread further to Santo
Tomé (today the Democratic Republic of São Tomé and Príncipe) and to the
New World.23 Iberia’s sugar production, and especially Gran Canaria, occupied an
intermediary stage in sugar cane’s spread from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic.
The importance of slave labour in the production of sugar in Spain is highlighted
in a 1572 complaint to Philip II after his prohibition of raids (cabalgadas) from
citizens of Gran Canaria: ‘because the principal enterprises of Gran Canary are
sugar mills and vineyards, and because they have no slaves to work and cultivate
them, each day they suffer great harm.’24
References to their indigenous sugar plantations had been already articulated
with the symbol of cane sugar in the seventeenth century, in the early modern
21 Rafael Mauricio Pérez García and Manuel Francisco Fernández Chaves, ‘Sevilla y la trata negrera
atlántica: envíos de esclavos desde Cabo Verde a la América española, 1569–1579’, in Estudios de histo-
ria moderna en homenaje al professor Antonio García-Baqueo, edited by León Carlos Álvarez y Santalló
(Seville: Universidad de Sevilla, 2009), p. 601.
22 José Andrés-Gallego and Jesús María García Añoveros, La Iglesia y la esclavitud de los negros
(Pamplona: Eunsa, 2002), pp. 17–19.
23 Andrés-Gallego and García Añoveros, La Iglesia y la esclavitud de los negros, pp. 17–19 and
William D. Phillips, Jr, Slavery in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania University Press, 2014), pp. 22, 114–15, 153.
24 Phillips, Jr, Slavery in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia, p. 114.
98 Black but Human
genre of still-life in Seville and Valencia, the most powerful slave-cities in Western
Europe after Lisbon: Still Life with Apples, Walnuts and Sugar Cane (Naseiro
Collection in Madrid), signed and dated 1645 by Pedro de Medina Valbuena
(c.1620–Seville, 1691)25 and Still Life with Cane Sugar and Sweet Meats (1600–35,
Museo del Prado, Madrid) by Tomás Hiepes (Valencia c.1610–74).26
The Iberian empire was the centre of the transatlantic slave trade from the
fifteenth century to the end of the sixteenth century in Western Europe, and
Hoefnagel’s drawing clearly positions the institution of transatlantic and
Mediterranean slavery in the imperial fabric of the main Spanish trade city.
Alessandro Stella recently claimed that while the three centuries of the transat-
lantic slavery of Africans (1450–1750) transported between seven to 800,000
Africans to the Crowns of Aragon and Castile, the Mediterranean slave trade
brought 300,000–400,000 of Moors, Berbers, and Turks. The historian claimed
that if we take into account those slaves born in Spain, we can estimate that
around 2 million slaves lived in early modern Spain.27 In the sixteenth century, it
is estimated that 125,000 Africans and their descent were forced to go to the
New World while the total black migration from 1492 to 1870 moved 15.4 million
people from Africa to become slaves.28 During the union of the kingdoms of
Castile, Aragon, and Portugal from 1580 to 1640, the slave traffic to the Spanish
colonies, especially from Angola and Guinea, increased dramatically.29 Until
recently, the traditional view was that the Portuguese expedition in Africa was at
the root and consolidation of the African slave trade while Spain mainly concen-
trated on the capture of Berbers and Turks.30 Historians of Spanish slavery and
social anthropologists have recently indicated a more active role for the slave
market in Spain and the direct involvement of Spanish merchants along with the
Portuguese, in the transportation of black slaves to the Iberian Peninsula.31 In
1479, the Spanish Crown acknowledged the Portuguese monopoly on the slave
trade, although Spanish shippers brought Africans directly to Spain from the sec-
ond half of the fifteenth century onwards because of the transatlantic slave mar-
ket, but also because of the illegal slave market in Castile. The Portuguese slave
traders who were residents in Seville also exported African slaves directly from
25 See Spanish Still-Life from Velázquez to Goya, edited by William B. Jordan and Peter Cherry
(London National Gallery Publications Limited, 1995), p. 115.
26 See Juan J. Luna, El bodegón español en el Prado. De Van der Hamen a Goya (Madrid: Museo
Nacional del Prado, 2008), p. 162 and Spanish Still-Life from Velázquez to Goya, pp. 118–28.
27 See Alessandro Stella, Ser esclavo y negro en Andalucia Occidental (Siglos XVII y XVIII) (Madrid:
Fundación Ignacio Larramendi, 2011), p. 1 in digital form, see http://www.larramendi.es/i18n/consulta/
registro.do?id=1204, accessed 14 August 2018.
28 García Añoveros and Andrés-Gallego, La Iglesia y la esclavitud de los negros, pp. 18–19.
la Hermandad del Calvario (Seville: Ayuntamiento de Sevilla, 2001), p. 51.
30 Antonio Domínguez Ortiz, El Antiguo Régimen: los Reyes Católicos y los Austrias (Madrid:
Alianza Editorial, 1978), pp. 9, 178–9.
31 Pike, Aristocrats and Traders, p. 174.
Portugal or from their colonies to the Spanish city. Recent findings show that in
the years 1569 and 1570 in Seville (when slaves were roughly 10 per cent of the
population), 85 per cent of Afro-Hispanic slaves stayed in the city, 10 per cent
were distributed in the kingdoms of Castile and Aragon, and 1.75 per cent went
to the colonies. Only 4.1 per cent of these slaves were sold directly by the
Portuguese.32 The higher visibility of Afro-Hispanic slaves (mainly black and
mixed-race) in Spanish cities, such as in ‘Seville, Cádiz, Granada, Lisbon, Las
Palmas in Gran Canaria’,33 where they constituted 10 per cent or even 15 per cent
of the population, brought some commentators to compare Seville to a ‘giant
chessboard containing an equal number of white and black chessmen’ as did
Melchor de Santa Cruz in his History of Seville in 1589.34 There were 58,000 black
slaves in Spain (one slave out of fourteen inhabitants) by the end of the sixteenth
century,35 while in Granada they constituted 14 per cent of the population
(5,000–6,000 slaves out of 40,000 inhabitants).36 However, by the end of the
sixteenth century and in the following two centuries, the population in Seville
declined from 130,000–140,000 people to 85,000 or even 75,000 inhabitants due
to the Atlantic plague (1599–1601), the expulsion of the 7,000 and 500 Moriscos
(1610), and the loss of half of the population (60,000 people) in four months to
bubonic plague (1649).37
In the fifteenth century, Valencia was the third most important slave city in the
Iberian Peninsula, especially for the redistribution of Sub-Saharan slaves, and
here 40 per cent of the slave population was Afro-Hispanics.38
The slave-traders, who were Sevillians, Portuguese, Genoese, Florentines,
Catalans, Germans, French, and English, exported many of the African slaves to
the rest of the Peninsula and to the New World. Slave owners in the Spanish king-
doms belonged to the monarchy, aristocracy, religious orders, the high clergy,
32 Pérez García and Fernández Chaves, ‘Sevilla y la trata negrera atlántica’, pp. 600–2 and Rafael
Mauricio Pérez García and Manuel Francisco Fernández Chaves, ‘Hombres y murallas: mercado y
geografia de la esclavitud de la Sevilla de Felipe II’, in Población y grupos sociales en el Antiguo Régimen,
edited by Juan Jesús Bravo Caro and Juan Sanz Sampelayo, IX Reunión Científica de la Fundación
Española de Historia Moderna. Universidad de Málaga (7–9 de junio 2006), 1 (Málaga: Universidad
de Málaga, 2009b), pp. 587–98.
33 Andrés-Gallego and García Añoveros, La Iglesia y la esclavitud de los negros, pp. 17–19 and
William D. Phillips, Jr, Slavery in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia, pp. 22, 114–15, 153.
34 This quotation by Melchor de Santa Cruz, Floresta española (1574) is cited in Antonio
Domínguez Ortiz, ‘La esclavitud en Castilla durante la Edad Moderna’, in Estudios de historia social de
España, edited by Carmelo Viñas y Mey, 2 (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas,
1952), p. 378.
35 Stella, Ser esclavo y negro en Andalucia Occidental (Siglos XVII y XVIII), p. 1.
36 Aurelia Martín Casares, La esclavitud en la Granada del siglo XVI: género, raza y religión
(Granada: Editorial Universidad de Granada, 2000), p. 115.
la Hermandad del Calvario, pp. 95–6, 98.
38 Debra Blumenthal, ‘La Casa dels Negres’: Black African Solidarity in Late Medieval Valencia”, in
Black Africans in Renaissance Europe, edited by Thomas F. Earle and Kate J. P. Lowe (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 226–7, 229.
100 Black but Human
and the wealthy merchant class. Owners were also professionals, artisans, and
labourers. The upper echelons of society purchased slaves through intermediaries,
whereas the rest of society—such as lawyers, physicians, notaries, traders, con-
quistadors, sea captains, merchants, tailors, shoemakers, and builders—dealt with
the transaction directly, as documents of sale, purchase, donation, declaration of
escape, and manumission of slaves testify. Slaves were owned not only by individ-
uals but also by institutions: hospitals, monasteries, and cloistered nuns which
acquired slaves mainly through donations,39 and were also common at the Hapsburg
court as in exchange for a royal favour.40 The latter institutions also obtained their
respective male and female slaves through inheritance from the families of those
taking their religious vows. Most black Africans were bought by the Spaniards
and particularly by the Portuguese in present-day Guinea-Bissau, Guinea Conakry,
Senegal, Gambia, part of Mali, and part of Burkina.41
The entry Esclavo (Slave) by Sebastián de Covarrubias Orozco in his Tesoro de
la lengua castellana (1611) is defined as ‘the servant and the captive’ (Esclavo: El
siervo, el cautivo).42 It is important, however, to note that there was a fundamental
difference between a domestic slave and a servant in early modern Spain: while
both were at the bottom of the social scale in terms of marginalization and
exploitation, servants were never bought and sold at public auctions, were never
branded, nor were they captured in wars.43 Even if Canon Law considered all
human beings equal, the European and Hispanic concept of human diversity
acknowledged the following classification: free, freedmen and enslaved people,
free born from free people; freed men freed from the condition of slavery and
slaves because they were born from a slave mother or because of the derecho de
gentes (ius gentium).44
Enslaved Afro-Hispanic individuals were not allowed to act as free people
since, as possessions of their slave owner, they lacked freedom. This status, based
on Roman laws, defined a slave as ‘a res, a thing, the chattel of the owner’.45
Aristotle’s idea of natural masters and natural servants and slaves was accepted
39 José Luis Cortés López, Los orígenes de la esclavitud negra en España (Madrid: Mundo Negro,
1986), pp. 64–75, Carmen Fracchia, ‘(Lack of) Visual Representation of Black Slaves in Spanish
Golden Age Painting’, Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies (Tesserae), 10, 1 (2004), p. 28 and
Pike, Aristocrats and Traders, pp. 175, 179.
40 See Elvira M. Melián, ‘Chikaba, la primera monja negra en el sistema esclavista español del siglo
XVII’, Hispania Sacra, 14 (130) (2012), p. 574.
41 Franco Silva, La esclavitud en Sevilla y su tierra a fines de la Edad Media, pp. 73–103, 193.
Martín de Riquer (Barcelona: Horta, 1987), p. 536.
43 Aurelia Martín Casares, La esclavitud en la Granada del siglo XVI: género, raza y religión,
pp. 23–5, 319–27. Fracchia, ‘(Lack of) Visual Representation of Black Slaves in Spanish Golden Age
Painting’, p. 27.
44 Jesús María García Añoveros, El pensamiento y los argumentos sobre la esclavitud en Europa en el
siglo XVI y XVII y su aplicación a los indios americanos y a los negros africanos (Madrid: Consejo
Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 2000), p. 37.
and reinforced by Christianity, as we saw in the first two chapters.46 This category
was in fact adopted in a series of medieval laws in Las Siete Partidas de Alfonso X
(1256–65).47 This claim allowed slave owners to establish total possession of their
slaves.48 Therefore, ‘slaves and inanimate objects or animals were interchangeable
in commercial transactions.’49 Enslaved Afro-Hispanics became objects of mater
ial exchange: donations to save the donor’s soul, gifts, dowry, pawn, heritage, as
money to pay debts and settle accounts; as mortgage, rental, lease, and precious
commodities at auctions.50 The only addition to the sixteenth-century laws of the
Nueva Recopilación de las Leyes de España, issued by Philip II (1560 and 1566),
was the exclusion of Moriscos from the slave trade and from owning African
slaves for fear of religious contamination, because it was believed that Moriscos
would convert their slaves to Islam.51 Only Old Christians were allowed to become
slave owners. On the other hand, Moriscos could be enslaved even if they were
Christians, but only if they aided non-Christians against Christians.52 Francisco
Núñez Muley, a nobleman Morisco, rebelled against this new addition to the law
and asked, ‘Is there any caste lower than that of blacks and slaves from Guinea?’,53
which is the sentence that will open my next chapter.
Spanish slave markets generally took place in public spaces in the main squares
or streets in urban centres, such as the Plaza Mayor, Plaza de Santa Cruz, and
Puerta de Guadalajara in Madrid,54 seat of the Hapsburg Court or in Plaça Nova
46 Aurelia Martín Casares, ‘Historia y actualidad de la esclavitud claves para reflexionar’, in

Laberintos de libertad: Entre la esclavitud del pasado y las nuevas formas de esclavitud del presente,
edited by Museo de América (Madrid: Ministerio de Educación, Cultura y Deporte, 2012), p. 14.
47 Fourth Partida, Title XXI, Law VI, in Manuel Lucena Salmoral, Regulación de la esclavitud negra
en las colonias de América Española (1503–1886): Documentos para su estudio (Alcalá de Henares:
Universidad de Alcalá/Universidad de Murcia, 2005), p. 18. García Añoveros, El pensamiento y los
argumentos sobre la esclavitud, pp. 37–8.
48 Cortés López, Los orígenes de la esclavitud negra en España, p. 133.
49 A. C. de C. M. Saunders, A Social History of Black Slaves and Freedmen in Portugal, 1441–1555
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 115.
50 Cortés López, La esclavitud negra en la España peninsular del siglo XVI, pp. 76–82 and Cortés
López, Los orígenes de la esclavitud negra en España, 97–113.
51 Nueva Recopilación de las Leyes de España, VII, 2.14. Felipe II Toledo (1560) y Madrid (1566),
cited in Martín Casares, La esclavitud en la Granada del siglo XVI, pp. 76–7. See also Julio Carlos
Baroja, Los moriscos del reino de Granada (4th edition) (Madrid: Ediciones Istmo, 1991), pp. 151–2.
52 Martín Casares, La esclavitud en la Granada del siglo XVI, pp. 76–9.
53 See Luis del Mármol Carvajal, Historia del rebelión y castigo de los moriscos del reino de Granada
(1600) (Alicante: Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes, 2001), Book 2, chapter 9: Como los moriscos
contradijeron los capítulos de la nueva premática, y un razonamiento que Francisco Nuñez Muley hizo
al Presidente sobre ello. Digital edition, http://www.cervantesvirtual.com/obra-visor/historia-del-sic-
rebelion-y-castigo-de-los-moriscos-del-reino-de-granada--0/html/ff45049c-82b1-11df-acc7-
002185ce6064_6.html#I_42, accessed 26 February 2018; Aurelia Martín Casares, ‘Free and freed
Africans in Granada in the time of the Spanish Renaissance’, in Black Africans in Renaissance Europe,
edited by Thomas F. Earle and Kate J. P. Lowe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 251,
and Baltasar Fra-Molinero, ‘Juan Latino and his racial difference’, in Black Africans in Renaissance
Europe, edited by Thomas F. Earle and Kate J. P. Lowe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005),
p. 335.
54 José Miguel López García, ‘El mercado de esclavos en Madrid a finales del Antiguo Régimen,
1701–1830’, Historia Social, 85 (2016), pp. 45–62.
102 Black but Human
and Plaça Sant Jaume in Barcelona.55 In Seville, captured and enslaved Africans
were transported to be sold at auctions held in the most important spaces for the
city’s administrative and economic life, the square of San Francisco, the Street of
Bayona, and the steps of the Cathedral, known as Lonja de Sevilla or Mercado de
Gradas. In 1589, according to Alonso Morgado, slaves were sold here with other
precious commodities: grande abundancia de prendas de gran valor, que allí se
rematan, así de oro y plata labrada como de grandes posesiones, ropas costosísimas,
tapicerías riquísimas y muchísimos esclavos, con toda suerte de armas, y quantas
riquezas puedan imaginarse (A great abundance of rich clothing, auctioned off
there, as well as gold and worked silver and great possessions, the costliest gar-
ments, richest tapestries and very many slaves, and all sorts of weaponry, and as
many riches as could be imagined).56
Slaves were also sold privately with no intermediaries or else were bought
directly from the street where slave dealers paraded their slaves, with an auction-
eer, who would sell them on the spot.57 Physicians examined enslaved Africans
and Afro-Hispanic people to determine their economic value. The detailed ways
by which they were to be examined were established by 1581 by the royal surgeon
Juan Fragoso (Toledo, 1530–Madrid, 1597) in the first Spanish treatise on legal
medicine, Tratado de las declaraciones, published in Madrid.58 In his extraordin
ary and little-known work, Fragoso clarified his aims about the procedure he
establishes for ‘How a Surgeon ought to proceed when examining and preparing a
statement about a slave who is being sold’:
With this rigorous examination, the Surgeon can be sure not to give a false state-
ment about a slave who is being sold, and he who buys the slave will know what
he is buying, with all his blemishes (as they say), and the one who examined him
cannot be faulted. And for the Surgeon to be beyond all reproach, one should
ensure, insofar as that is possible, that the slave does not suffer from kidney or
gallstones, cystitis or epilepsy, because, as Plato says, if a slave who suffers from
any of these diseases, which can last a long time and are difficult to cure, is sold
to a Physician or a fencing or wrestling master, or someone with a similar pro-
fession, he will not have the right to return the slave and be compensated if the
seller has told the truth from the beginning. But if one Master sells a slave to
55 Cortés López, La esclavitud negra en la España peninsular del siglo XVI, p. 132 and Phillips, Jr,
Slavery in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia, p. 66.
56 Alonso Morgado, Historia de Sevilla en la qual se contienen sus antigüedades, grandezas y cosas
memorables (Seville: Imprenta de Andrea Pescioni y Juan de Leon, 1587), fol. 56.
58 Juan Fragoso, ‘Tratado de las declaraciones que han de hazer los cirujanos acerca de muchas
enfermedades y muchas maneras de muertes que suceden’, in Juan Fragoso, Cirugía Universal (1666,
Madrid), edited by Jacint Corbella (Barcelona: PPU, 1988), fol. 418v, 419r. The Spanish editions of
Cirugía Universal are several: 1586, 1596, 1601, 1607, 1621, 1627, 1643, 1666, 1672 and 1692. See also
Luis S. Granjel, Cirugía española del Renacimiento (Salamanca: Universidad de Salamanca, 1968).
another who is unaware of these diseases, the one who buys the slave can return
him within six months, except if he suffers from epilepsy, in which case the slave
can be returned within a year.59
Fragoso takes great care of slave owners by inspecting the state of their invest-
ment in the market. He therefore provides a detailed list of the most important
parts of the body to be examined to identify any sign of disease, and he indicates
how to proceed.60 Besides the basic conditions of good physical health as required
by Fragoso, the price of a slave, which depended on the degree of acculturation,
age, gender, skin colour, and ethnicity rose at the height of the Iberian transatlan-
tic slave trade in the sixteenth century.61 Fragoso’s instructions helped maintain
the health of the slave workforce in the Spanish kingdoms.
Documentary evidence analysed by Cortés López shows that during the
sixteenth century, except in Valencia, young black enslaved women, between
eighteen and twenty-five years old, fetched the highest prices, followed by white
slaves (including Moriscos) and male slaves between twenty and twenty-nine
years old.62 The majority of slaves were between twenty and forty years old.63 In
the late fifteenth century and early sixteenth century, geographical origin was
another factor determining the price of an enslaved person: in Seville, the most
expensive slaves came from North Africa, followed by Black Africans and Canary
Islanders (guanches). The enslaved population from the New World was the
cheapest in the illegal slave market, because they were subject to restrictions and
were legally free from slavery from 1542. In the kingdom of Castile, the purchase
price of enslaved women in all these categories was higher, but after the age of
forty, enslaved men fetched the higher price. However, in the Crown of Aragon,
male slaves always fetched higher prices than female slaves.64 In the first half
of the sixteenth century, the average price of a young and healthy male slave was
100 ducats (one ducat was the equivalent of 375 maravedíes during the reign of
the Catholic Monarchs) and their economic value was higher in the seventeen
century.65 Sales of slaves were taxed66 and in 1502, a customs tax of 5 per cent of
59 Fragoso, ‘Tratado de las declaraciones’, in Fragoso, Cirugía Universal, fols. 418, 419.
60 Fragoso, ‘Tratado de las declaraciones’, in Fragoso, Cirugía Universal, fol. 418.
61 See Cortés López, Los orígenes de la esclavitud negra en España, p. 123 and Pike, Aristocrats and
62 Cortés López, La esclavitud negra en la España peninsular del siglo XVI, pp. 135–7 and Cortés
López, Los orígenes de la esclavitud negra en España, pp. 97–119.
63 Cortés López, Los orígenes de la esclavitud negra en España, p. 123 and Pike, Aristocrats and
64 Cortés López, La esclavitud negra en la España peninsular del siglo XVI, p. 136 and Phillips, Jr,
Slavery in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia, pp. 73, 84–5.
65 Antonio Domínguez Ortiz, ‘La esclavitud en Castilla durante la Edad Moderna’, pp. 399–400.
Domínguez Ortiz, El Antiguo Régimen, pp. 7–8, 180–1.
66 Cortés López, La esclavitud negra en la España peninsular del siglo XVI, pp. 132–3. Philip II on a
decree issued on 17 July 1572 declared that slave merchants and owners who transported Africans to
the New World pay 20% royal impost and then slaves could be sold.
104 Black but Human
their value was imposed on incoming slaves and 2.5 per cent on slaves who left
the country.67 Payments were made in full or in agreed instalments in the most
common currencies (maravedíes, ducados, doblas, pesos), or slaves were exchanged
for animals, objects, wool, sugar, or cereals. Buyers received a receipt with the
names of merchants, sellers, and buyers involved in the transaction, the name of
the slave and description: colour, age, place of capture, bodily marks, and physical
and moral condition (healthy and good character).68 These requirements for a
good sale of an enslaved individual are described as:
of good war, not of peace, and that he or she was not a fugitive, nor consump-
tive, nor possessed by the devil, nor a drunk, nor a thief, nor blind in one eye
or both, nor a bed wetter, nor suffering from epilepsy or buboes, nor from any
other infirmities with all his or her good or bad qualities, seen or unseen.69
The historian Cortés López gives us an example from sixteenth-century Seville:
Vendo a vos, Francisco [. . .] un mi esclavo de color negro [. . .] de edad de 21 años
poco más o menos, el cual vos vendo por de buena guerra y no de paz, y que no es
borracho, ni ladrón, ni huidor, [. . .], ni endemoniado, ni tiene gota coral y tiene los
ojos claros y no ve, al cual vos vendo por oficial de candelero, ni tiene otra tacha ni
enfermedad alguna ni ha tenido.
(I sell you Francisco [. . .] a Black slave of mine [. . .] 21 years old, more or less,
whom I sell you captured in legitimate war, not in peace, and he is not a drunk,
nor a thief, nor a fugitive, [someone liable to flee] [. . .] nor possessed by the
devil, nor blind in one eye or both, nor suffering from epilepsy, nor from any
other infirmities with all his good or bad qualities, seen or unseen, as I am sell-
ing him to you as a wax officer [wax was an important Canarian export crop], he
has no other imperfection nor has had any other illness).70
Following Covarrubias’s definition of the word esclavo, he offers a range of possible

origins for this entry, and he defines a fugitive enslaved man:
Some people want something said about the brands that are put on fugitives and
the rings through both cheeks, of the S and the vertical line: but I understand
67 Phillips, Jr, Slavery in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia, pp. 68–9.
68 Cortés López, La esclavitud negra en la España peninsular del siglo XVI, pp. 128–39. For an
example of a full document of purchase, see ‘Documento XX. 1619. Febrero 10. Venta de esclavo’, in
La vida privada española en el protocolo notarial. Selección de documentos de los siglos XVI, XVII Y
XVIII del Archivo Notarial de Madrid, edited by Agustín G. De Amezúa y Mayo (Madrid: Ilustre
Colegio Notarial de Madrid, 1950), pp. 57–9.
69 For the sale formula of slaves, see Phillips, Jr, Slavery in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia, p. 69.
70 Cortés López, La esclavitud negra en la España peninsular del siglo XVI, p. 129.
them to be two letters S and I, which appears as a line, and each of them is a way
of saying, and means the same as Sine iure: because the slave does not belong to
himself but to his master, and so he is forbidden any free act. Hence the name
of the slave, like Spurius’s name, of the two letters S P, which mean the same as
Sine patrie.71
Covarrubias recorded that Pliny had claimed that the idea of branding enslaved
people emerged in Greece, in the region of Laconia in the south-eastern part of
the Peloponnese peninsula with Sparta as its capital.72 Although the Spanish
lexicographer concentrates on fugitive slaves, they were not the only ones
whose bodies were marked forever. Slaves who were bought and sold in auctions
were mostly branded as a ‘kind of insurance’. The most common mark was, as the
Spanish lexicographer registered, on the face with an ‘S’on one cheek and a vertical
line (clavo), standing for ‘slave’ (esclavo), on the other: S = ESE + UN CLAVO= ES
(E) CLAVO.73 Other common marks on the slave’s cheeks were a star, a fleur-de-lis,
a pomegranate, symbol of Granada, or the slave’s owner’s initials. The cruellest, if
less common, mark was for the slaves to have the full names of their owners
branded on their faces.74 In auctions, the economic value of a slave would dimin-
ish if the brands were punishments for attempted flight, as was the case in Seville,
where 38–9 per cent of the enslaved population had permanent body marks.75
Covarrubias rightly connects the branding of the enslaved body with the slave’s
legal category as individual with no rights (Sine iure). It follows that the perman-
ent ‘marks of slavery’, as Francisco Andújar Castillo denominates them, became
the marks of identity of fugitive slaves (fugitivos), so they could be identified
immediately.76 There are records in notarial documents of female and male
slaves being branded, such as the case of the slave Tello who belonged to Juan
de Castañeda from Mexico City and had this inscription on his face: Esclavo
del Licdo. J. de Castañeda, v° de México.77 There is also documentary evidence
that in Málaga, almost 50 per cent of slaves, black and white, were branded.78
There is mention of the case of the mora Inés who presented: ‘Two brand marks
71 See entry Esclavo (Slave) in Covarrubias Orozco, Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española (1611),
p. 536.
72 See entry Esclavo (Slave) in Covarrubias Orozco, Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española (1611),
p. 536.
73 Pike, Aristocrats and Traders, pp. 176–7.
74 Pike, Aristocrats and Traders, p. 177. Francisco Andújar Castillo, ‘Sobre las condiciones de vida
de los esclavos en la España Moderna. Una revisión crítica’, Chrónica Nova, 26 (1999), pp. 14–15.
75 Andújar Castillo, ‘Sobre las condiciones de vida de los esclavos en la España Moderna’, p. 15.
76 Francisco Andújar Castillo, ‘Del esclavo morisco al berberisco. Sobre la esclavitud en la Almería
del siglo XVII’, Boletín del Instituto de Estudios Almerienses. Letras, 11–12 (1992–1993), pp. 95–100.
77 Luis Fernández Martín, S.J., Comediantes, Esclavos y Moriscos en Valladolid (Valladolid:
Universidad de Valladolid, 1988), p. 135. The writer provides several examples of the type of marks
described in documents and he claims that only 11% were branded.
78 Andújar Castillo, ‘Sobre las condiciones de vida de los esclavos en la España Moderna’, pp. 14–15.
106 Black but Human
in the form of a vertical line or nail on the forehead and others on the right
cheek, the mark of a flower and another two marks of lines on the nostril on
the same side and on the chin and below the other marks’ or the case of the
slave, Vitorio Rodríguez ‘with a rosary tattooed on the right arm and in the
middle an S and a line’.79
Slaves without marks comprised 25 per cent of the total slave population and
were mainly children or those who were born at the owners’ home. However,
between 1621 and 1627 in Almería, along with Málaga the most important entry
port for Berber slaves from North Africa, documents recorded marks on the
body of enslaved children, mainly eight- to eighteen-year-old berberisco boys
(Francisco, Antón, Alonso).80 In Valladolid, seat of the Hapsburg court before
1561, 11 per cent of female slaves and 22 per cent of male slaves had the usual ‘S’
and nail on their cheeks, or two marks, such as two dots, two knife-wounds
(cuchilladas) on the chin (barba), on the left ear, or on the forehead above the
left eye.81 Iron rings (argollas) around the neck and occasionally with the name
of their slave master engraved on them, as we shall see in the next chapter,
were another visible device to capture and publicly humiliate fugitive slaves in
Hapsburg Spain.
In Madrid, seat of the court from 1561 and one of the biggest cities in Western
Europe with 130,000 inhabitants by 1630, there were also branded slaves, with the
usual ‘S’ and the nail marks, even at the Hapsburg court, the most powerful slave
owner in early modern Spain. Twenty-eight Afro-Hispanic servants resided at the
Casa Real (Royal House) in the Alcázar of the city,82 excluding the esclavos del rey,
the royal labour force, who also performed domestic tasks, and those slaves from
Africa and the Philippines who were in charge of the ‘royal animals’: ostriches for
Philip II in the royal palace of Aranjuez, jaguars from Veracruz and from Peru in
the seventeenth century, as well as extravagant birds and animals from Africa,
that Hoefnagel probably visited.83
The most common symbol of a ‘S’ and the nail marks are to be found carved in
stone at the entrance of the Chapel of the confraternity of the Los Esclavos del
Santo Cristo in the Royal Church of San Ginés in the centre of Madrid, near
Puerta del Sol on Bordadores Street.84 This is one of the twenty-five sacramental
confraternities founded by the nobility in Madrid in the first half of the
79 María Carmen Gómez García and Juan María Martín Vergara, La esclavitud en Málaga entre los
siglos XVII y XVIII (Málaga: Diputación Provincial de Málaga, 1993), p. 24.
80 Andújar Castillo, ‘Del esclavo morisco al berberisco’, pp. 97–98, 100.
81 Fernández Martín, S.J., Comediantes, Esclavos y Moriscos en Valladolid, pp. 134–5.
82 See Domínguez Ortiz, ‘La esclavitud en Castilla en la Edad Moderna’, pp. 367–428.
83 Gómez Centurión Jiménez, Alhajas para Soberanos, pp. 64, 85, 112–14.
84 Luis Robledo Estaire, ‘Música y cofadías madrileñas en el siglo XVII. Los Esclavos del Santísimo
Sacramento de la Magdalena y los Esclavos del Santo Cristo de San Ginés’, Revista de Musicología, 29
(2006), p. 69. See also http://callesdemadrid.blogspot.co.uk/2011/03/bordadores-calle-de-los.html,
accessed 8 December 2107.
seventeenth century.85 The name confraternity had been replaced with ‘slavery’
(esclavitud) and brothers with ‘slaves’. The idea behind this change was that mem-
bers of these religious institutions considered themselves as ‘unworthy slaves’ and
offered themselves to God as Christ who they believed had descended to earth to
become a slave to liberate humanity from the slavery of the devil by his sacrifice
and by his presence in the host. These new institutions were created initially as
imitations of the poorest classes and enslaved people were sometimes included.
Members of the aristocracy, nobility and high clergy considered it a privilege to
be unworthy subjects and their three major devotions were the Eucharist, symbol
of the Hapsburg monarchy, the Immaculate Conception of Mary, and the Passion
of Christ that they refer to with the symbols of ‘S-vertical nail’ (S-clavo) alluding
to slavery as religious devotion. These hieroglyphs, usually branded on the skin of
Fig. 4.2. Anonymous artist, S-clavo between angels or palm leaves. Devotional jewellery,
1601–25, Inv. 847. ©Museo Lázaro Galdiano. Madrid.
85 Elena Sánchez de Madariaga, ‘Da “confratello” a “schiavo”: le esclavitudes religiose a Madrid nel
XVII secolo’, in Confraternite, Chiese e Società, edited by Liana Bertoldi Lenoci (Bari: Schena Editore,
1994), pp. 267–75.
108 Black but Human
enslaved people, generally on their faces, now become part of the confraternity’s
badge (insignia) that was either embroidered on their processional banners or
made into devotional jewellery. The latter was mostly worn by the most import
ant men of the confraternity as a symbol of wealth and opulence.86 These were
generally made of bronze or gold in different shapes: heart, rectangular, square,
triangular, octagonal, or rounded.87 They were also decorated with enamel, either
with anagrams of the name of Jesus or the host, and the symbol of the Passion
S-clavo between angels or palm leaves. Devotional jewellery, such as the Insignia
de cofradía, made of translucent glass, gold, and enamel by an anonymous artist
between 1601 and 1625 (see Fig 4.2), now at the Museo Lázaro Galdiano in
Madrid, are kept in private collections, churches, such as Our Lady of Carmen in
the Confraternity of Gypsies in Madrid, or in Museums, such as the Museo del
Traje CIPE, in Madrid and Museo Federico Marés, in Barcelona.88
Slave Resistance
The first visual evidence of chained Africans as slave labourers in the kingdoms of
Aragon and Castile is provided by Christoph Weiditz in his Trachtenbuch, his
manuscript about costume and occupations that he produced in 1529 during his
travels in Spain, as we saw in the previous chapter.89 Weiditz (Strasbourg, c.1500–
Augsburg, 1559) was from the parts of Spanish territory nowadays included in
Germany and was invited to join the Hapsburg Court by the Polish Ambassador
Johannes Dantiscus (1485–1548), Bishop of Warmia when he was at the ser-
vices of Charles V.90 The sculptor-goldsmith joined the itinerant court of the
Emperor in Castile, either in Valladolid or Toledo in 1529, but also travelled to
the kingdom of Aragon, to Catalonia and Barcelona. From here, Weiditz went
to the Spanish Netherlands and then, between 1531 and 1532, returned to
Augsburg, from where the international banking family Fugger had financed the
86 La moda española en el Siglo de Oro, edited by Rafael García Serrano (Madrid: Junta de
Comunidades de Castilla-La Mancha, 2015), p. 344.
87 See the collection of devotional jewellery online in Museo del Traje, CIPE, Madrid and the six-
teenth and seventeenth centuries—Veneras de cofradía, object number 741, in Catálogo del Museo
Federico Marés (Barcelona: Ayuntamiento de Barcelona, 1979), p. 136.
88 La moda española en el Siglo de Oro, edited by García Serrano, p. 298.
89 See Christoph Weiditz, Authentic Everyday Dress of the Renaissance. All 154 Plates from the
‘Trachtenbuch’ (New York: Dover Publications, 1994), pp. 5–11, 15, 19–20. For the artist, his costume
book and its subsequent influence and uses, see Jocelyn N. Hillgarth, The Mirror of Spain, 1500–1700:
The Formation of a Myth (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), pp. 243–51 and Jean
Michel Massing, ‘Weiditz and Costume Books’, in The Image of the Black in Western Art: From the ‘Age
of Discovery’ to the Age of Abolition: Europe and the World Beyond, edited by David Bindman and
Henry Louis Gates, Jr, 3.2 (Cambridge, Mass., London: Harvard University Press, 2011), pp. 45–54.
90 Michał Wasilewski, ‘The Growing Wave: Polish Archaeological Contributions in The New
World’, Contributions in New World Archaeology, 6 (2014), p. 170.
election of Charles V as Holy Roman Emperor in 1519, enabling the Hapsburg

dynasty’s rise to global power. In return for loans, the Emperor, for whom the
sculptor coined medals with his portrait, granted the Fuggers the administra-
tion and profits from the mercury mines of Castilian Almadén (Ciudad Real)
and the silver mines of Gaudalcanal (Seville), where Afro-Hispanic slave labour
was introduced.91
In his pen- and water-coloured drawing, plate 47, Negro slave with a wineskin
in Castile, Weiditz places an isolated Afro-Hispanic chained labourer at work in
the kingdom of Castile, as the inscription written at the top of his drawing indi-
cates (see Fig 4.3). The enslaved man is carrying wine in a heavy goatskin on his
right shoulder with both hands. The fetter around his left ankle is chained to his
waist and his left foot is bare. The labourer is wearing a bright red tunic with tat-
tered white breeches and a shoe on his right foot. There is another leg iron around
his right ankle. The figure of the chained Afro-Hispanic male slave, depicted with
an inexpressive face and with a strong body, occupies the centre of the artist’s
sketch. He seems to handle his bundle with ease and is shown in three-quarters
profile. Weiditz’s inscription adds important details about the man’s status, his
social function and the reason for his wearing chains: ‘Negro slave with a wine-
skin in Castile: Thus the Moors who have been sold carry wine in goatskins in
Castile; if they run away from their masters, they have to work thus and wear
chains.’92 Weiditz makes clear to his spectators that the chained Afro-Hispanic
man is a runaway slave labourer who has tried to escape his social condition and
subsequently has been punished because he had rebelled against his lack of free-
dom, his legal status.93 He is seen and effectively represented here as a commod-
ity, a designation that is reiterated in the inscription written in the sketch: ‘the
Moors who have been sold’. In plates 65 and 66, on the artist’s double page draw-
ing entitled ‘In this manner slaves carry fresh water to the galleys’ (see Figs 4.4
and 4.5), the draughtsman also records white chained runaway slaves with their
ankle irons on top of a protective cloth round their skin.94
91 Ángel Hernández Sobrino, ‘Crónicas de la Historia: La esclavitud en España y en las minas de
azogue de Almadén’, Lanza Diario de la Mancha, 9 December 2016. See https://www.lanzadigital.com/
blogs/cronicas-de-la-historia/la-esclavitud-en-espana-y-en-las-minas-de-azogue-de-almaden,
accessed 9 December 2017. See also Andújar Castillo, ‘Sobre las condiciones de vida de los esclavos en
la España Moderna’, pp. 7–36.
92 See plate XLVII in Das Trachtenbuch des Christoph Weiditz von seinen Reisen nach Spanien
(1529) und den Niederlanden (1531–32), edited by T. Hampe (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1927), pp. 30,
85. It is published in Authentic Everyday Dress of the Renaissance. (1994), which is a republication of
Das Trachtenbuch des Christoph Weiditz, n. 20, plate 47.
93 Kate Lowe, ‘The Lives of African Slaves and People of African Descent in Renaissance Europe’, in
Revealing the African Presence in Renaissance Europe, edited by Joaneath Spicer (Baltimore: The
Trustees of the Walters Art Museum, 2013), pp. 15–16.
94 These two plates nos. 65–6 are published in Weiditz, Authentic Everyday Dress of the Renaissance.
110 Black but Human
Fig. 4.3. Christoph Weiditz, Black Slave with a Wineskin in Castile, Das Trachtenbuch
(1529). Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg (Hs 22474, fol. 22v).
By the first decades of the sixteenth century, the presence of white slaves (from
the Mediterranean or Balkan regions, Eurasia and the Ottoman region) had
become less prominent in urban Spain. The two bearded galley slaves are wearing
the same clothing as the Afro-Hispanic slaves, except for the one on the right who
has a blue tunic on top. They are also portrayed as carriers of the water barrels on
their shoulders. In keeping with previous drawings, the two fettered slaves are
standing on the top of the well filling barrels with water and are wearing white
breeches and the one on the right also wears the same bright red tunic that
Weiditz’s slave in Castile does. On the extreme left of this sketch, the spectator
can see a very tall pink starched apron higher than the well. In adding this item of
Fig. 4.4. Christoph Weiditz, In this manner slaves carry fresh water to the galleys, Das
Trachtenbuch (1529). Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg (Hs 2247–73v).
costume in this composition, the artist deliberately displaces the attention from
the slaves and focuses on his primary interest on Spanish costume. In the inscrip-
tion written on the drawing, the draughtsman explains that these two runaway
slaves are in the kingdom of Aragon. In his drawings, ‘based on first hand obser-
vation’, Weiditz certainly codifies the iconography of Afro-Hispanic labouring
slaves. Most slaves in general worked in the kitchen or the laundry, cared for
112 Black but Human
Fig. 4.5. Christoph Weiditz, In this manner slaves carry fresh water to the galleys, Das
Trachtenbuch (1529). Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg (Hs 2247–74r).
horses and mules in the stables, and worked as attendants to adults, doorkeepers,
porters, waiters, and valets.95 Enslaved men in urban households were, however,
most commonly employed as carriers, water sellers, or errand boys, while those
95 Pike, Aristocrats and Traders, p. 177 and Martín Casares, ‘Free and freed black Africans in
Granada in the time of Spanish Renaissance’, in Black Africans in Renaissance Europe, pp. 255–6.
who worked outside the domestic environment to support their masters did not
reside in their owners’ homes.96 In Seville, they mainly lived in the poorer quarter
of San Bernardo, outside the city walls, with other working people, such as bakers,
gardeners, and employees of the slaughterhouse.97 The great majority of female
slaves worked as domestic servants and were confined to the most menial tasks
in the kitchen. One of the daily tasks expected of female slaves was to ‘make fruit
preserves and jellies.98 Enslaved women, who were close to their mistresses,
would accompany them to public places, served as wet nurses and took care of
their masters’ children.99 The relationship with their masters was often ambigu-
ous and complex and not necessarily as peaceful and ‘natural’ as most Spanish
historians of slavery have claimed.100 The sexual exploitation of female slaves and
servants by their masters was apparently widespread in early modern Spain. In
fact, during the sixteenth century, between 80 per cent and 90 per cent of Afro-
Hispanic women were unmarried yet had one or two children and most mixed-
race children were born from the union of a female black slave and a white male
Christian.101 Slave owners also occasionally forced their slaves into prostitution.102
Enslaved Afro-Hispanics also lived in the suburb of Triana, on the southern of
the city across the river Guadalquivir and outside the city walls in the port or
Arenal opposite the Triana district, where most punished (penados) galley slaves
were concentrated.103 Slaves and freed slaves not in domestic service were known
as cortados and were part of the city’s large unskilled workforce.104 In cities such
as Seville, they were mainly employed in lowly tasks in the public granary and in
soap factories in the Triana district.105 The latter produced white soap exported as
far as to the New World, England, and Flanders.106 Slaves and manumitted slaves
also worked as porters, carriers of sedan chairs, and wine or street vendors of
water, fireworks, fish, and vinegar.107 They were also employed, slave women
96 Franco Silva, La esclavitud en Sevilla y su tierra a fines de la Edad Media, p. 193.
97 Mary Elizabeth Perry, Gender and Disorder in Early Modern Seville (Princeton: University of
Princeton, 1990), p. 15. See also Pike, Aristocrats and Traders, pp. 185–6.
98 Pike, Aristocrats and Traders, pp. 177–8, 180, and also Carmen Fracchia, ‘La mulata de
Velázquez’, in Mujeres esclavas y abolicionistas en la España de los siglos XVI–XIX, edited by Aurelia
Martín Casares and Rocío Periáñez Gómez (Madrid and Frankfurt: Iberoamericana-Vervuert, 2014),
pp. 17–32.
99 Aurelia Martín Casares, ‘Productivas y silenciadas: el mundo laboral de las esclavas en España’,
in Mujeres esclavas y abolicionistas en la España de los siglos XVI–XIX, pp. 57–94.
100 Martín Casares, La esclavitud en la Granada del siglo XVI, chapter 1.
101 Franco Silva, La esclavitud en Sevilla y su tierra a fines de la Edad Media, p. 215.
102 Luis Méndez Rodríguez, Esclavos en la pintura sevillana de los Siglos de Oro (Seville: Universidad
de Sevilla, 2011), p. 76.
103 Domínguez Ortiz, El Antiguo Régimen, pp. 181–2.
104 See Phillips, Jr, Slavery in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia, p. 109.
105 Phillips, Jr, Slavery in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia, pp. 102–21. Pike, Aristocrats and
Traders, p. 184.
106 Pike, Aristocrats and Traders, p. 40.
107 Pike, Aristocrats and Traders, p. 184 and Antonio Collante de Terán Sánchez, Sevilla en la Baja
Edad Media: La ciudad y sus hombres (Seville: Sección de Publicaciones del Excmo. Ayuntamiento,
1984), p. 96; Martín Casares, ‘Free and freed black Africans in Granada in the time of Spanish
114 Black but Human
included, as labourers on the private or public buildings in Seville and Granada, in

the construction of the cathedral of Málaga or the fortress and bastions in Cádiz.108
Freed slaves joined the great mass of unskilled labourers and found temporary
employers in the main squares or public spaces of urban centres. They worked as
carriers, diggers, casters in foundries, builders, tile makers, bakers, and butchers.
The latter also served as executioners.109 Freedwomen had less opportunity to
find paid jobs and mostly got married to become housewives. Slave owners in
general opposed the marriage of their female slaves especially if their husbands
were freedmen and could therefore buy their wives’ freedom. However, slave
masters would occasionally provide their emancipated female slaves with ‘a few
goods as dowry’ so that they could get married. Freedwomen are recorded work-
ing in taverns and inns or earning their living as sorceresses, which involved,
according to Martín Casares, ‘making love filters, finding lost objects’ and ‘curing
illnesses with herbal remedies’.110 In urban spaces, slaves were forbidden to go
into local shops or taverns unless they did so with their slave owners and had a
vessel in their hand to sell wine. Otherwise, tavern owners would be punished as
the 1531 Taverners’ Law in Antequera Province of Málaga warned.111
From the end of the fourteenth century slavery was, as the Spanish historian
Antonio Domínguez Ortiz states, ‘essentially an urban and domestic phenomenon’.112
However, a large number of slaves also worked in rural areas, as new documents
testify. For example, this comment that was recorded on 30 July 1559 in Jerez
de los Caballeros, in Extremadura on the border with Portugal claims that ‘in
this city there are many slaves and servants, the same in the city as in the
countryside’.113 The most common task for enslaved people in the rural area on
the coast from Extremadura to Granada was the collection of dried wood.114 In
rural Andalusia, enslaved Afro-Hispanics had small plots of land where they grew
sugar cane, vines, and mulberry trees, and some of them collected wild chestnuts
to sell. Martín Casares has also provided documentary evidence of female slaves
Renaissance’, in Black Africans in Renaissance Europe, p. 256; Méndez Rodríguez, Esclavos en la pintura
sevillana de los Siglos de Oro, p. 83.
108 Méndez Rodríguez, Esclavos en la pintura sevillana de los Siglos de Oro), pp. 96–8.
109 Martín Casares, ‘Free and freed black Africans in Granada in the time of Spanish Renaissance’,
in Black Africans in Renaissance Europe, p. 256.
111 Francisco Alijo Hidalgo, Ordenanzas de Antequera (1531) (Málaga: Universidad de Málaga,
1979), p. 38. González Arévalo, ‘Ordenanzas municipales y trabajo esclavo en la Corona de Castilla
(Siglos XV–XVI)’, p. 452.
112 Antonio Domínguez Ortiz, The Golden Age of Spain: 1516–1619 (London: Weidenfeld and
Nicolson, 1971), p. 163.
113 This Spanish document recorded that there were as many slaves in the city as in the countryside
and it is cited by Rocío Periáñez Gómez Cáceres in La esclavitud en Extremadura (Siglos XVI–XVIII)
(PhD dissertation, Universidad de Extremadura, 2008), p. 329.
114 Alijo Hidalgo, Ordenanzas de Antequera, p. 456.
who ‘owned pieces of land and worked in the countryside’.115 Contrary to the
belief that slaves in Spain did not work in mines, we now have archival docu-
ments testifying about this labour, as we saw in the previous section.
Weiditz’s images of slaves in imperial Spain were not conceived in isolation but
belong to a ‘parade’ of individual portrayals of local, regional, imperial, or global
types—mostly free white people—classified according to costumes, class and
profession and displayed in 154 sketches. The draughtsman’s chosen subjects
are mainly from the kingdoms of Castile and Aragon, with fewer types chosen
from the Spanish territories covered by today’s Netherlands, Germany, Austria,
and Italy and regions from beyond the empire’s boundaries, such as Portugal,
France, England, and Ireland. Weiditz’s images of Afro-Hispanic slaves are also
complemented by the artist’s ethnographic survey of the clothing, social function,
and labour of the Moriscos from the kingdom of Granada. His drawings, with
their portrayal based on first hand observation, were made after the Christian
Reconquest of the city in 1492.116 In eight of these drawings, the artist mainly
concentrates on the ‘house-dress’ and ‘street-dress’ of Morisco women and girls,
who are shown spinning or sweeping the house.117 Weiditz also draws a Morisco
carrying bread, while two other double page sketches entitled The Morisco dance
and Morisco travelling with wife and child in the kingdom of Granada introduce the
viewers to a Muslim culture that will soon radically change.118 In 1566, as we noted
before, Moriscos were excluded from becoming slave owners, and on 17 November
of the same year, a royal pragmatic was issued barring Moriscos from wearing
their distinctive clothes, practising their customs and using their language.119
Two years later, the Second Revolt of the Alpujarras broke out specifically against
the enforcement of the 1566 pragmatic. This, the worst of the civil wars in Granada,
only ended in 1570.120
Significantly, Weiditz also drew and classified the Aztecs from New Spain
(Mexico) in the New World. His eleven illustrations focus on the group of thirty-
six Aztecs that Hernán Cortés brought to the Spanish court for Charles V in 1528,
‘including dwarfs and acrobats’.121 The artist’s drawings seem to have been
116 See ‘Surrender Treaty of the kingdom of Granada’, in Early Modern Spain: A Documentary
History, edited by Jon Cowans (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), pp. 15–19.
117 These eight plates nos. 79–86 are published in Weiditz, Authentic Everyday Dress of the
Renaissance. See also Phillips, Jr, Slavery in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia, p. 109 on Morisco
spinners.
118 These five illustrations (nos. 87–91) are published in Weiditz, Authentic Everyday Dress of the
Renaissance.
119 John H. Elliott, Imperial Spain: 1469–1716 (London: Penguin Books, 2002), pp. 235–9.
120 Novísima Recopilación de las Leyes de España (Madrid: en la imprenta de Sancha, 1895), 5 (12.4)
Felipe III (Madrid, 9 December 1609), pp. 312–13.
121 Jean Michel Massing, ‘Early European Images of America: The Ethnographic Approach’, in Art
in the Age of Exploration: Circa 1492, edited by Jay A. Levenson (National Gallery of Art: Washington,
1991), p. 517.
116 Black but Human
‘the first European sketches of real Aztecs’ sketched by a European artist.122

Dantiscus, the first Polish ambassador to Charles V from 1524 and 1531, met the
Spanish conquistador and kept up a long correspondence with him, and subse-
quently wrote three memorials on the Iberian discoveries in the New World.123
The nature and aim of Weiditz’s Trachtenbuch should therefore be viewed as an
imperial project. In 1529, the sculptor also coined medals with the portraits of
the Emperor, Dantiscus, and that of Hernán Cortés,124 whom he portrayed in his
costume book under the following inscription: ‘Don Fernando Cordesyus, 1529,
at the age of 42; this man won all India for his Imperial Majesty Charles the Fifth.’125
In his double-page drawing, plates 20 and 21, entitled Indians playing Mora and
catch-stone the artist claims: ‘These are Indian people whom Ferdinand Cortez
brought to His Imperial Majesty from India and they have played before His
Imperial Majesty with wool and ball.’126
It was not the first time that Cortés had sent a group of Aztecs from New Spain
to the Emperor.127 The first young caciques were brought to Spain by Cristóbal
Colón when he returned from his first voyage to the New World. According to
Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, they were baptized in the Monastery of Guadalupe
in 1493,128 followed in 1516 by another group, in response to the request from
Charles V to send influential ‘Indians’ over to his court to convert the Native
Americans in Castile. In 1519, four men and two women arrived at the court,
with Gonzalo Hernández Portocarrero, Cortés’s chief officer from Veracruz, and
in 1521, another group of Aztecs from New Spain with Moctezuma’s treasure was
sent by Cortés.129 Native Americans were considered vassals of the King of Spain,
unlike Afro-Hispanic people: this status was considered incompatible with the
institution of slavery and the slave trade. Thus, the institution of ‘Indian’ slavery
in the Spanish empire was officially abolished by the Spanish Crown, with the
Leyes Nuevas (New Laws) of 1542.130 However, in 1549, a report from the House
of Trade to the King of Spain, claimed that Spaniards still kept their Native
Americans as slaves: ‘[there are] any male and female Indians that the Spaniards
122 For a detailed iconographic analysis of the eleven drawings depicting real Aztecs by Weiditz, see
Jean Michel Massing, ‘Early European Images of America: The Ethnographic Approach’, in Art in the
Age of Exploration: Circa 1492, p. 517, and also Massing, ‘Weiditz and Costume Books’, in The Image of
the Black in Western Art, p. 45.
123 Wasilewski, ‘The Growing Wave: Polish Archaeological Contributions’, p. 170.
124 Massing, ‘Weiditz and Costume Books’, in The Image of the Black in Western Art, p. 45. See plate 4
in Weiditz, Authentic Everyday Dress of the Renaissance and Cortés’s portrait in the medal on p. 24.
125 See plate 4 in Weiditz, Authentic Everyday Dress of the Renaissance, p. 26.
126 See plates 11 and 12 in Weiditz, Authentic Everyday Dress of the Renaissance, p. 27.
127 See Mira Caballos, Indios y mestizos americanos en la España del siglo XVI (2000), p. 75.
128 Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo: Historia General y Natural de las Indias, 1 (Madrid: Atlas, 1992),
p. 3, cited in Mira Caballos and I.E.S. Mariano Barbacid, ‘Indios nobles y caciques en la corte real
española, siglo XVI’, pp. 6–7.
129 See Mira Caballos, Indios y mestizos americanos en la España del siglo XVI, pp. 88–9.
130 Mira Caballos and I.E.S. Mariano Barbacid, ‘Indios nobles y caciques en la corte real española,
siglo XVI’, pp. 1–15 and Mira Caballos, Indios y mestizos americanos en la España del siglo XVI, p. 57.
hold as slaves and who serve them as such, [even though] they cannot nor ought
not to do so.’131 Documentary evidence confirms that Native Americans were in
fact still being sold as slaves in auctions in the Spanish cities of Córdoba, Sevilla,
Badajoz, and Huelva, even in the seventeenth century, although more sporadic
ally. It was, therefore, absolutely crucial to concentrate and expand the transat-
lantic slave trade with African and Afro-Hispanic people, in order to generate
income for the Crown by keeping the mines open in the New World. In Spain, the
slave trade reached its peak in Cádiz between the second half of the seventeenth
century and the first of the eighteenth century, and the trade only ended in 1837.132
The abolition of Afro-Hispanic slavery was finally achieved with its demise in
1886 in Cuba.
In his imperial project of the classification of human diversity it is also evident
that Weiditz’s iconography of the chained slaves, like those depicted by Hoefnagel
in his View of Seville, could not be disentangled from a curiosity about, as well as
a need to register, these novel encounters from the New World. The treatment of
the caciques and the rest of the Native Americans was very different to that meted
out to enslaved and freed Afro-Hispanics. The roots of this attitude lay in the
medieval laws of Alfonso X, Las Partidas, where special attention was to be given
to the children of the nobility.133 From the economic point of view, the royal
decree issued on 17 July 1572 stated that the caciques were, as Castilian hidalgos,
exempted from paying taxes. This aim of this was the hispanization of the Native
American elite, along the model of the Castilian nobility (nobles hijosdalgos de
Castilla). Hence, for example, the acceptance in 1606 of Melchor Carlos Inga,
Huayna Capac’s descendant, in the military Order of Santiago.134
In his sketches, plates 11–23, Weiditz portrays the Aztecs as performers and
entertainers, either playing ball and catch-stone or performing with a wooden
block. They are also depicted as standing figures, with specific attributes such as a
parrot or with a wooden drinking jug.135 The artist depicts the Native American
caciques as exotic trophies, like the Moriscos from Granada and those Afro-
Hispanics working at the Hapsburg court, who were mainly employed as servants
131 This report, Real Cédula a los oficiales la Casa de la Contratación, Valladolid, 1 May 1549. AGI,
Indiferente General 1964, L. 11, ff. 226–v, from the Recopilación de las Leyes de Indias de 1680 is cited
by Mira Caballos in Indios y mestizos americanos en la España del siglo XVI, p. 59.
132 See Alessandro Stella, Ser esclavo y negro en Andalucia Occidental (Siglos XVII y XVIII), and
Andrés-Gallego and García Añoveros, La Iglesia y la esclavitud de los negros. Manuel Lucena Salmoral,
Regulación de la esclavitud negra en las colonias de América Española (1503–1886): Documentos para
su estudio, CD, Chapter 1 pp. 9, 11.
133 Juan Bautista Olaechea Labayen, ‘Experiencias cristianas con el indio antillano’, Anuario de
Estudios Americanos, 26 (1969), p. 86.
134 Jesús Larios Martín, ‘Hidalguías e hidalgos de Indias’, I Congreso Ítalo-español de Historia
Municipal y de la Asamblea de la Asociación de Hidalgos (Madrid: Hidalguía, 1958), pp. 208–11, cited
by Mira Caballos and I.E.S. Mariano Barbacid in ‘Indios nobles y caciques en la corte real española,
siglo XVI’, p. 5.
135 See plates 11–23 in Weiditz, Authentic Everyday Dress of the Renaissance and p. 18.
118 Black but Human
and were considered ornaments and performers whose function was to entertain,
as we saw in the previous chapter. Thus, in his attempt to classify the ‘clothing of
different nations’, the goldsmith separates the sketched figures from their environ
ment, rather like modern cut-outs. There is no doubt that the re-conceptualization
of human diversity in imperial Spain after 1492, following the conquest and
colonization of the New World, coupled with the expulsion of the Jews from the
kingdoms of Castile and Aragon and the Muslims from the kingdom of Granada,
had an impact on Weiditz’s Trachtenbuch.136 Significantly, by 1529 no visual rep-
resentation of the Jewish population, who had been mainly concentrated in
Toledo and Seville in the kingdom of Castile, is recorded by the artist.137
Weiditz’s emphasis is on the classification of subjects according to their social
functions rather than the depiction of the harshness of enforced slave labour.
Nevertheless, his sketches are the only visual representations of runaway slave
labourers in imperial Spain. In my view, Weiditz’s iconography also makes visible
the act of resistance by slaves to the inhumanity of their condition and the institu-
tion of slavery. Thus, the visualization of the consequences of the slave’s rebellious
act of defiance to their total subjugation to their masters and the forms of punish-
ment applied to fugitive slaves to prevent their rebellion are significant.
The account of the Jesuit Pedro de León (Jerez de la Frontera, 1545–Sevilla, 1632)
in his Compendio, De algunas experiencias en los ministerios que usa la Compañía
de Jesus (1615–16) help us to identify a variety of forms that the domestic and
mainly individual acts of rebellion took in Hapsburg Spain. His experiences as a
chaplain in the Royal Prison of Seville and as a preacher between 1578 and 1616
are recorded in his original manuscript that was only published in 1981 by Pedro
Herrera Puga under the title Grandeza y Miseria en Andalucía: Testimonio de una
encrucijada histórica (1578–1616).138 It is a painful testimony of the suffering of
the victims of the Inquisition before their deaths. He gives a comprehensive
chronicle of all the cases he attended, recording the details of the prisoners who
had, in the main, been guilty of rebellion against the inhumanity of the slave sys-
tem and the cruelty of the treatment by their slave owners. I agree with José
Miguel López García that criminal acts (delitos) are the most important mode or
manifestation of rebellion that domestic slaves could perform in early modern
Spain.139 In the second part of his chronicle, the Jesuit León tells us the story of a
chained slave defined as ‘negro ladino’ who worked as a nurse in the royal prison
and successfully helped a black ‘criminal’ to escape from the roof, but failed to
136 Domínguez Ortiz, El Antiguo Régimen, pp. 186–93.

137 Domínguez Ortiz, El Antiguo Régimen, p. 190.
138 The full title is Compendio de algunas experiencias en los ministerios de que usa la Compañía de
Jesús, con que prácticamente se muestra con algunos acontecimientos y documentos el buen acierto en
ellos, por orden de los superiores, por el Padre Pedro de León, de la misma Compañía.
139 José Miguel López García, ‘La forja de un esclavo rebelde. Historia de Narciso Convento, ca.
1732–1802’, El Poder de la Historia, edited by Miguel Artola Gallego y Pilar Díaz Sánchez et al., 1
(Madrid: Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, 2014), pp. 481–500.
escape himself and was caught in the Confraternity started by León at the prison.140
In the final part of his account, León provides an extremely useful Appendix
(Apéndice de los Ajusticiados), with cases of Afro-Hispanic slaves and ex-slaves
who had been tried and convicted as criminals, and sentenced by the secular
Tribunal Supremo (or Inquisition), located in San Francisco Square. Executions
normally took place in the Plaza de San Francisco, which was where slave auc-
tions also occurred, with all their attendant publicity, and religious processions
also gathered.141 In his Compendio, León explained that the administrative run-
ning of the royal prison was paid for by the contributions of slave owners, as they
were the economic providers for their slaves. Owners were obliged to pay one real
per day for each slave who was in prison either because they were classified as
fugitives or criminals. The penalty for escaping was the highest and because there
were a higher number of fugitives than criminals, the prison always made a profit.142
Although during León’s services at the royal prison there were at least 18,000
people,143 León recorded 309 cases of ‘criminals’ or victims of the Inquisition in
general, amongst whom were slaves and ex-slaves, over his thirty-eight years of
service. The confessor then describes, sometimes in minute detail, the prisoners’
names, ethnicity, age, place of origin, nature of crime, sentence, and type of
execution they suffered. This gives us a precious resource for understanding the
definitions of enslaved and freed men, women and children at the royal prison, who
were the majority of his cases.144 Pedro de León listed the different nature of their
crimes: homicides,145 sodomy (pecado nefando),146 adultery, theft (ahorcado por
ladrón), falsifying documents and coins, rape of women,147 practices of abortion,148
witchcraft (hechicería), and murder. The Jesuit recorded those slaves who were
hanged for the murder or attempted murder of their masters. On 23 April 1583,
Pedro, a black slave, tried to poison his master but failed,149 while a Morisco slave
killed his own slave master, the parish priest of the church of San Salvador, the
second most important church in Seville. In 1595, Isabel Ramírez, a Morisco
woman and the seventeen-year-old Magdalena de los Santos, of mixed-race

(1578–1616), edited by Pedro Herrera Puga (Granada: Facultad de Teología, 1981), pp. 8–384.
http://personal.us.es/alporu/histsevilla/carcel_real_sevilla.htm, accessed 9 December 2015.
141 Karina Galperín, ‘The passion according to Berruguete: painting the Auto-da-fé and the estab-
lishment of the Inquisition in early modern Spain’, Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies (2014), pp. 1–33
and Francisco Núñez Roldán, La vida cotidiana en la Sevilla del Siglo de Oro (Seville: Silex, 2004).
142 http://personal.us.es/alporu/histsevilla/carcel_real_sevilla.htm, accessed 9 December 2015.
143 http://personal.us.es/alporu/histsevilla/audiencia.htm, accessed 9 December 2015.
144 See http://personal.us.es/alporu/histsevilla/padre_pedro_de_leon.htm, accessed 9 December
2015.
(1578–1616), pp. 414, 426.
146 León, Grandeza y Miseria en Andalucía, pp. 412, 520, 546–8, 589–94.
147 León, Grandeza y Miseria en Andalucía, pp. 458, 501.
148 León, Grandeza y Miseria en Andalucía, pp. 414–15.
149 León, Grandeza y Miseria en Andalucía, p. 420.
120 Black but Human
parentage, were executed for the death of the latter’s master. Their confessor
defined the slave owner as ‘an honest woman who had raised her as a daughter
[. . .] and taught her to carve, to play the harp, and to sing’ and that she was so
generous that she also nominated Magdalena as her heir in her will.150 Manuel, an
eighteen-year-old teenager, who had been bought fifteen days before by an ‘honest
man’ from a foreigner for 120 ducats, killed the owner of a tavern in 1613 and
was hanged on 17 September.151 Two years later, another teenager, Gaspar de los
Reyes, mulatillo, a nineteen-year-old, was hanged on 30 April 1615 because he
had killed another slave.152 There were also rebellions on the galleys organized by
an unnamed mixed-race enslaved man who was executed in 1584.153
In his costume book, Weiditz tried to illustrate and record what he saw and, in
this way, his drawings representing Afro-Hispanic slaves are a visual document of
their presence in the kingdoms of Aragon and Castile. Despite the illustrative
aims as a costume book, these sketches show black and white slaves as structur-
ally subjugated people who have been punished for attempting to escape their
condition. These deep-lain notions of Africans, which inform the visual form,
were embedded by the institutionalization of chattel slavery in the Spanish empire
and their presence was accepted as the natural fabric of the social order and as an
urban feature of the Spanish landscape. In Weiditz’s drawings, Afro-Hispanic
slaves, Native Americans and Moriscos occupy a space where their identity is
reduced to ‘nothing but props and costume’.154 The goldsmith reproduces a
hegemonic account of human diversity and in this context his images ‘reinforce
the stereotyped account of Africans’.155
The iconography of chained Afro-Hispanic slaves was exclusively depicted in
the sixteenth century by artists from the Spanish territories in Northern Europe
during their travels to Hapsburg Spain. However, this iconography by Spanish
artists is located in the religious form, as we will explore in the next chapter.

153 León, Grandeza y Miseria en Andalucía, p. 427.
154 Barbara Fuchs, Mimesis and Empire: The New World, Islam, and European Identities (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 1.
155 Massing, ‘Weiditz and Costume Books’, in The Image of the Black in Western Art, p. 54.
5
Commodification
Is There Any Caste Lower Than Blacks
and Slaves from Guinea?
(Francisco Nuñez Muley, 1566)1
The Miracle of Saints Cosmas and Damian
The Miracle of the Black Leg, also known as the Miracle of SS. Cosmas and Damian
(see Colour Plate 5.1) by the sculptor Isidro de Villoldo,2 in Valladolid (Spain),
seat of the Hapsburg court, is perhaps the most remarkable image by Castilian
artists in Spain which both allegorizes the violence of the institution of slavery
and sets up the iconography of the enslaved Afro-Hispanic subject. This is a
uniquely Castilian iconography which articulates this religious legend in the first
half of the sixteenth century, as we will see in the second section of this chapter.
It is a small panel in polychrome and gilt wood, now in the Museo Nacional de
Escultura in Valladolid, that shows the in vivo amputation of the leg of an African
man represented in the foreground of the composition.3 He lies on the floor of
1 Francisco Núñez Muley, a Morisco noble, summed up Morisco resistance when he asked ¿Qué
gente hay en el mundo más vil y baja que los negros de Guinea? (Is there any caste there any caste lower
than that of blacks and slaves from Guinea?) in Luis del Mármol Carvajal, Historia del rebelión y cas-
tigo de los moriscos del reino de Granada (1600) (Alicante: Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes,
2001), Book 2, chapter 9: Como los moriscos contradijeron los capítulos de la nueva premática, y un
razonamiento que Francisco Nuñez Muley hizo al Presidente sobre ello. Digital edition, http://www.
cervantesvirtual.com/obra-visor/historia-del-sic-rebelion-y-castigo-de-los-moriscos-del-reino-de-
granada—0/html/ff45049c-82b1-11df-acc7-002185ce6064_6.html#I_42_, accessed 26 February 2018.
2 Isidro de Villoldo (Villoldo, Palencia?—Seville) was active between 1526 and 1575. He worked in
the most important Spanish centres for the production of sculpture: Toledo (1539–42), Ávila (1538,
1544–1553), and Seville (from 1553). See Jesús María Parrado del Olmo, Los escultores seguidores de
Berruguete en Ávila (Ávila: Caja Central de Ahorros y Préstamos de Ávila, 1981), pp. 195–233, who
believes that Villoldo was originally from Toledo.
3 Villoldo’s work (H. 70, W. 78, D. 9 cm) belongs, since 1836, to the National Museo de Sculpture in
Valladolid, see Marie-Louise David-Danel, Iconographie des Saints médecins Côme et Damien (Lille:
Morel & Corduant, 1958), pp. 49, 172, 186, 198, 200, 201; The Image of the Black in Western Art, edited
by Ladislas Bugner, Jean Devisse and Michel Mollat, 2 vols. (Fribourg: Office du Livre, Menil
Foundation, 1979), pp. 205–6; One Leg in the Grave: The Miracle of the Transplantation of the Black Leg
by the Saints Cosmas and Damian, edited by Kees W. Zimmermann (Maarsen: Elsevier/Bunge, 1998),
p. 38; Carmen Fracchia, ‘Spanish Depictions of the Miracle of the Black Leg’, in One Leg in the Grave
Revisited: The miracle of the transplantation of the black leg by the saints Cosmas and Damian, edited by
Kees W. Zimmermann (Groningen: Barkhuis, 2013), pp. 79–91 and Carmen Fracchia, ‘El esclavo
negroafricano en las imágenes españolas de los Santos Cosme y Damián’, in La esclavitud negroafricana
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198767978.001.0001
122 Black but Human
an elegant room, and the chopping block on which his stump rests adds a
c ontemporary visual motif to this scene, since in early modern Spain this was
an essential tool for surgeons (who dealt with wounds, ulcers, tumours, and
fractures) to perform amputations on the battlefield to save the lives of wounded
soldiers. The amputee’s left leg has been removed and grafted onto the patient,
who holds the stump of his limb with his right hand. The amputee lies in agony by
the side of the bed (see Fig 5.1), where a European man is being tended by these
two physicians: St Damian on the left is grafting the African’s amputated leg on to
their patient while St Cosmas, on the right of the composition, is taking the sick
man’s pulse and examining his urine in a vessel. Their patient might be sedated,
probably with opium, mandragora, or alcohol, unlike the African man.4 This hor-
rific scene takes place in a sumptuous setting, where there is a lavish application
of the New World gold that was readily available during the sixteenth century.
Painting and gilding highlight the surface of the wood and foregrounds the rich
Fig. 5.1. Isidro de Villoldo, Detail: Mutilated African Man. Isidro de Villoldo,
The Miracle of the Black Leg, 1547: © Museo Nacional de Escultura, Valladolid (Spain).
© Photo: Javier Muñoz y Paz Pastor, CE0362.
en la Historia de España. Siglos XVI y XVII, edited by Aurelia Martín Casares and Margarita García
Barranco (Granada: Comares, 2010), pp. 127–49.
4 These substances were normally given to patients before the invention of anaesthesia (1840). See
Geoffrey B. Rushman, N. J. Davies, and Richard S. Atkinson, A Short History of Anaesthesia: the first
150 years (Oxford and Boston: Butterworth-Heinemann, 1996).
Commodification 123
textures of the short tunic worn by the suffering African man, the long, red,
Spanish academic gowns and the golden capes of the holy physicians, their shoes,
the sheet covering the patient’s body, his pillow cases, and the base of the four-
poster bed that occupies the centre of the panel. This technique of the magnificent
estofado—the ‘painted and gilt decoration imitating the textiles or stuff (estofa) of
the draperies’—found in Spanish sculpture had originated in the Netherlands in
the late fifteenth century.5
The wealth and sense of comfort that are exuded here are in stark contrast to
the violence of the African amputee lying, in agony, on the ground. The ensuing
horror of this visual motif is amplified by the indifference shown by the other figures
in the room towards the amputee’s excruciating sacrifice. The main concern of
SS. Cosmas and Damian is the transplantation of the healthy leg and the welfare
of their patient. Paradoxically, the depiction of the pain of the butchered African
man, so central to a religious composition, becomes the focus of the attention for
the believer-viewers. They would have perceived this depiction as the portrayal of
a contemporary Afro-Hispanic enslaved man, as my previous chapters have
shown. The twin martyrs Cosmas and Damian, who had been venerated from the
fourth century onwards as the patron saints of surgeons, doctors and pharmacists
are defined by their medical attributes in this Valladolid panel, such as the small
container of ointments on the base of the bed and the vessel containing urine.6
Different sources recorded three distinctive versions of this pairing of SS. Cosmas
and Damian, although they are always physicians: twins from Mesopotamia;
brothers martyred outside Rome during the reign of Roman Emperor Carinus;
or brothers tortured and beheaded under the Roman Emperor Diocletian
(284–305 ad). In Western Europe it is this last version of SS. Cosmas and Damian
that was officially adopted in the Roman Martyrology (Martyrologium Romanorum),
and their martyrdom is commemorated on 26 September.7 The hagiography of
SS. Cosmas and Damian was written by Usuardo in the ninth century. He recorded
that the saintly physicians were born in Arabia, learned the art of healing in Syria,
lived in Aegea in the Roman region of Cilicia, and that in 303 ad Cosmas and
Damian were arrested, tortured, and beheaded by order of Lysis, Roman Governor
of Cilicia. Their bodies were buried in Cyrrus. Usuardo added that SS. Cosmas
5 Marjorie Trusted, Spanish Sculpture: A Catalogue of the Collection in the Victoria and Albert
Museum (London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 1996), p. 10.
6 See The Phantom Limb Phenomenon: A Medical, Folkloric, and Historical Study. Texts and
Translations of 10th to 20th Century Accounts of the Miraculous Restoration of Body Parts, edited by
Douglas B. Price and Neil J. Twombly (Washington: Georgetown University Press, 1978), p. xxxvi and
Mónica Ann Walker Vadillo, ‘Los santos médicos Cosme y Damián’, Revista Digital de Iconología
Medieval, 3 (5) (2011), pp. 51–60.
7 See Filippo Caraffa, ‘Cosma e Damiano’, Bibliotheca Sanctorum. (Istituto Giovanni XXIII nella
Pontificia Università Lateranense), 4 (1964), p. 224 and Pierre Julien, François Ledermann and Alain
Touwaide, Cosma e Damiano: dal culto popolare alla protezione di chirurghi, medici e farmacisti.
Aspetti e immagini (Milan: Antea Editori, 1993), p. 2.
124 Black but Human
and Damian were considered the patrons of physicians because they healed without
charging fees, and hence were called anargyroi (‘those who did not require fees
for their medical treatments’). The reference to holy healers was taken from the
passage from St Matthew 10:8, when Christ summons his disciples: ‘Heal the sick,
raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out the demons. You receive without pay,
give without pay.’
There is no doubt that the representation of the Miracle of the Black Leg also
alludes to early modern medical discourses and surgical operations. In most
Spanish cities and villages, the medical profession and its practices were in fact
regulated by the Confraternities of SS. Cosmas and Damian.8 From the beginning
of the sixteenth century, their members were required to provide a certificate of
purity of blood,9 and from the middle of the century, this requirement extended
to members of the University and most hospitals. The legal practice of surgery
was promoted by Philip II, with the creation, in the last decades of the century, of
university chairs in Surgery, though this did not preclude the traditional training
of surgeons in hospitals until the seventeenth century.10 The study of anatomy
was essential for the surgeon, and so hospitals and medical confraternities became
teaching centres, where the autopsy and dissection of corpses took place.11 The old-
est autopsy room in an early modern hospital in Spain was the Caseta de notomies
of the general hospital of Valencia built in 1586, located near the poultry sheds.12
The presence of Afro-Hispanic enslaved and ex-slaves is recorded in hospitals,
such as the hospital in Seville during the first two decades of the sixteenth cen-
tury. The slaves recorded in the General Hospital of Valencia in the years 1565–6
and 1574–5 are from North and Central Africa. In Málaga there are also records
of attending slaves when they were ill and ordinances of the Hospital of Santa Ana
for the admission of slaves between 1729 and 1733 recorded that ‘María de la
Concepción, Berber, from Málaga, single, 50 years-old’, died on 2 April and was
buried in this hospital.13
8 María Luisa Rodríguez-Sala Gomezgil, ‘La cofradía-gremio durante la Baja Edad Media y siglos
XVI y XVII: el caso de la cofradía de cirujanos, barberos, flebotomianos y médicos en España y la
Nueva España’, Revista Castellano-Manchega de Ciencias Sociales, 10 (2009): pp. 149–63.
9 See Luis S. Granjel, Cirugía española del Renacimiento (Salamanca: Universidad de Salamanca,
1968) and Luis S. Granjel, La medicina española renacentista, in Historia general de la medicina espa-
ñola renacentista, 2 (Salamanca: Universidad de Salamanca, 1980).
10 Treatises were published at the Spanish Court in Madrid by the Castilian royal surgeons Juan de
Fragoso (1581), Francisco Díaz (1575), and Dionisio Daza Chacón (1580, 1583), and in Seville by the
Valencian Juan Calvo (1580) and the Sevillian Bartolomé Hidalgo Agüero (1584).
11 See María Luz López Terrada, El hospital general de Valencia en el siglo XVI (1512–1600) (PhD
dissertation, Universidad de Valencia, 1986), pp. 606, 858.
12 Alfonso Franco Silva, La esclavitud en Sevilla y su tierra a fines de la Edad Media (Seville:
Diputación Provincial de Sevilla, Servicio de Publicaciones, 1979), pp. 225–7. The General Hospital of
Valencia was founded in 1512 and López Terrada, El hospital general de Valencia en el siglo XVI
(1512–1600) (1986), pp. 520, 574, 576, 579, 582, 587.
13 See María Carmen Gómez García and Juan María Martín Vergara, La esclavitud en Málaga entre
los siglos XVII y XVIII (Málaga: Diputación Provincial de Málaga, 1993), p. 59.
Commodification 125
Slaves belonged to the category of the ‘poor’, along with servants, abandoned
children, beggars, prostitutes, students, and insane people. They were at the bottom
of the social order and were perceived as a social threat that had to be contained
in institutions.14 It is unsurprising that most male and female corpses used for
dissection had their provenance in hospitals, amongst the poor and the executed.
In Spain, the cult of SS. Cosmas and Damian was fully established by the seventh
century, and more specifically in Toledo, as the Pasionario hispánico claimed.
This is a popular Spanish book of liturgy concerning the history of martyrdoms
(pasiones) that was read in public at mass on the saint’s day. In the list of martyrs,
SS. Cosmas and Damian are categorized as ‘saints physician and healers from the
East’, and the Pasionario hispánico recorded that St Ildefonso composed two masses
to commemorate their ‘memory,’ that ‘there was a blessing of the perfumed oil or
unguent, to alleviate the suffering of, and return health to, those who were ill’.15 The
relics of SS. Cosmas and Damian were brought by the Roman Emperor Justinian
(527–65) to Byzantium, where two churches were dedicated to the saints. SS. Cosmas
and Damian’s reputation ‘as miraculous healers spread both east and west’ after
their deaths.16 The cult of SS. Cosmas and Damian became even more popular
after the Reconquista of the greater part of Andalusia from the Moors in 1248.
In the kingdoms of Castile and Aragon, churches dedicated to the holy phys
icians were built to contain their relics, which became an essential component in
the creation of centres of pilgrimage. The Acta Sanctorum recorded the earliest
presence of their relics in Spain in the year 972 at the church in Covarrubias
(south of Burgos), in the kingdom of Castile, and the reliquary of the heads of
SS. Cosmas and Damian in the royal convent of the Descalzas Reales in Madrid
was venerated from 1561 onwards.17 It is believed that these relics were taken to
Germany from the church dedicated to the twin brothers, founded by Pope
St Felix in the Grand Basilica in Rome (526–30).18 It is in that church, according
to the Latin sources, that the miracle of the black leg took place. The skulls of
14 María Luz López Terrada and Lanuza Navarro, Los estudios históricos sobre el Hospital General de
Valencia (Valencia: Fundació Hospital Reial i General Patronat de la Fundació Conseller de Sanidad,
2007), p. 565.
15 Ángel Fábrega, Pasionario hispánico (siglos VII–XI) (Madrid and Barcelona: Consejo Superior de
Investigaciones, 1953), 1, pp. 49–50, 212–13. See also Joaquín Yarza Luaces, ‘Algunas reflexiones sobre
iconografía en Pedro Berruguete y su época’, in Actas del Symposium Internacional Pedro Berruguete y
su entorno. Palencia 24–6 abril de 2003. Centro Cultural Provincial (Palencia: Diputación Provincial de
Palencia, 2004), p. 272.
16 Sami K. Hamarneh, Cosmas and Damian in the Near East: Earlier Extant Monuments (Yarmouk
University, Faculty of Public Health and Allied Health Sciences, Irbid, Hashemite kingdom of Jordan),
Pharmacy in History, 27 (2) (1985), p 78, and Heinz Peter Gerhard Skrobucha, Kosmas and Damian.
The Patrons of the doctors, translated by Hans Hermann Rosenwald (Recklinghausen: Aurel Bongers,
1967), p. 8.
17 María Teresa Ruiz Alcón, Monasterio de las Descalzas Reales (Madrid: Patrimonio Nacional,
1987), pp. 86–92. See also Leslie G. Matthews, ‘SS. Cosmas and Damian: Patron Saints of Medicine
and Pharmacy. Their Cult in England’, Medical History, 12 (3) (1968), pp. 281–2.
18 Matthews, ‘SS. Cosmas and Damian—Patrons Saints of Medicine and Pharmacy: Their Cult in
England’, pp. 281–2 and Caraffa, ‘Cosma e Damiano’, Bibliotheca Sanctorum, p. 224.
126 Black but Human
SS. Cosmas and Damian were in Bremen in the tenth century and then in Bamberg
until they were requested by Empress Maria of Austria, wife of Maximilian II, who
donated these relics to the royal convent founded by her sister, Juana of Austria.
In the Descalzas Reales the impressive collection of reliquaries were made ‘of
gold, pearls and finest diamonds’ and were displayed as though in a cámara de
maravillas, in a manner not dissimilar from the European collections of rare and
unusual natural objects.19 Relics had powerful spiritual effects because the fragments
of a saint’s body conjured the eternal presence of the saint in question and thus
overcame any sense of horror produced by the dismemberment of real bodies.20
This can be seen in the depiction of the in vivo mutilation in the Valladolid panel.
The intriguing narrative of Villoldo’s panel is common to a number of legends
found in ‘medieval Marian collections and the lives of saints’ from the seventh to
the fifteenth centuries.21 These all contain an element of supernatural restoration
of a missing body part. The case of a miracle of the restoration of a missing leg by
the intercession of the Virgin Mary is recorded in The Books of Exempla by
Clemente Sánchez de Vercial, archdeacon of Valderas in León, in Castile. He
compiled and translated his collection into Spanish, between 1400 and 1421, and
this is considered ‘the first of the Spanish collections, which are the best and most
extensive of the vernacular compilations’ intended for the use of both preachers and
the general public. There are also eleven versions of an unusually late miracle, the
‘restitution of a cut-off lower leg’ to Miguel Pellicero by the Blessed Mary of Grace
(Virgen del Pilar), which occurred in Zaragoza in 1640 and was first recorded in
1641.22 Medieval legends of saintly healers, who perform miracles of body repar-
ation, were written to counteract the revulsion felt at the fragmentation or dis-
memberment of bodies for political or scientific purposes that had become
common in Western Europe at the end of the thirteenth century with the legaliza-
tion of dissection practices in European centres and the public exhibition of body
parts from criminals, associated with the practice of judicial punishments.23
From the sixth to the twentieth century, the legend of SS. Cosmas and Damian
developed as the number of images (in every artistic medium), shrines, and sanc-
tuaries multiplied, and spread from the Byzantine World to Western Europe, and
19 See Juan Carrillo, Relación histórica de la Real Fundación de las Descalzas de S. Clara de la Villa
de Madrid (Madrid: Por Luis Sánchez, 1616), in Nora De Poorter, The Eucharistic Series, in Corpus
Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard, I (London, Philadelphia, Brussels: Harvey Miller-Heyden & Son,
1978), pp. 423, 427 and Fernando Checa Cremades, ‘Monasterio de las Descalzas Reales: orígenes de
su colección artística’, in Reales Sitios, 102 (1989), pp. 22, 26.
20 Caroline Walker Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body
in Medieval Religion (New York: Zone Books, 1992), pp. 269–80.
21 Douglas B. Price, ‘Miraculous Restoration of Lost Body Parts: Relationship to the Phantom Limb
Phenomenon and to Limb-Burial Superstitions and Practices’, in American Folk Medicine: A
Symposium, edited by Wayland Hand (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), p. 56.
22 Douglas B. Price, ‘Miraculous Restoration of Lost Body Parts: Relationship to the Phantom Limb
Phenomenon and to Limb-Burial Superstitions and Practices’, in American Folk Medicine, pp. 40–1,
65, 69, 414–502.
23 Walker Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption, pp. 270–1.
Commodification 127
even to the New World.24 The European image of SS. Cosmas and Damian
c irculated in Spain in medical books25 and in religious broadsheets (called goigs
or ‘joys’), especially in the kingdom of Aragon. From the fifteenth century onwards,
the latter were an exclusively Catalan form of devotion to be sung to and by believers.
Goigs also circulated in Sicily and Sardinia, which were under the jurisdiction of
the kingdom of Aragon.26 Here, Cosmas and Damian are depicted as physicians,
in medical robes following the fashion of the time of their visual representation,
and accompanied by poems on their life and miracles and verses pleading for their
intercession.27 This was an effective way of keeping alive the legend of SS. Cosmas
and Damian and, of their three posthumous miracles, the leg transplantation was
the most popular in the collective imaginary.
The Valladolid image, which we will consider in more detail in the second sec-
tion of this chapter, and other examples from the Cathedrals of Ávila and Palencia,
departs radically not only from the earliest surviving depiction of the Miracle of
SS. Cosmas and Damian in the illuminated manuscript Legend Aurea, written
in Latin in 1275.28 The narrative also deviates from the three known legends
(Greek, Latin, and Catalan) that inform the visual representation of this miracle
enacted by SS. Cosmas and Damian, although the Latin legend is closest to the
Valladolid panel:
Felix, the eighth pope after S. Gregory, did do make a noble church at Rome of
the saints Cosmo and Damian, and there was a man which served devoutly the
holy martyrs in that church, who a canker had consumed all his thigh. And as he
slept, the holy martyrs Cosmo and Damian, appeared to him their devout servant,
bringing with them an instrument and ointment of whom that one said to that
other: Where shall we have flesh when we have cut away the rotten flesh to fill
the void place? Then that other said to him: There is an Ethiopian that this day is
buried in the churchyard of S. Peter ad Vincula, which is yet fresh, let us bear
this thither, and take we out of that morian’s flesh and fill this place withal. And
so they fetched the thigh of the sick man and so changed that one for that other.
24 See David-Danel, Iconographie des Saints médecins Côme et Damien, and Hamarneh, Cosmas
and Damian in the Near East, p. 80.
25 The iconography of SS. Cosmas and Damian circulated in Spain in the frontispiece of the treatise
on urethrotomy (Toledo, 1498) by Juan Gutiérrez, physician of the Catholic Monarchs, see E. Forge,
‘La Médicine espagnole: quelques étapes, quelques hommes’, Æsculape, 23 (1933), pp. 30, 31–2.
26 Julien, Ledermann and Touwaide, Cosma e Damiano, p. 28.
27 Josep Massons,‘Iconographie de saint Côme et saint Damien en Catalogne’, in Saint Côme et
saint Damien: culte et iconographie: colloque, Mendrisio, 29–30 IX 1985, edited by Pierre Julien and
François Ledermann (Zürich: Juris Druck + Verlag, 1985), pp. 82–4.
28 The Dominican Friar Jacobus de Voragine (Varazze, 1229–98) was Archbishop of Genoa from
1292. The earliest surviving illustration of this miracle is in the Legenda Aurea in the Henry
E. Huntington Library in S. Marino, California (USA). It is a Parisian production written in Latin
between 1270 and 1280 with 135 miniatures surviving from the original 178: see Martha Easton,
‘Pain, torture and death in the Huntington Library legenda aurea’, in Gender and Holiness: Men,
Women, and Saints in Late Medieval Europe, edited by Samantha J. E. Riches and Sarah Salih (London:
Routledge, 2002), p 40. See the reproduction of this image in Zimmermann, ‘Introduction’, in One Leg
in the Grave Revisited, p. 18, illustration 01, p. 50.
128 Black but Human
And when the sick man awoke and felt no pain, he put forth his hand and felt his
leg without hurt, and then took a candle, and saw well that it was not his thigh,
but that it was another. And when he was well come to himself, he sprang out of
his bed for joy, and recounted to all the people how it was happed to him, and
that which he had seen in his sleep, and how he was healed. And they sent
hastily to the tomb of the dead man, and found the thigh of him cut off, and that
other thigh in the tomb instead of his. Then let us pray unto these holy martyrs
to be our succour and help in all our hurts, blechures and sores, and that by their
merits after this life we may come to everlasting bliss in heaven. Amen.29
Jacobus of Voragine collected the Latin legend of the miraculous transplantation

in ‘The Lives of Saint Cosmas and Damian’ in his book The Golden Legend or
Lives of Saints (1275), the most widely circulated stories of saints in Medieval
and Renaissance Europe. Voragine’s tales concentrate on martyrdom and were
intended for the use of the preachers and the general public.30 In the Latin legend,
the corpse belonged to an ‘Ethiopian’ man who then is only referred as ‘morian’
(Moor) in the rest of Voragine’s text. The apparent indiscriminate use of both
terms seems to indicate a certain confusion or ambiguity, but also indicates the
historical coexistence of slaves belonging to different ‘nations’ and territories in
the Crowns of Aragon and Castile. The word ‘Ethiopian’, as we saw in the first
chapter, designated the term ‘black’. In the entry of the word ‘black’, Covarrubias
defines it as a ‘Black Ethiopian with black skin’ while, for his entries ‘Ethiopian:
the man from Ethiopia’ and ‘Moor: from the Latin maurus, said of someone
from the Province of Mauretania’, the references are purely geographical.31 The
identification of the term ‘Ethiopian’ with ‘Africans’ or ‘Blacks’ was in tune with
the early modern European perception of African descent, although geographically
it refers to the northern area of the continent or people who were then living
there. However, according to Elizabeth Wright, in Spain, ‘Ethiopian’ (Aethiops
Christicola) meant a ‘black follower of Christ’, an African with an ‘Old Christian
status’ rather than an ethnic heritage.32 The term Moros (Moors) by contrast
implied Muslims from the ‘naçión de moros’, regardless of skin colour. They were
either from the kingdom of Granada, Northern Africa, or the Maghreb. The
categories of ‘esclavo moro’, ‘esclavo blanco’, and ‘esclavo negro’ that emerged, for
example, in sixteenth-century documents in Seville and Málaga, show that their
29 Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend: Readings on the Saints, translated by W. Granger Ryan,
with an Introduction by Eamon Duffy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), pp. 582–4.
See http://catalogue.wellcomelibrary.org/record=b1203821, accessed 25 August 2018.
30 Walker Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption, pp. 204, 290.
Martín de Riquer (Barcelona: Horta, 1987), pp. 573, 815.
32 Elizabeth R. Wright, The Epic of Juan Latino: Dilemmas of Race and Religion in Renaissance Spain
(Toronto, Buffalo and London: University of Toronto Press, 2016), p. 25.
Commodification 129
‘nations’ of origin determined their differences.33 The terms negro berberisco

(Black Berber) and negro moro (Black Moor) referred to North African Muslims,
therefore they belong to the category ‘Moor’ instead of ‘Black’.34 The latter clearly
referred to enslaved people from Guinea or West Africa (Senegal, Gambia, and
Niger), but also from North Africa. Instead, the designation of ‘esclavos blancos’
(White Slaves) were included in the category of esclavos moros (Moors), as were
the less commonly defined groups of esclavos Árabes (Arabs), berberiscos (Berbers),
or moriscos (Christianized Muslims), or those white slaves who are from a differ-
ent naçión, such as Jews (Judíos), Indians from the Indian subcontinent (Indios)
and Native American Indians (Indios).35 However, the ethnic group of esclavos
blancos also included Muslims from Turkey (de naçión de turcos) or esclavos turcos
(Turk slaves or Ottomans), who were ‘Moors’ or from de naçión de moros.36
In the Valladolid bas-relief dated 1547, the first obvious departure from the
Latin legend of the miraculous transplantation of the black leg is that the mutilated
‘Ethiopian’ is not a corpse from a cemetery, but an in vivo Afro-Hispanic man
whose leg has been amputated whilst he is alive. However, most depictions of the
miracle of the black leg based on Voragine’s tale in the kingdoms of Castile and
Aragon adhere to the original late fourteenth-century iconographies articulated
by both the Master of Rubió in the Crown of Aragon, now at the Museu Episcopal
de Vic in Barcelona (see Fig 5.2)37 and by the Master of the Rinuccini Chapel
(Matteo del Pacino?, active 1350–74), for the church of Santa Croce in Florence
and now in the Museum of Art in Raleigh, North Carolina (see Fig 5.3).38 It is
possible that the patronage of Cosimo de’ Medici was responsible for the circula-
tion of this iconography in Europe. The Tuscan prototype, where the ‘Ethiopian’
man is shown as a corpse and the reciprocal transplantation of the leg is visible,
unlike the Valladolid panel, increased in popularity, but less intensely, in the rest
of Western Europe and it was established in the Spanish colonies of the New
World by the sixteenth century.39 This visual detail is relevant, since according to
33 Raúl González Arévalo, La esclavitud en Málaga a fines de la Edad Media (Jaén: Universidad de
Jaén, 2006), pp. 61–4.
34 Raúl González Arévalo, La esclavitud en Málaga a fines de la Edad Media, p. 62.
35 Raúl González Arévalo, La esclavitud en Málaga a fines de la Edad Media, p. 62.
36 Raúl González Arévalo, La esclavitud en Málaga a fines de la Edad Media, pp. 63, footnote 86, 64.
37 The Master of Rubió is an anonymous Catalan painter who is believed to have trained in
Barcelona. His Miracle of the Black Leg was the predella for the original altarpiece with scenes from the
life of St Cosmas and Damian for the parish church of Santpedor. See https://www.museuepiscopalvic.
com/en/colleccions/gotic/predella-from-the-altarpiece-in-the-church-of-santa-maria-in-rubio-
mev-850-849, accessed 27 August 2018.
38 David-Danel, Iconographie des Saints médecins Côme et Damien, p. 69. Jean Devisse and Michel
Mollat, ‘The Appeal to the Ethiopian’, in The Image of the Black in Western Art: From the Early Christian
Era to the ‘Age of Discovery’. Africans in the Christian Ordinance of the World, edited by David Bindman
and Henry Louis Gates, Jr, 2. 2 (Cambridge, Mass., London: Harvard University Press, 2010),
pp. 100–1, and Fracchia, ‘El esclavo negroafricano en las imágenes españolas de los Santos Cosme y
Damián’, in La esclavitud negroafricana en la Historia de España. Siglos XVI y XVII, p. 134.
39 The popularity of the image of the miracle of SS. Cosmas and Damian decreased in the Italian
kingdoms, where it had originated in the second half of the fourteenth century. It is rare in the
130 Black but Human
Fig. 5.2. Master of Rubió, The Miracle of the Black Leg, third quarter of the fourteenth
century. ©Museu Episcopal de Vic. Photo: Joan M. Díaz.
Fig. 5.3. Master of the Rinuccini Chapel (Matteo del Pacino), Miracle of the Black Leg,
circa 1370–1375, Tempera and gold leaf on panel, Left predella: 7 ¼ × 16 1/8 × 1 ¼ in.
(18.4 × 41 × 3.2 cm), North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, Gift of the
Samuel H. Kress Foundation, GL.60.17.9/a-c.
Commodification 131
Walker Bynum ‘the intact condition of the body, even after death, had deep
s ignificance’ in medieval religion and culture because of the ‘assumption that
material continuity is crucial to personhood’.40
In addition, in the Rinuccini panel the visual motif of two elegant women and
two men who witness the transplantation of the black leg, a motif that most
Spanish artists would adopt, was added to the Latin narrative.41 One of the earliest
influences on the Spanish visualization of the Tuscan iconography of the Miracle
of the Black Leg is in the 1460 altarpiece by Jaume Huguet, for the church of Santa
María de Terrassa (near Barcelona).42 The work is dedicated to the ‘oriental’ saints
Abdon and Sennen, whose devotion was widespread in Catalonia. The royal
Persian couple are depicted in the central panel, and the predella is dedicated to
Cosmas and Damian, to their martyrdom and to the Miracle of the Black Leg.
The amputation of the African corpse is generally visible in the background of the
composition while the miraculous transplantation of the black leg occupies the
centre of the visual form. Originally in the church at Bocos, near Villarcayo, in
the extreme northern part of the province of Burgos in Castile, the 1533 panel
by the prolific Burgundian painter and sculptor León Picardo,43 also part of an
altarpiece dedicated to SS. Cosmas and Damian, is now in the Diocesan Museum
of Burgos. The Cathedral of this important centre was home to the relics of
territories of Flanders and modern Germany, despite the popularity of devotion to the holy physicians,
which had originated with their relics in Bremen and Bamberg, and also in Essen, Hildesheim, and
Kaufbeuren. See the most comprehensive study on the iconography of SS. Cosmas and Damian:
David-Danel, Iconographie des Saints médecins Côme et Damien, pp. 43, 47, 66–9 and The Image of the
Black in Western Art, pp. 76, 276, n. 49. See also Julien, Ledermann and Touwaide, Cosma e Damiano,
pp. 9, 22, 23; Zimmermann, One Leg in the Grave Revisited, pp. 31–3. Depictions of the Miracle of the
Black Leg almost disappeared in Spain from the seventeenth century, probably as a response to the
constraints placed by the Council of Trent on dubious legends. See Jan de Jong, ‘Transplantation and
Salvation’, in One Leg in the Grave Revisited, p. 47.
40 Walker Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption, pp. 270, 280.

41 The earliest Tuscan example of the Miracle of the Black Leg (Raleigh, North Carolina Museum of
Art, 134 × 77.8 cm) seems to be the predella of the altarpiece (1370–5) in Santa Croce, Florence, dedi-
cated to SS. Cosmas and Damian by the Master of the Rinuccini Chapel (Matteo di Pacino [?], active
1350–1375). See The Image of the Black in Western Art, p. 75 and Zimmermann, One Leg in the Grave:
The Miracle of the Transplantation of the Black Leg by the Saints Cosmas and Damian, p. 69.
42 Jaume Huguet (Valls, Tarragona c.1412–Barcelona, 1492) worked for the nobility, confraternities
and with Miquel Nadal, another interpreter of the Miracle of the Black Leg in the Cathedral of Barcelona.
In 1460 and in 1461 Huguet received payment for the Terrasa altarpiece (162 × 120 cm) which had
originally been intended for a chapel in the church of St Peter: it is now in the church of Santa María,
the original Cathedral: see Chandler Rathfon Post, A History of Spanish Painting, 7 (Cambridge,
Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1938), pp. 52–53, 176. David-Danel, Iconographie des Saints
médecins Côme et Damien, pp. 37, 46, 186; Zimmermann, One Leg in the Grave: The Miracle of the
Transplantation of the Black Leg by the Saints Cosmas and Damian, p. 38.
43 Picardo’s panel is shown together with another five scenes of the same altarpiece: Beheading of
SS. Cosmas and Damian; Annunciation; Resurrection; St. Peter and A Virgin Martyr. León Picardo
(Saint-Omer, France—Burgos, 1547) was documented in Burgos after 1509. See Diego Angulo
Íñiguez, ‘León Picardo’, Archivo español de arte, 18 (1945), pp. 84–92. Chandler Rathfon Post, A
History of Spanish Painting, 9 (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1947), pp. 640–1;
David-Danel, Iconographie des Saints médecins Côme et Damien, p. 47; The Image of the Black in
Western Art, pp. 205, 292; Zimmermann, One Leg in the Grave: The Miracle of the Transplantation of
the Black Leg by the Saints Cosmas and Damian, p. 38.
132 Black but Human
SS. Cosmas and Damian, which were kept in a cupboard with paintings
commissioned in 1495, from Andrés de Sédano and the wealthy trader Andrés
Sánchez de Oña (active in Burgos, 1484–1510), another painter of the miraculous
transplantation.44 The latter’s oil painting on wood A Verger’s Dream: Saints Cosmas
and Damian performing a miraculous cure by transplantation of a leg (see Fig 5.4),
for the church of Cosmas and Damian in the royal seat of Burgos, is now at the
Wellcome Collection in London (UK). It is another step away from the Latin
legend since the African corpse as well as the cemetery are absent from the back-
ground of the composition.45 Only the black leg that will be grafted onto the
verger’s body appears. The same interpretation is offered by the converso painter
Pedro Berruguete,46 who is known for his painting St Dominic Presiding over an
Auto-da-fé (1493–4) for the first Grand Inquisitor, the Dominican Friar Tomás de
Torquemada, who was responsible for the expulsion of the Jews from the kingdoms
of Castile and Aragon.47 Berruguete’s only surviving panel for the altarpiece dedi-
cated to the holy physicians in about 149648 was for the Royal Collegiate church
of SS. Cosmas and Damian (Colegiata) in Covarrubias, south of Burgos, where
the earliest recorded relics of the saints in Spain were to be found (see Fig 5.5).
The difference with the work by Sánchez de Oña is that Berruguete introduces
the Tuscan tradition of the presence of witnesses, depicted in contemporary
fashion, in the scene of the surgical operation.49 Berruguete, who lived at the
44 See Yarza Luaces, ‘Algunas reflexiones sobre iconografía en Pedro Berruguete y su época’, p. 272.
45 Andrés Sánchez de Oña lived and had a prosperous workshop by the gateway to the market (the
current main square) in one of the busiest commercial sites in Burgos. See María Pilar Silva Maroto,
Pintura hispanoflamenca castellana: Burgos y Palencia: Obras en tabla y sarga, I (Valladolid: Junta de
Castilla y León, 1990), p. 134. It was previously attributed to Alonso de Sédano (1486–1533) and to
Fernando Gallego, but the most recent attribution to the ‘Master of Los Balbases’ is by José Ignacio
Hernández Redondo, in Vlaanderen en Castilla y León: Op de drempel van Europa (Antwerp:
Kathedraal Antwerpen, 1995), pp. 356, 357. The ‘Master of Los Balbases’ had been identified with
Andrés Sánchez de Oña by Silva Maroto, Pintura hispanoflamenca castellana: Burgos y Palencia: Obras
en tabla y sarga, pp. 133–5.
46 Pedro Berruguete (Paredes de Nava, Palencia c.1445–1504) arrived in Castile from Urbino, Italy
after 1482, and had important commissions in Burgos, Ávila from 1499, Toledo, and the province of
Palencia: see Ángel Sancho Campo, El Museo Diocesano de Palencia. Origen, formación y estado
actual, 2 (Asturias: Gráficas Summa, 1999), p. 76 and María Pilar Silva Maroto, Pedro de Berruguete:
el primer pintor renacentista de la Corona de Castilla (Valladolid: Junta de Castilla y León, 2003),
pp. 15–16, pp. 174–5.
47 Berruguete’s painting was originally for the royal Monastery of St Thomas of Ávila, the head-
quarters of the Inquisition, and now is in the Museo del Prado in Madrid.
48 Although the date c.1490 has been accepted for the completion of Berruguete’s altarpiece, docu-
mentary evidence shows that the main altarpiece of SS. Cosmas and Damian at the Collegiate was
completed in 1496. See Yarza Luaces, ‘Algunas reflexiones sobre iconografía en Pedro Berruguete y su
época’, p. 272. For the Miracle of the Black Leg by Pedro Berruguete, now displayed in the Museum at
the Collegiate, see Silva Maroto, Pedro de Berruguete: el primer pintor renacentista de la Corona de
Castilla, pp. 47, 143, 204.
49 See Fernando Checa Cremades, Pintura y escultura del renacimiento en España, 1450–1500
(Madrid: Ediciones Cátedra, 1988), pp. 62, 66, 76, 99, 102, 103, 105, 110, José María de Azcárate,
Alonso Berruguete (Salamanca: Publicaciones Colegio de España, 1988), pp. 23–4, and Yarza Laces,
‘Algunas reflexiones sobre iconografía en Pedro Berruguete y su época’ (2004), p. 272.
Commodification 133
Urbino Court in Italy, prior to this commission from the powerful Abbot Diego
Fernández de Castro, a relative of Pope Sixtus IV, would have been aware of the
Tuscan prototype in the inclusion of witnesses, where two elegant women and
two men are witnesses to the transplantation of the black leg. Instead, Sánchez de
Oña depicted the Hispano-Flemish motif of three angels as witnesses to stress the
Fig. 5.4. Andrés Sánchez de Oña, A Verger’s Dream: Saints Cosmas and Damian
performing a miraculous cure by transplantation of a leg, 1495. Oil painting attributed
to the Master of Los Balbases. Credit: Wellcome Collection. Public domain.
Fig. 5.5. Pedro Berruguete, The Miracle of the Black Leg, c.1496, Museum of the Royal
Collegiate Church of SS. Cosmas and Damian, Covarrubias (Burgos, Spain). Mary
Evans/CAGP/Iberfoto.
Commodification 135
supernatural and religious aspects of the miraculous operation.50 I believe that

the disavowal of the ‘Ethiopian’ body in these two versions at the royal seat of
Burgos is clearly symptomatic of the royal pragmatic by the Catholic Monarchs
ordering the expulsion of the Moors from the Crowns of Castile and León.51 The
corpse, however, is present in the earliest known visualizations of the Miracle of
the Black Leg in the Crown of Aragon in the fourteenth century, attributed to the
Master of Rubió and in another panel, now in a private collection, where contrary
to the former, the anonymous painter is fully clothed on the floor and with no pain.52
The foregrounding of the Ethiopian/Moor’s body is visible again, especially after
1492, as a corpse or has become a sleeping figure, a sedated patient, or a living
(albeit mutilated) man. His body changes position and place to the more
prominent space in the foreground of the visual form to become a repository of
new anxieties. This is not surprising, if we consider the impact of the last decade
of the fifteenth century in the building of the Spanish empire: the Reconquest of
Granada, the last Muslim stronghold in the Iberian Peninsula; the expulsion of all
the Jews from the Crowns of Castile and Aragon; and the discovery of the New
World. The representation of the Ethiopian corpse in the foreground of the com-
position (see Fig 5.6) by the Castilian Fernando del Rincón de Figueroa for the
Monastery of Saint Francis in Guadalajara,53 follows the Master of Rubió’s version
of the Miracle of SS. Cosmas and Damian. The former was one of the most gifted
Spanish portraitists, working for the Catholic Monarch Ferdinand, between 1513
and 1517, and for the court of Cardinal Mendoza, a member of the wealthiest
aristocratic family of Guadalajara. The image of the mutilated corpse, wrapped in
his shroud with the newly attached gangrenous white leg and with his face
towards the spectator-believer, is placed on the floor parallel to the seated verger.
Cosmas, on the right, is blessing the grafted leg while his brother Damian is hold-
ing a jar of ointment and a spatula. Their patient is sleeping with his head on his
left hand whilst his right hand holds a plant—perhaps, as David Danel suggested,
50 The Hispano-Flemish motif of angels was adopted in Castile. See Silva Maroto, Pedro de
Berruguete: el primer pintor renacentista de la Corona de Castilla, p. 174 and Price, ‘Miraculous
Restoration of Lost Body Parts’, in American Folk Medicine, pp. xxxiii–xxxiv.
51 Guadalupe Ramos de Castro, ‘Notas documentales y aspectos judíos e islámicos en Pedro
Berruguete y su hijo Alonso Berruguete’, in Actas del Symposium Internacional Pedro Berruguete y su
entorno. Palencia 24–6 abril de 2003. Centro Cultural Provincial (Palencia: Diputación Provincial de
Palencia, 2004), p. 85. The corpse of the Ethiopian man is also invisible in later versions of the trans
plantation of the black leg in Spain: in a painting on wood in Sitges, near Barcelona and in two relief
panels from polychrome wood altarpieces in the church dedicated to the holy doctors by José
Rodríguez, Mateo de Olmos, and Pedro de Cicarte in Hontoria del Pinar (province of Burgos); in the
panel, in the church of Saint Peter, by an anonymous artist, in Teruel (province of Aragon). See
Fracchia, ‘Spanish Depictions of the Miracle of the Black Leg’, in One Leg in the Grave Revisited, p. 80.
52 Fracchia, ‘Spanish Depictions of the Miracle of the Black Leg’, in One Leg in the Grave Revisited,
pp. 52 (Illustration 03), 89.
53 Fernando or Hernando del Rincón de Figueroa’s painting (188 × 155 cm) was acquired by the Prado
Museum in 1933. The painter was from Guadalajara near Madrid (active 1491–1518). See Museo del
Prado. Catálogo de las pinturas (Madrid: Museo del Prado, 1996), p. 320 and Zimmermann, One Leg in the
Grave: The Miracle of the Transplantation of the Black Leg by the Saints Cosmas and Damian, pp. 39, 88.
136 Black but Human
Fig. 5.6. Fernando del Rincón de Figueroa, The Miracle of the Black Leg, c.1492.
© Museo Nacional del Prado.
a mandragora or another natural narcotic.54 The unusual visual motif of a seated

man who is asleep, with a serpent coming from his mouth in the foreground, is
a reference to another miracle of healing by SS. Cosmas and Damian.55 In this
54 David-Danel, Iconographie des Saints médecins Côme et Damien, p. 205.

55 This visual motif, which represents one of the three main miracles performed by the saints after
their death, is rarely depicted in the life of SS. Cosmas and Damian in early modern Spain, It is erased
in a contemporary copy made after Rincón de Figueroa, which testifies to the popularity of his com-
position. See Fracchia, ‘Spanish Depictions of the Miracle of the Black Leg’, in One Leg in the Grave
Revisited, p. 83. Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend or Lives of Saints, p. 583.
Commodification 137
painting, Rincón introduces the significant visual motif of the pomegranate, on

the central shelf behind St Damian who is in charge of the transplantation of the
black leg, to the right of the composition. This exotic fruit, which has medical
properties, is the heraldic emblem of the city of Granada.56 Thus, the artist clearly
establishes a link between the legend of Cosmas and Damian and the definitive
Reconquest of the Muslim city in 1492. The pomegranate is also shown by the
painter and gilder Pedro de Raxis the Elder, who belonged to a family dynasty of
artists in Granada and ran a large and profitable workshop in the city.57 In his
interpretation of the Miracle of the Black Leg, for the Discalced Carmelite Monastery
of the Martyrs, the fruit is prominently displayed on the verger’s bed, in the fore-
ground of the large composition, dated 1592 (see Fig 5.7).58 Here, the Ethiopian
man lying in the foreground is shown with his head resting on a pillow in realistic
fashion as if he were asleep. This depiction allows the viewer to think that the
African man might be alive, but is now sedated after his amputation and leg
transplantation.59 His grafted white leg is miraculously healed and it suggests that
the transplantation of the white leg was also successful. This visual detail is sig-
nificant because it reveals the possibility of the restoration and resurrection of the
mutilated Ethiopian’s now intact body that will be denied in the versions of the in
vivo mutilated African man. Here the Tuscan tradition is followed in the deployment
of witnesses holding candles to illuminate the scene and to assist Cosmas and
Damian. The curtain on the left is opened to display their miracle to their spectators.
The impression is thus created that the surgical operation takes place in an early
modern anatomy theatre. Raxis might have had contact with the sick and the dying
when, in 1586, he produced major decorative work for the Hospital de Santiago
in Úbeda, commissioned by its founder Diego de los Cobos, Inquisitor and bishop
of Jaén. Raxis’s image of the leg transplantation in fact brings to mind hospital
theatres, surgical operations, or amputations of bodies of slaves.60
56 The pomegranate also has medical properties. See Rosalia Bonito Fanelli, ‘The Pomegranate
Motif in Italian Renaissance Silks: a Semiological Interpretation of Pattern and Color’, in La seta in
Europa: Sec. XIII–XIX, edited by Simonetta Cavaciocchi (Firenze: Le Monnier, 1993), pp. 507–30.
57 For the life and work of the ‘most complete and multifaceted’ artist Pedro Raxis (Alcalá de
Henares, 1555–Granada, 1626), see Lázaro Gila Medina, ‘Aproximación a la vida y obra del pintor y
estofador alcalaíno-granadino Pedro Raxis’, Archivo español de arte, 76 (2003), pp. 389–406.
58 Raxis’ painting (200 × 220 cm), which is signed and dated 1592, is a copy that he made after his
own earlier painting of the Miracle of the Black Leg that has been destroyed. See Emilio Orozco Díaz,
Guía del Museo Provincial de Bellas Artes Granada. Palacio de Carlos V (Madrid: Ministerio de
Educación y Ciencia, Dirección General de Bellas Artes, 1966), pp. 35–6. See Lázaro Gila Medina,
‘Los Raxis: importante familia de artistas del Renacimiento andaluz. A ella perteneció el gran escultor
Pablo de Rojas’, Archivo español de arte, 238 (1987), pp. 167–77 and Gila Medina, ‘Aproximación a la
vida y obra del pintor y estofador alcalaíno-granadino Pedro Raxis’, pp. 389–406.
59 The motif of the sedated Ethiopian man with his anointed and healed white leg is also visible in a
seventeenth-century panel of the Miracle of the Black Leg in the Santuario de Santa Eulalia de Mérida
in Totana (today in the province of Murcia), see Fracchia, ‘Spanish Depictions of the Miracle of the
Black Leg’, in One Leg in the Grave Revisited, pp. 83–4.
60 Walker Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption, p. 414. It also brings to mind our own modern
anxiety ‘that a donor lives on the transplanted organ’ as well as our preoccupation with matching the
skin colour of the recipient. The Guardian (25 August 2003) refers to the case of Ingrid Nicholls at the
138 Black but Human
Fig. 5.7. Pedro de Raxis the Elder, The Miracle of the Black Leg, 1592. © Museo de
Bellas Artes de Granada (Spain).
Hospitals were founded in the fifteenth century in the Crown of Aragon and by
the end of the following century in the Crown of Castile. They were created to
meet the needs of the empire: its increasing population, the ecology of different
illnesses, and changes in hospital and medical practices. The emergence of the early
modern hospital in the Counter-Reformation period as a charitable activity, pri-
marily to provide medical, social, and surgical assistance to the poor, was made
possible by the unification of medieval hospitals in urban centres despite the
resistance from medical confraternities.61 However, treatment for slaves was
Royal Berkshire Hospital who had to have a foot amputated and was told that she could only have a
white prosthetic limb. A spokesperson for the disability rights commission complained, ‘It is an abso-
lute disgrace that the NHS hasn’t made suitable provision for a black disabled person.’
61 López Terrada and Lanuza Navarro, Los estudios históricos sobre el Hospital General de Valencia,
p. 22.
Commodification 139
paid for by their masters in order to safeguard their economic investment. The

dissection of those ‘condemned to death’ had been practiced in universities in the
kingdom of Aragon since the fourteenth century. In the kingdom of Castile, no
royal warrants were granted to universities and medical confraternities for the
dissection of the bodies of the executed or those who had died in hospital until
the fourth decade of the sixteenth century: in 1539, a royal provision decreed that
the university be provided with bodies ‘from the executed and from those who
had died in hospitals’, who were ‘men, women and the poor’.62 It is significant that
the wealthier urban centres in the kingdoms of Aragon and Castile, where the
transplantation of the black leg were depicted, were important university centres
for the study of anatomy.
The healing of a man whose gangrenous leg is replaced by that of an Ethiopian
corpse is a ‘legend particularly popular in the Occident and does not belong to
the cycle of Eastern legends’.63 In fact, the Valladolid panel departs even further
from the oldest Greek narrative, of the ‘Miracle of the holy and glorious anargyroi
Cosmas and Damian’, written in the fifth century.64 The ethnicities of the muti-
lated man and the patient are not specified, and one is led to assume that both
belong to the same ethnic group:
Now, there was in the Sebastian country a man who had a splinter in his right
leg. And the physicians had used up all his possessions and had not benefitted
him at all, but rather his condition worsened. He, too, heard of the miracles of
the glorious anargyroi Cosmas and Damian. And after going to their house
(church), he said to the saints, ‘I beg that you, saints, in the name of our Lord
Jesus Christ take pity also on me, the sinner, that you may give me a cure of my
right leg.’ On going out, the saints covered their noses, for he was already stink-
ing because his bone was close to being corrupted. The saints said to him [the
patient], ‘We cannot, ourselves, treat you for this wound, but our Lord Jesus
Christ will give you the favor of a cure.’ But he said tearfully, ‘Take pity, saints,
also on me the sinner.’ Then the saints said to him, ‘Go to our house (church)
and rest and address your God in prayer with longing in your heart. We, too,
[will] ask a favor of God, and the Lord will show us [what] we should do for you.’
And, asking a favour of God, they went away. Now, at the sixth hour of the night,
the angel Raphael came and said to them, ‘Go to the church of holy martyr
62 See José María López Piñero, ‘La disección anatómica y la reforma vesaliana en la España del
siglo XVI’, in Medicina moderna y sociedad española. Siglos XVI–XX (Valencia: Cátedra e Instituto de
Historia de la Medicina, 1976), pp. 65, 68–9; and Granjel, La medicina española renacentista, pp. 49–54.
63 Gerhard Skrobucha, Kosmas and Damian, translated by Hermann Rosenwald, p. 16 and Nebojša
J. Jović and Marios Theologou, ‘The Miracle of the Black Leg: The Eastern Neglect of Western Addition
to the Hagiography of Saints Cosmas and Damian’, Acta Medico-Historica Adriatica, 13 (2) (2015),
pp. 329–44.
64 For the Greek legend of the miraculous transplantation and the translation into English, see
Price, ‘Miraculous Restoration of Lost Body Parts’, in American Folk Medicine, pp. 399–403.
140 Black but Human
cenobiarch.65 There is a dead man there. And go to his tomb, for he has been
dead for four days. Take his right leg and put it on the man who has the splinter
as your medical treatment for him. And on the day of the resurrection, let each
one take his own limb, because they came to you with great faith in God. For the
Lord indeed, wishes also to glorify his anargyric saints.’ During this time, the
man having a splinter saw that certain ones were cutting off his right leg, and
that they were cutting off a walking right [i.e., a leg good for walking] of a man
nearby; and he did see this in a dream. Damian said to Cosmas, ‘Brother
Cosmas, I fear that the Devil is deceiving us so that we may cause this man to
die.’ Cosmas said to him, ‘No. Hold your tongue, because it was an angel of the
Lord.’ And after these things, the angel of the Lord came back and said, ‘Do as
I told you.’ They went and cut off the right leg of the dead man. They also cut off
at the knee the right leg of the man who had the splinter and they placed the leg
of the dead man against [the stump] of the [sick] man in the name of the Father,
the Son, and the Holy Spirit. No sooner had they invoked the Holy Trinity than
the man was found to be sound. And perceiving [this], the saints praised God.
And having gone, they put [the leg] of the man who had the splinter onto [the
stump] of the dead man in the name of the Holy Trinity. And so was this leg
found to adhere just as his own leg had formerly. The saints said, ‘Glory to your
kingdom, O Lord. Glory to your goodness, Lord.’ They said to the man, ‘Did you
see, brother? Who favoured you with his surgical skill?’ To the saints he
responded, ‘I saw in a dream that men came and cut off my leg, and I was joined
to the leg of another man. And now I see also that my leg is sound. And the only
thing that terrifies me is the contour of the leg.’ And they believed to be true
what he had told them, and all praised God who gives such a cure to those who
have hope in God. To him, glory for ever and ever. Amen.66
The Greek legend is the literary source for the Miracle of SS. Cosmas and
Damian in the altarpiece of the chapel of Cosmas and Damian in the Cathedral of
Barcelona (see Fig 5.8), completed by Miquel Nadal in 1454.67 In the altarpiece,
the central panel has the standing figures of SS. Cosmas and Damian surrounded
by three scenes depicting episodes from their lives and one representation of the
posthumous miracle of the healing of Palladia’s illness. The altarpiece is supported
by the predella with the Miracle of the Black Leg on the right and the martyrdom
65 The Greek legend refers to the Church of St Theodosios The Cenobiarch (423–590) from
Cappadocia (modern Turkey).
66 Price, ‘Miraculous Restoration of Lost Body Parts’, in American Folk Medicine, pp. 402–3.
67 Payments for the SS. Cosmas and Damian altarpiece, which was moved to the Museum of the
Cathedral of Barcelona in the nineteenth-century and later to different chapels, were received by Nadal
on 6 October 1453 and 11 July 1454. The executors of the cleric Francisco Desplá, who founded the
chapel of SS. Cosmas and Damian, commissioned the altarpiece from Bernardo Martorell the Younger
and from Miquel Nadal. See Chandler Rathfon Post, A History of Spanish Painting, 6 (Cambridge,
Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1938), pp. 172–82. See Ramón Jordi González, Iconografía de
los santos Cosme y Damián (Barcelona: Colegio Oficial de Farmacéuticos, 1973), pp. 10–11 and Fracchia,
‘Spanish Depictions of the Miracle of the Black Leg’, in One Leg in the Grave Revisited, pp. 87–9.
Commodification 141
Fig. 5.8. Miquel Nadal, The Miracle of the Black Leg, 1454, Cathedral of the Holy
Cross and Saint Eulalia, Barcelona. © 2019 Institut Amatller d’Art Hispànic—im.
05496024 (Photo Gudiol A-2975/ante 1939).
of their saints and their brothers on the left. In the centre, below the depiction of
the saints, is the representation of the Ecce Homo. The doors of the altarpiece
show St Acisclo, the Cordovan martyr whose cult was very popular in the Crown
of Aragon, and St Sebastian. Here, the presence of a seated man asleep by the
verger’s bed in the foreground of the composition shows the artist’s knowledge
142 Black but Human
of the fourteenth-century Italian device that signifies that the miracle of the
t ransplantation of the healthy leg took place at night.68 The painter also adds
the Flemish visual motif of two angels as assistants to the holy doctors, as his
colleague Huguet did in his version following Voragine’s legend.
In both compositions, there is the uncommon depiction of the man’s gangrenous
leg with its bleeding wounds dripping onto the floor as if the amputated leg still
belongs to the verger’s body. This visual motif indicates that both artists were
familiar with the earliest Catalan legend of the Miracle and exemplum of St. Cosmas
and St. Damian of a young man who lost a leg through a malady of cancer, as
recounted in the Lombardy Legend [The Golden Legend]:
Cosmas and Damian. A man who had great devotion to St. Cosmas and
St. Damian, was said to have a malady of cancer in his leg, and he feared he
would lose it to that disease. Since the man was in danger, one night those saints
appeared to him and saved his leg. One [saint] said to the other, ‘Where could
we get some flesh to fill the hole [forat] in this leg which has been eaten away by
cancer?’ The other saint answered, ‘Today they buried a Moor [moro]; let us take
the flesh from the Moor [moro] and fill the hole in the leg.’ And then having
brought there the thigh of the Moor [moro], they cut from it a piece of flesh and
put it in the spreading sore on the man’s leg; and then the man woke up fully
cured. And realizing he was cured, he gave thanks to God, and there came to
him the memory of his vision, that he had seen those saints and then he told his
friends about it and they went where the Moor [moro] had been buried and they
found the Moor [moro] in his and the spreading sore was as fresh in the Moor’s
leg as if he were alive and had had the sore for a long time.69
SS. Cosmas and Damian filled the hole in the sick man’s leg with a bit of flesh
from the cut-off thigh of a dead ‘Moor’ buried in the cemetery and transferred
their patient’s ulcer to the Moor’s leg. It means that ‘the man’s leg was not ampu-
tated and replaced by the Moor’s leg’.70
Medical historians claim that this healing method ‘represents a type of
transplantation that was performed much more often than limb-transplantation
conceivably could have been’. They refer ‘to the ancient and widespread folk medical
practices of transferring a disease from a person usually to an inanimate object
such as tree-plug or sometimes to a subhuman species such as a puppy or a freshly
killed chicken’.71 The emphasis on the different ethnicity of the mutilated corpse
in the Latin legends and the wounded corpse in the later Catalan legend is a
departure from the oldest Greek legend. It certainly connotes the impact of the
68 See Zimmermann, One Leg in the Grave: The Miracle of the Transplantation of the Black Leg by
the Saints Cosmas and Damian, plates 6, 8.
69 Price, ‘Miraculous Restoration of Lost Body Parts’, in American Folk Medicine, pp. 409–12.
70 Price, ‘Miraculous Restoration of Lost Body Parts’, in American Folk Medicine, p. 409.
71 Price, ‘Miraculous Restoration of Lost Body Parts’, in American Folk Medicine, p. 409
Commodification 143
presence of African people in Medieval and Early Modern Europe.72 In the Greek
and Latin versions, there is also an explanation of why Cosmas and Damian
attached the discarded leg from their patient to the mutilated cadaver so that the
Moor’s body will be intact on the day of the resurrection. In the Catalan legend,
the ‘heterogeneous limb transplantation does not take place’ because there was
not mutilation of the leg.
In the next section, we will explore the ways in which the ‘Ethiopian’s’ corpse
becomes the enslaved Afro-Hispanic man who suffers in vivo amputation. The
shift from the ‘Ethiopian’ corpse of the Latin legend collected by Voragine is an
extraordinary and unique interpretation of the Miracle of the Black Leg in Western
Europe. Moreover, this depiction that stands out for its gratuitous cruelty, and for
which I am not aware of any literary source, is not an isolated case in the Crown
of Castile.
The Castilian Miracle of the Black Leg
The panel with the representation of the Miracle of the Black Leg by Villoldo was
originally in the Monastery of St Francis in Valladolid where Christopher
Columbus was buried and the Franciscan friar Juan de Zumárraga was conse-
crated in 1553, after being nominated first bishop, then archbishop, and Inquisitor
of New Spain in 1528 by Charles V.73 Villoldo’s bas-relief was part of the altar-
piece dedicated to the patron saints of medicine and surgery in the chapel of
SS. Cosmas and Damian, funded by the physician Francisco Arias who was bur-
ied there in 1547, next to his wife Elena Núñez and other family members, such as
the physician Bernardino Arias.74 In 1660, Matías de Sobremonte recorded this
altarpiece with sculptures of SS. Cosmas and Damian in the centre: ‘very fine, if
old, whose main recess was occupied by the medium sized effigies of the brother
saints, the distinguished martyrs’.75 The Franciscan historian also described
72 Ethiopia had been Christianized in the fourth century. The terms Ethiopian and Indian were
interchangeable when used to refer to black people. See Jean Michel Massing, ‘From Greek Proverb to
Soap Advert: Washing the Ethiopian’, Journal of the Warburg and the Courtauld Institutes, 58 (1995),
p. 182.
73 For the Monastery of San Francis in Valladolid, see Matías Sangrador Vítores, Historia de la muy
noble y leal ciudad de Valladolid (Valladolid: Imprenta D. M. Aparicio, 1854); María Antonia
Fernández Del Hoyo, ‘El convento de san Francisco de Valladolid. Nuevos datos para su historia’,
Boletín del Seminario de Estudios de Arte y Arqueología, 51 (1985), pp. 411–38 and Francisco Javier
Rojo Alique, ‘El proceso de fundación del convento de San Francisco de Valladolid’, Hispania Sacra,
54 (2002), pp. 555–603.
74 Matías de Sobremonte (OFM), Noticias chronográphicas y topográphicas del Real y Religiossísimo
Convento de los Frailes Menores Observantes de San Francisco de Valladolid (1660), Manuscrito del
siglo XVII, Biblioteca Nacional de España, Ms 19351, 11.17. parte 2ª, 11.15–11.17 (fols. 321r–321v).
75 Sobremonte (OFM), Noticias chronográphicas y topográphicas del Real y Religiossísimo Convento
de los Frailes Menores Observantes de San Francisco de Valladolid, 11.15. parte 2ª, 11.15–11.17 (fols.
321r–321v): un retablo ‘mui bueno aunque antiguo’, cuyo nicho principal lo ocupaban las tallas de los
santos que daban nombre a la capilla.
144 Black but Human
Villoldo’s retable as ‘of both age and elegance’.76 Villoldo’s interpretation of this
legend is to be found in a small group of contemporary Castilian depictions of
the miraculous transplantation of the black leg for the Cathedrals of Ávila and
Palencia. The sculptor, who was the key artistic figure in sixteenth-century Ávila,
was primarily responsible, in 1538, for the model and drawings of thirty-nine
lower choir stalls of the city’s cathedral, along with stories of the lives of saints
and Christ. In 1534, the commissioners demanded the faithful imitation of the
choir stalls by the sculptor Alonso Berruguete (pintor del rey) for the church of
St Benito in Valladolid, with which Villoldo and Holanda were involved.77 This
massive Ávila project was commissioned from Nicolás Cornielis de Holanda in
1536 and he took Villoldo to Ávila (1538–53) while Holanda remained to work
in Valladolid. Both worked for Berruguete, who was painter and sculptor to
Charles V.78 The Miracle of the Black Leg (see Fig 5.9) was carved behind one of
Fig. 5.9. Isidro de Villoldo, Lucas Giraldo, Juan Rodríguez and Cornielis de Holanda.
The Miracle of the Black Leg, 1538–43, Cathedral. Ávila. © 2019 Institut Amatller d’Art
Hispànic—im. 05496027 (Photo Gudiol G-32999/1954).
76 Matías de Sobremonte (OFM), Noticias chronográphicas y topográphicas del Real y Religiossísimo
Convento de los Frailes Menores Observantes de San Francisco de Valladolid, 11.15. parte 2ª, 11.15–11.17
(fols. 321r–321v): tanta antiguedad como primor.
77 Jesús María Parrado del Olmo, Los escultores seguidores de Berruguete en Ávila, pp. 211, 230–1.
78 Parrado del Olmo, Los escultores seguidores de Berruguete en Ávila, pp. 35–8.
Commodification 145
the choir stalls in walnut wood. The forty-three high choir stalls with their
full-length figures of saints and the freestanding sculptures at the Crown were
executed between 1538 and 1543 by Lucas Giraldo and Juan Rodríguez, who had
completed the retrochoir (trascoro) of the Cathedral (1531–6). The project was
finished a decade later when they were assembled by Cornielis de Holanda.79 This
group of sculptors, including others, such as Felipe Vigarny, also worked together in
the framing of the monumental main altarpiece (1499–1503) for Ávila Cathedral
commissioned by Cardinal Cisneros from Pedro Berruguete (Alonso’s father)
who was also the author of a Miracle of the Black Leg, as we saw previously.80
Villoldo conceived the composition of the in vivo mutilated Afro-Hispanic
man in agony with his body positioned in parallel to the healed European recipient
for the Ávila and Valladolid panels. In the former choir relief, the unique visual
motif of a chained Afro-Hispanic man is visible and the chopping block is more
prominent than in the Valladolid panel. The Ávila representation can be interpreted
as the Spanish iconography of Afro-Hispanic enslaved people in the Crown of
Castile, since this unusual visual motif with its deviation from Voragine’s narrative
reveals the inextricable belief in the equivalence of being black and being a slave.
Both versions by Villoldo are linked to the earliest image of the in vivo mutilated
African man in the Cathedral of Palencia (see Fig 5.10) by the prestigious sculp-
tor and architect Felipe Vigarny (Langres c.1470–Toledo 1542).81 His bas-relief
with the Miracle of the Black Leg is placed in the predella of the small altarpiece of
SS. Cosmas and Damian in polychrome wood, where the freestanding sculptures
of S. Cosmas and S. Damian are placed at the centre. In his wide relief, the com-
position is tilted towards the viewer and the sculptor follows the Tuscan tradition
in the introduction of three witnesses to the miraculous grafting operation;
St John the Baptist, on the left, is standing behind Juan de Arce, who kneels by the
head of the bed of the sick man who is, unusually, awake. He is being comforted
by a woman next to St Cosmas, who is blessing the verger and lifting the sheet to
79 For the participation of Lucas Giraldo and Juan Rodríguez, p. 230 and for Villoldo’s participation
in the planning of the sculptural work in the choir stalls in the Cathedral of Ávila, see Parrado del
Olmo, Los escultores seguidores de Berruguete en Ávila, pp. 35–8, 313–27. González, Iconografía de los
santos Cosme y Damián (1973), pp. 6, 24.
80 For Vigarny’s participation, see Parrado del Olmo, Los escultores seguidores de Berruguete en
Ávila, p. 230.
81 Ángel Sancho Campo, La Catedral de Palencia. Un lecho de catedrales (León: Edilesa, 1996),
pp. 65–7. Felipe Vigarny arrived in Burgos in 1498, where he worked for the Cathedral (c.1520–8)
with León Picardo, another painter of the leg transplantation, and Diego de Siloé, the most important
artists of the Castilian modernity. In the years 1532 and 1533, Vigarny spent long spells in Valladolid,
see Isabel del Río de la Hoz, El escultor Felipe Bygarny (h. 1470–1542) (Valladolid: Junta de Castilla y
León, 2000), p. 253. Vigarny also executed the main altarpieces for the Cathedrals of Palencia and
Toledo, as well as the altarpieces for the chapel of Salamanca University and the Royal Chapel in
Granada. He carried out other commissions in Logroño, Segovia and Valladolid, where he sculpted
the tomb of the powerful Friar Alonso de Burgos for the chapel of the Colegio de San Gregorio: see
María del Rosario Fernández Gómez, ‘Felipe Bigarny’, in Escultura del siglo XVI en Castilla y León
(Valladolid: Sever-Cuesta, 1987).
146 Black but Human
Fig. 5.10. Felipe Vigarny, The Miracle of the Black Leg, 1533, Cathedral. Palencia.
©Photo: Carmen Fracchia.
show the grafted leg to the spectator. His brother is also blessing the healed man
and holding the new grafted leg. To his right, at the foot of the bed, is a man holding
the patient’s ulcerous leg (perhaps Vigarny’s self-portrait).82 He is placed behind
the in vivo mutilated black man, who is fainting in agony at his feet, with his body
falling towards the edge of the composition.83 All the figures are looking at the
grafting operation at the centre of the image, except the suffering Ethiopian. His
marginal but strong presence and the arching movement of this body are visibly
dissonant. The compositional effect, the realism and cruelty of this scene and
the portrayal of the living Afro-Hispanic man, attracts the viewer’s attention.
Paradoxically the Ethiopian, who is perceived as a contemporary Afro-Hispanic
slave, becomes immortalized in the visual form.84 Vigarny’s retable is in the
chapel of St Gregory, where a coat of arms indicates that it belonged to the powerful
family of the converso Dominican Friar Alonso de Burgos, bishop of Palencia
(1485–99).85 His nephews, Juan de Arce, Abbot of Lebanza, and Juan de Arce the
82 Ramón Revilla Vielva, Manifestaciones artísticas en la Catedral de Palencia (Palencia: Imprenta
Provincial, 1945), p. 47.
83 See The Image of the Black in Western Art, pp. 206, 292: the authors claim that ‘it is hard to tell
whether’ the Ethiopian ‘is alive or dead’ (206), but I went to see this work (80 × 180 cm) and I have no
doubt that the mutilated Ethiopian man is alive and in agony.
84 This Castilian iconography is reproduced much later in the Miracle of the Black Leg by an
unknown painter for an altarpiece dedicated to Cosmas and Damian. Tiberio Damián, an Italian surgeon
from the Hospital of San Hermenegildo in Seville, donated this work in 1657 to the Jesuit Church of
the Annunciation, in the same city, and known today as the University Chapel. See Fracchia, ‘Spanish
Depictions of the Miracle of the Black Leg’, in One Leg in the Grave Revisited, pp. 79–91.
85 Henry Kamen, The Spanish Inquisition: An Historical Revision (London: Weidenfeld and
Nicholson, 1997), p. 30.
Commodification 147
Younger, imperial theologian for the Council of Trent, financed the work for
the richly decorated chapel in Palencia Cathedral.86 Alonso de Burgos was the
Chancellor and late confessor to the Catholic Queen Isabella, who nominated him
as President of the Royal Council (Consejo Real) that sponsored Columbus’s voyages
of discovery to the Indies. Burgos was a great patron of the arts and founded the
prestigious Dominican College of San Gregorio in Valladolid (1484–96),87 where
he employed Vigarny for the construction of his funerary chapel. It was here that
the famous dispute between Bartolomé de Las Casas and Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda
took place in 1550, as decreed by Charles V.88 Sepúlveda justified his claim by
asserting that there was a fundamental difference between Native Americans and
Spaniards, based on early modern notions of savagery, barbarism, and civilization.89
Las Casas radically opposed Sepúlveda’s theory that the indigenous peoples of the
Americas were natural slaves, although the former supported, from the year 1516
to 1543, the theory that some men, in this case, Africans, were natural slaves:
‘[Las Casas] suggested that either Europeans or Africans slaves be imported as
labourers to relieve the burdens shouldered by the natives.’90 Two years later, in
1545, he reversed his opinion in his major work The History of the Indies, only
published in the nineteenth century.91 Las Casas took up residence in the College,
where he wrote down his doctrines in the Historia general and the Apologética.92
The affluent ‘modern’ makers of the unconventional Miracle of the Black Leg
worked for the politically powerful and slave-owning ecclesiastical elite. Vigarny
and Picardo, who included the visual motif of the pomegranate in their versions
of the miraculous transplantation of the black leg, worked for Cisneros, known as
the ‘missionary to the Moors’.93 He was directly involved in promoting the institution
of slavery and the commodification of Africans as enslaved people in Hapsburg
Spain.94 When he became Regent (1516–18), Cisneros personally authorized
86 See Revilla Vielva, Manifestaciones artísticas en la Catedral de Palencia, p. 47, who claims that
Juan de Arce decided to have an altarpiece dedicated to the physician saints on 17 February 1533 in
the chapel of St Gregory. See also Silva Maroto, Pedro de Berruguete: el primer pintor renacentista de la
Corona de Castilla, pp. 140–1.
87 Hugh Thomas, Rivers of Gold: The Rise of the Spanish Empire (London: Weidenfeld and
Nicholson, 2003), p. 12.
88 Lewis Hanke, Aristotle and the American Indians: A Study in Race Prejudice in the Modern World
(London: Hollis & Carter, 1959), p. 37.
89 Roger Bartra, El Salvaje artificial (Mexico City: Universidad Autónoma de México, 1977),
pp. 73–4.
90 Hanke, Aristotle and the American Indians: A Study in Race Prejudice in the Modern World, p. 57;
William D. Phillips, Jr, Slavery in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania University Press, 2014), p. 152, and Jesús María García Añoveros, El pensamiento y los
argumentos sobre la esclavitud en Europa en el siglo XVI y su aplicación a los indios americanos y a los
negros africanos (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 2000), pp. 94–195.
91 Phillips, Jr, Slavery in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia (2014), p. 156.
92 Daniel Castro, Another Face of Empire: Bartolomé de las Casas: Indigenous Rights, and Ecclesiastical
Imperialism (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2007), p. 134..
93 See Angulo Íñiguez, ‘León Picardo’, pp. 84–92.
94 Isacio Pérez Fernández, Bartolomé de Las Casas ¿Contra los Negros? Revisión de una leyenda
(Madrid: Editorial Mundo Negro, 1991), pp. 71–86.
148 Black but Human
slave trade licences to allow Africans to be transported as slaves to the newly

iscovered lands of the New World.95 Villoldo, amongst this group of artists,
d
might also have met Bishop Zumárraga, friend of Las Casas,96 when he came to
be consecrated at the Monastery of St Francis, where the sculptor’s bas-relief was
kept in the chapel of SS. Cosmas and Damian.97 In New Spain, Zumárraga was in
charge of the building of the metropolitan Cathedral in Mexico City where, in the
oldest chapel of SS. Cosmas and Damian, the Mexican painter Sebastián López
Dávalos completed his Miracle of the Black Leg for the altarpiece dedicated to the
holy physicians.98 In this version, the transplantation of the black leg takes place
in the open air, in the portico of a colonial hospital, perhaps the Hospital del Buen
Amor de Dios, dedicated to SS. Cosmas and Damian, in 1547, where a mutilated
Afro-Mexican man, with the gangrenous white leg attached to his body, is resting
on a pillow above a woven mat. Cosmas and Damian are represented as contem-
porary Mexican physicians, with their long black academic gowns and short
golden capes, as graduates from the Royal and Pontifical University of Mexico
that was also founded by Zumárraga in 1551. It is, therefore, evident that there is
a direct link between the unique Castilian iconography of the Miracle of the Black
Leg and the emergence of early modern transatlantic slavery in Hapsburg Spain.
My claim is that the change of motifs from the removal of the leg from an
African corpse articulated in the Catalan and Tuscan prototypes based on the
Latin legend to the in vivo amputation and grafting of the leg of an Afro-Hispanic
subject in the Castilian visual form can only be grasped if we consider the latter as
symptomatic of the paradoxical notions of Afro-Hispanics, both enslaved and
freed. One key element in all Spanish depictions of the miraculous transplantation
of the black leg is the indifference shown by the saints and the European verger
towards the mutilated Ethiopian/Moor corpse/Afro-Hispanic man.
The motif of the in vivo mutilated African man refers to the methods of control
of the social behaviour of the slave population deployed by ‘local police forces’,
known in Spain as the Holy Brotherhood (Santa Hermandad). One example comes
from the Brotherhood in Seville, on 3 July 1515, when Diego, an Afro-Hispanic
slave whose owner was Tomás de Herrera, had his foot amputated, which led to
95 See the direct involvement of the Catholic Monarchs (1492–1515) and the Regent Cardinal
Cisneros in the slave trade and authorization of slave licences to the New World, in Franco Silva, La
esclavitud en Sevilla y su tierra a fines de la Edad Media, pp. 73–103, 193, and in Pérez Fernández,
Bartolomé de Las Casas ¿Contra los Negros? Revisión de una leyenda, pp. 71–86.
96 Castro, Another Face of Empire: Bartolomé de las Casas: Indigenous Rights, and Ecclesiastical
Imperialism, p. 102.
97 Castro, Another Face of Empire: Bartolomé de las Casas: Indigenous Rights, and Ecclesiastical
Imperialism, p. 102.
98 For the history of the chapel of SS. Cosmas and Damian and description of the altarpiece by
Sebastián López Dávalos (Puebla, c.1615–Mexico City, before 1694), see Rogelio Ruiz Gomar,
‘Sebastián López Dávalos, Un pintor novohispano del siglo XVII’, Anales del Instituto de Investigaciones
Estéticas, 16 (64) (1993), pp. 15–37.
Commodification 149
his death;99 another was in the province of Málaga, on 20 (?) November 1505,
where the slave owner Montañés went to Antequera to fetch her fugitive female
slave who had already a mutilated ear as a result of a previous attempt to escape.100
In the entry ‘Slave’ (Esclavo), Covarrubias differentiates the branding of slaves
from the mutilation they suffered as punishments for trying to escape, where, for
example, the joints of the big toes would be severed so that the slaves could not
walk far away:
And as well as this branding, they would cut the joint of the big toes; because
with this [the slaves] could not walk far, although they remained able to perform
their everyday duties [. . .] Thus far a very important person has described
[things]: but in the verses that follow points out who he is; firstly by signs and in
the end more clearly. He says that the point of the shoe will not hurt his big toe
because it won’t get to it, giving to understand that the big toe was missing.101
Other types of punishment included ‘the dropping of pork fat’ (pringamiento), or

‘the wax of the taper itself ’ on the naked skin, or the more drastic measures of
being donated to the Crown to be used as galley slaves or being sold to be sent
to the colonies.102 The House of Trade also had judicial functions for prisoners
from the royal prison and acted as a civil tribunal.103 Therefore masters could
imprison their slaves, tie them up, or put them in chains, as was the case of a slave
woman and former fugitive in 1445 in Valencia, whose owner, a baker, was given
permission by the Justicia Criminal to put her in chains,104 or put a metal collar,
usually made in iron but sometimes made in silver with an inscription indicating
the name of their slave owner, on the slave’s neck,105 or placing yokes on their feet
or neck.106 Other traditional methods of punishment were flogging, as when the
mixed-race slave Catalina Rodríguez, whose owner ‘Catalina Rodríguez widow of
Francisco Morillo and neighbour of Llerena gave her many blows to the head, face
and body using a pestle’,107 or beating, as when in three cases in fifteenth-century
Valencia: in 1445, the slave owner and notary Johan Saranya, declared that he
wanted to see his fugitive slave Johan ‘tied up to a stake in front of the courthouse
99 Franco Silva, La esclavitud en Sevilla y su tierra a fines de la Edad Media, pp. 209, 217–18.
100 Raúl González Arévalo, La esclavitud en Málaga a fines de la Edad Media, pp. 439–41.
101 Covarrubias Orozco, Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española, p. 536.
102 Ruth Pike, Aristocrats and Traders: Sevillian Society in the Sixteenth Century (London and
Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1972), p. 180.
103 http://personal.us.es/alporu/histsevilla/audiencia.htm, accessed 9 December 2015.
104 Debra Blumenthal, Enemies & Familiars: Slavery and Mastery in Fifteenth-Century Valencia
(Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2009), p. 225.
105 Esteban Mira Caballos, Indios y mestizos americanos en la España del siglo XVI (Madrid:
Vervuert-Iberoamericana, 2000), pp. 83–4.
106 Pike, Aristocrats and Traders, p. 180 and Antonio Domínguez Ortiz in ‘La esclavitud en Castilla
durante la Edad Moderna’, in Estudios de historia social de España, edited by Carmelo Viñas y Mey, 2
(Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1952), pp. 388–9.
107 Rocío Periáñez Gómez Cáceres, La esclavitud en Extremadura (Siglos XVI–XVIII) (PhD disser-
tation, Universidad de Extremadura Servicio de Publicaciones, 2008), p. 396.
150 Black but Human
and whipped at least fifty times’, with a hempen rope;108 in 1457, when the pregnant
slave Anna was beaten naked by her master who impregnated her, so ferociously
that she ‘remained bedridden for days’;109 or as when a black female slave, Ursola,
‘suffered a major head injury’ due to the brutal beating by her master Francesch
Martínez, a stonemason.110
Harsh punishments and death of enslaved Afro-Hispanic men, women and
children may well have been quite common, given the constant concerns expressed
by Spanish theologians and intellectuals who gave instructions to slave owners
on how to treat their slaves and ex-slaves until their death, so as to maximize
their investment and profits.111 Vicente Mexía, from the Dominican Colegio
del Monasterio de San Pablo in Córdoba, dedicated his 1566 manual Healthy
Instruction on the State of Matrimony (Saludable instrucción del matrimonio) to
Philip II, although his treatise was aimed at people with little education.112 This
meant that his target audience would have included ‘servants and slaves’,113 as
Afro-Hispanic slaves and ex-slaves had learned to read and write in artistic work-
shops and very possibly in black religious confraternities. Elizabeth Wright also
claims that Moriscos, freedmen and even ‘slaves and servants’ did find ‘at least
a limited access to advanced instruction’ in institutions such as the cathedral
school in Granada, where the first Afro-Hispanic writer, Juan de ‘Sesa’ Latino
(c.1516–18–c.1567), was Professor of Latin grammar.114 It was viewed as a crucial
step to educate ‘New Christians’ and to make sure they received a Christian edu-
cation that enabled their acculturation into Hispanic culture and society.115
Mexía’s manual is a moralizing treatise about modes of conduct advising on
the manners, behaviour, and treatment of all the members of a family. In this
hierarchical microcosm, slaves occupy the lowest rank as people who are considered
of ‘less quality’ or of ‘a servile condition that is the lowest of all’.116 Slaves were
‘lower’ than two other groups of people who were free but classified as dependent:
children of the household and servants. Each group of the family hierarchy, ‘prin-
cipal’ (husband, wife and their children) and ‘dependant’, requires a different
treatment. In the three chapters dedicated to domestic slaves, the Dominican friar
defines the paradoxical nature of slaves: human but at the same time the property
of slave owners and therefore available to be bought and sold.117 He consequently
draws up general rules on how to manage slaves in the domestic space, providing
108 Debra Blumenthal, Enemies & Familiars: Slavery and Mastery in Fifteenth-Century Valencia, p. 225.
109 Blumenthal, Enemies & Familiars: Slavery and Mastery in Fifteenth-Century Valencia, p. 216.
110 Blumenthal, Enemies & Familiars: Slavery and Mastery in Fifteenth-Century Valencia, pp. 201–3.
111 Franco Silva, La esclavitud en Sevilla y su tierra a fines de la Edad Media, pp. 209, 217–18.
112 Vicente Mexía, Saludable instrucción del estado del matrimonio [Healthy Instruction on the State
of Matrimony] (Córdoba: Juan Bautista Escudero, 1566), fol. 238v.
113 Mexía, Saludable instrucción del estado del matrimonio, fols. 237v–242r.
114 Wright, The Epic of Juan Latino: Dilemmas of Race and Religion in Renaissance Spain, pp. 49–55.
115 Wright, The Epic of Juan Latino: Dilemmas of Race and Religion in Renaissance Spain, pp. 49–52.
116 Mexía, Saludable instrucción del estado del matrimonio, fol. 237v.
117 Mexía, Saludable instrucción del estado del matrimonio, fols. 236v.
Commodification 151
the codes of behaviour that slave owners should follow. The basic principle was
that slaves must be kept busy at all time to prevent them trying to escape and to
avoid the occasion for sin.118 The Dominican fails to question the legalization of
the institution of slavery and the consequent creation of slave licences and shows
that he is in line with most Hispanic theologians. Mexía puts forward the more
humane treatment of captives that was already enshrined in the Siete Partidas,119
therefore condones the possession and sale of slaves but not with extreme punish-
ment and killing.120 Mexía recommends the systematic physical punishment of
slaves, especially those who tried but failed to escape, and strongly advises that
these should not be killed so as to preserve their owners’ investment: ‘whoever
orders punishment should ensure that punishment is punishment, and not tor-
ture to the point of killing the slave or making him despair.’121
The promotion of a more human treatment of Afro-Hispanic slaves is justified
because of the paradoxical position of enslaved people. Even if they are New
Christians, their legal status means that they have no legal rights or freedoms and,
therefore, they are personal possessions of their owners, but they are also ‘New
Christians’.122 The enslaved population becomes the recipient of the Reformed
Catholic Faith in two ways: they are the source of charitable deeds in receiving
baptism and therefore the potential of acculturation into Iberian and colonial
societies. The Dominican, therefore, asks the slave-owning elite to enact the
Christian virtues of justice and charity because of the transformative powers of
baptism. The aim was to preserve their owners’ investment and the profitability
of the slave market.123 Mexía also encourages the owners to take care of their
slave’s health:
Whenever the slaves are ill, treat them with care, looking after their health:
because they are in your charge to serve you when they are well. And look well
at those who do the opposite, because it is charity to treat the poor well, as well
as those who are ill in hospital: it would be against charity to have them in your
charge and in your house and not provide them with what would be necessary
to treat and cure them, for them not to die.124
The theologian also specifies three main obligations that slave owners should
have towards their Christian slaves: they should prohibit Afro-Hispanic couples
from living together; they should allow them time to fulfil their Christian duties
118 Mexía, Saludable instrucción del estado del matrimonio, fols. 241t and 241v.
119 Fourth Partida, Title XXI, Law VI, in Manuel Lucena Salmoral, Regulación de la esclavitud negra
en las colonias de América Española (1503–1886): Documentos para su estudio (Alcalá de Henares:
Universidad de Alcalá/Universidad de Murcia, 2005), p. 18.
120 Mexía, Saludable instrucción del estado del matrimonio, fol. 240r.
152 Black but Human
since they are taught like children;125 and they should avoid calling them names,
such as ‘dogs, moors, Jews’.126 These names refer to their previous condition when
they were pagans and are now the worst offence against the principles of purity of
faith and blood, as we saw in the previous chapter. These insults also mock the
honesty of their conversion unlike those of Muslims and Jews.
Mexía’s appeal to a better treatment of slaves is grounded on economic, polit
ical and religious concerns. He highlights this duty as a charitable act towards the
infidels who are ‘our enemies’ as they are enemies ‘of our faith’.127 The treatise,
then, conveys the main preoccupation of Hispanic theologians and intellectuals,
which was to articulate the need for charity and the practicalities concerning
Afro-Hispanic slaves in the Iberian empire. Slaves must therefore be taught to
obey their owners by means of a careful system of punishment that keeps them
obedient so as not to risk the profitability of the household.128 Ignorance, malice,
and negligence on the part of slave owners are all identified as the causes of harsh
punishment, starvation and illness that lead to the slaves’ death.129 The Black but
Human topos encapsulates the Afro-Hispanic defence of their humanity as sub-
jects of conversion to Christianity, against the dominant belief that they were
chattel property, with their will subject to the owner’s authority by means of
repeated and painful corporal punishment. Voragine’s legend was manipulated by
its articulation with the discourses that both included African slaves in the social
order and at the same time excluded them from it. The legend was also enmeshed
with the pervasive violence of the practice of slavery, where the relationship
between slave owners and slaves was established by mercantile practices and by
the paradoxical correlation of protection and exploitation. In the sacred space of
the pre-Counter Reformation church, the sacrifice of the Ethiopian man is justi-
fied by his total dependence and dedication to his master. This image embodies
and reproduces a hegemonic vision of enslaved Afro-Hispanics and reinforces
this complex attitude within the Spanish social imaginary. However, the new
Castilian iconography of the living Afro-Hispanic enslaved also opens up the
possibility of embracing a new subject by means of the visual form. The mutila-
tion, agony, pain or death of the early modern Afro-Hispanic slaves paradoxically
becomes the central focus for the viewer’s attention. This visual motif of the black
leg focuses on the violent appropriation of the body of the Ethiopian/Christian
African man and on his suffering. It also concentrates on the consequences of this
action: both the miraculous healing of the verger and the irreversible process of
intermixture or mestizaje.

128 Mexía, Saludable instrucción del estado del matrimonio, fols. 237v–239r.
Commodification 153
Thus, the grafted white leg in the European verger shown in the above works
conveys the whitening of the black leg in the recipient European body. The grafting
itself produces the whitening of the African leg. It signifies the violent subjuga-
tion and exploitation of the African man and the subsequent process of mestizaje
in imperial Spain. The change of colour produced by the surgical encounter with
a non-European subject is depicted as the manifestation of the miraculous healing
of the verger’s leg.
The sources of the miraculous transplantation, in fact, imply the whitening of
the black leg when they describe the post-operation effect of the physician saints’
patient. While in the Greek legend, the sick man exclaims, ‘And now I see also
that my leg is sound. And the only thing that terrifies me is the contour of the
leg’,130 in the Acta Sanctorum, it is explained that the healed man ‘found no lesion.
Putting then a candle nearby, when he saw nothing wrong in the leg, he thought
he was not who he was, but was someone else.’131 The latter echoes Voragine’s
suggestion that the healing of the black leg signifies the restoration of the patient’s
own white leg, with the startling consequence that when he woke up and saw his
healthy leg, he was confused about his own identity.
The Miracle of the Black Leg signifies the exploitation and violent appropriation
of the African body by the mighty imperial power of Spain. The disturbing and
violent visual motif of the in vivo mutilated African man and the whitening of his
leg on the European body foreground the new phenomenon of mestizaje or eth-
nic intermixture between Spaniards, Native Americans, and Africans in imperial
Spain. The radical Castilian interpretation of this miracle was produced at the
apex of the legalization of the slave trade between 1503, which marks the abolition
of Indian slavery, and the year 1542 when slavery in the New World was confined
exclusively to Africans.132 Thus, the image of the Miracle of the Black Leg becomes
an allegory of Spanish colonization and the transatlantic and Spanish slave trades.
132 Lucena Salmoral, Regulación de la esclavitud negra en las colonias de América Española (1503–1886)
(2005), CD, Chapter 1 pp. 9, 11.
6
The Image of Freedom
All Souls Are of a Single Colour and They
Are Wrought in the Same Workshop
(Antonio Palomino de Castro y Velasco, 1715–24)1
Portraiture and Slavery
In Hapsburg Spain, enslaved Afro-Hispanics became the embodiment of their

owner’s wealth and, according to Domínguez Ortiz, one of their main functions
was to fulfil ‘the taste for luxury and refinement of the nobility and indeed the mid-
dle class who required large retinues of servants’.2 Given the traditional Spanish
resistance in depicting black people, as we saw in chapter 3, it is not a complete
surprise to find that the extant royal portraiture includes portraits of their royal
servants, such as white and mixed-race dwarfs, but contains no depictions of slaves
as elegant servants, unlike regal images produced throughout Western Europe
between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries.3 There are, however, records of
paintings depicting African slaves and their descendants by anonymous artists
that are now lost: the group portrait of Martín de Aguas, a madman (a loco), with
another three ‘insane’ characters and one black man with them,4 and others with
1 Antonio Palomino de Castroy Velasco, ‘Juan de Pareja’, in El Museo Pictórico y Escala Óptica
(1715–1724) (Madrid: M. Aguilar, 1947), p. 961: las almas todas son de un color; y labradas en una
misma oficina. The writer’s comment was not translated in the 1739 English biography of Pareja:
Antonio Palomino de Castro y Velasco, An Account of the Lives and Works of the Most Eminent Spanish
Painters, Sculptors and Architects, and Where their Several Performances are to be Seen. Translated from
the Museum Pictorium of Palomino Velasco (London: printed for Sam. Harding, on the pavement in
St. Martin’s Lane, 1739).
2 Antonio Domínguez Ortiz, The Golden Age of Spain: 1516–1619 (London: Weidenfeld and
Nicolson, 1971), p. 163 and Izaskun Álvaro Cuartero, ‘Gentes de color, gentes de placer y otras rarezas:
una aproximación a su estudio en la pintura europea y americana de los siglos XVII y XVIII. En torno
a las Antillas Hispánicas. Ensayos en homenaje al profesor Paul Estrade’, Tebeto. Anuario del Anuario
del Archivo-Histórico de Fuenteovejuna, 5 (2004), p. 463.
3 See Revealing the African Presence in Renaissance Europe, edited by Joaneath Spicer (Baltimore:
The Trustees of the Walters Art Museum, 2012); The Slave in European Art: From Renaissance Trophy
to Abolitionist Emblem, edited by Elizabeth McGrath and Jean Michel Massing, The Warburg Colloquia
Series, 20 (London and Turin: The Warburg Institute and Nino Aragno Ed., 2012); Black Africans in
Renaissance Europe, edited by Thomas F. Earle and Kate J. P. Lowe (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2005), and The Image of the Black in Western Art, edited by David Bindman and Henry Louis
Gates, Jr, 6 vols. (Cambridge, Mass., London: Harvard University Press, 2010–2011).
4 José Moreno Villa, Locos, enanos, negros y niños palaciegos. Siglos XVI y XVII: Gente de Placer que
tuvieron los Austrias en la Corte Española desde 1563 a 1700 (Mexico City: Ed. Presencia, La Casa de
España en México, 1939), pp. 59–60.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198767978.001.0001
The Image of Freedom 155
generic titles of Negro Head, Negro with Grapes, Negroes making chocolate, or
just Negroes.5 There are also surviving portraits of African slaves by European
artists, such as the fragment of a larger canvas destroyed in a fire, portraying
An African Slave Woman (c.1580s), attributed to Annibale Carracci (1560–1609)
from Bologna (Italy), which Philip V of Spain mentioned on his deathbed in
1745, as hanging in the queen’s antechamber.6 The other portrait was from the
court in Lisbon, Juana de Austria with her Black Slave Girl (1553), now in Brussels,
at the Musées Royaux des Beaux Arts de Belgique, inv. no. 1296 (see Plate 6.1).7
This portrait, which was a personal commission from the royal sitter, is by the
Portuguese painter Cristovão de Morais (active 1551–73). This includes the
portrait of a female child (negrilla) that had been given to Philip II’s sister as a
wedding present from her husband Prince João. The presence of the enslaved child
highlights, as Annemarie Jordan Gschwend rightly claims, the ‘social position of
Juana as the next Queen of Portugal’ and the power of the Iberian empire that is
articulated by the setting of the little enslaved girl against a white pillar that is
reminiscent of those in the coat of arms of Charles V with the inscription Plus
Ultra.8 This painting is considered to be the first example in the Iberian empire of
the appropriation of Titian’s Laura Dianti (c.1523), now at the Heinz Kisters
Collection, in Kreuzlingen, Switzerland (see Fig 6.1). Titian’s orientalized sitter,
‘the earliest known freestanding portrait of an identifiable European individual
with an attendant black African figure’, looks at the spectator while she rests her
right hand on the black child who, in turn, is looking at her owner in awe.9 Her
gesture certainly indicates, as Kate Lowe claims, that ‘suitable young and attractive
black children’ were brought to European courts, sometimes with ‘whole black
families of free people’, so that they were ‘available to serve’.10 The presence of
enslaved Afro-Hispanic children at the Hapsburg and Bourbon Courts was
recorded by Moreno Villa in his chapter Lista de negros, negrillos y niños que
andaban en Palacio (‘List of Blacks, Little Blacks and Children at the Palace’) from
his 1939 book Locos, enanos, negros y niños palaciegos as called in the records at
the Royal Palace of Madrid: a little black girl playing with the King (16 December
1665), Marcela Carlos, Negrilla (1669) and Bernarda de Austria (1670), who was
5 Marcus B. Burke and Peter Cherry, Collections of Paintings in Madrid: 1601–1755, 1 (Los
Angeles, California: The Paul Getty Trust, 1997), p. 304.
6 Revealing the African Presence in Renaissance Europe, edited by Spicer (2012), p. 130.
7 Annemarie Jordan Gschwend, ‘Images of Empire: Slaves in the Lisbon Court of Catherine of
Austria’, in Black Africans in Renaissance Europe, edited by Thomas F. Earle and Kate J. P. Lowe
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 155–80.
8 Annemarie Jordan Gschwend, ‘Las dos águilas del emperador Carlos V. Las colecciones y el
mecenazgo de Juana y María de Austria en la corte de Felipe II’, in La Monarquía de Felipe II. A Debate,
edited by Luis Antonio Ribot García (Madrid: Sociedad Estatal para la Conmemoración de los
Centenarios de Carlos V y Felipe II, 2000), pp. 429–72.
9 Paul H. D. Kaplan, ‘Italy, 1490–1700’, in The Image of the Black in Western Art: From the ‘Age of
Discovery’ to the Age of Abolition, edited by David Bindman and Henry Louis Gates, Jr, 2.1 (Cambridge,
Mass., London: Harvard University Press, 2010), p. 107.
10 Kate Lowe, ‘The Lives of African Slaves and People of African Descent in Renaissance Europe’, in
Revealing the African Presence in Renaissance Europe, edited by Spicer (2012), pp. 17–19.
156 Black but Human
Fig. 6.1. Titian, Portrait of Laura de’ Dianti, c.1523, Heinz Kisters Collection,
Kreuzlingen, Switzerland. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
given the royal name, Rodrigo de Alencastro, Negrillo (1596), Juan Carlos, Negrillo
(1669–83); Jusepe, Negrillo (1634), and those who were given as gifts to Prince
Baltasar Carlos by the Count of Monterrey in 1639: Lorenzo de los Reyes, Negro
(1639–99) and Sebastián, Negrillo (d.1642).11 In these records, anonymous Afro-
Hispanic people are mentioned with reference to expenses made for servants and
slaves, such as payments for food and dresses: for the negra cantora de la Princesa
(‘Queen’s black singer’) in 1620; al enano negro (‘to the black dwarf ’) in 1643, and
for the Negras de Alcántara (‘black women from Alcántara’) on 1 April 1645.12
Moreno Villa also recorded the portraits that the Hapsburgs commissioned of
themselves with their mixed-race dwarfs, who were featured as royal accessories
in Juana de Mendoza, Duchess of Béjar with her Dwarf (c.1585) by Alonso Sánchez
Coello, now at the Marqués de Griñon Collection,13 and two canvases at the
11 Moreno Villa, Locos, enanos, negros y niños palaciegos, pp. 18, 68, 153–4, 155, 156.
12 Moreno Villa, Locos, enanos, negros y niños palaciegos, pp. 157–8.
13 See Alonso Sánchez Coello y el Retrato en la Corte de Felipe II (Madrid: Museo del Prado, 1990),
pp. 152–3 and Janet Ravenscroft, ‘Dwarfs— And A Loca—As Ladies’ Maids at the Spanish Habsburg
Courts’, in The Politics Of Female Households: Ladies In Waiting Across Early Modern Europe, edited by
Nadine Akkerman and Birgit Houben (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2014), p. 171.
Fig. 6.2. Alonso Sánchez Coello, Isabel Clara Eugenia with Magdalena Ruiz, 1585–8.
© Museo Nacional del Prado.
Museo del Prado, Queen Margaret of Austria with her Dwarf (c.1603) by
Bartolomé González14 and Philip IV with Soplillo (c.1620) by Rodrigo de
Villandrando. Miguel Soplillo was sent by Isabel Clara Eugenia to the King when
he was a child.15 These portraits include servants who might also be slave owners,
such as Magdalena Ruiz, depicted by Sánchez Coello with Philip II’s daughter in
the portrait Isabel Clara Eugenia with Magdalena Ruiz (c.1585) (see Fig 6.2).16
Philip II’s letter 28, from Lisbon, written on 8 November 1582 to his daughter and
to her sister Catalina Micaela, notes that Ruiz, a servant of Juana of Austria,
owned a black slave in this Portuguese city, who escaped and never came back:
‘Madalena is very distressed about her Black woman, who returned once and
14 See Obras del Museo Nacional de Escultura, edited by Manuel Arias Martínez (Valladolid: Museo
Nacional de Escultura, 1997), pp. 110–11.
15 Moreno Villa, Locos, enanos, negros y niños palaciegos, pp. 31–2, 143–4.
16 Moreno Villa, Locos, enanos, negros y niños palaciegos, who defined Magdalena Ruiz as a dwarf.
See also the challenge to this perception in Ravenscroft, ‘Dwarfs— And A Loca—As Ladies’ Maids at
the Spanish Habsburg Courts’, in The Politics Of Female Households, edited by Akkerman and Houben,
pp. 155–77.
158 Black but Human
now has gone again and she knows nothing of her whereabouts; but she has bad
suspicions about her.’17
Velázquez’s son-in-law, Juan Bautista Martínez del Mazo, also gave a prominent
place to an elegant dwarf of African descent in his monumental painting Hunting
scene seen from the ‘tabladillo’ at Aranjuez (c.1640), now in the Museo del Prado.
He is standing to the right of the King and Olivares in the foreground of his compos
ition.18 The term ‘tabladillo’ refers to the stand where ‘the Queen and her ladies-in-
waiting used to watch the hunt’.19
The only extant portrait of an enslaved Afro-Hispanic man at the Spanish Court
that has survived from Hapsburg Spain is by the painter Diego Velázquez, who
chose to represent, in an exceptional way, his own slave, the painter Juan de Pareja
(1606, Antequera, Málaga–c.1670, Madrid), in the papal city of Rome, now at the
Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (see Plate 6.2).20 In his half-length
portrait, Velázquez’s slave is seen looking directly at the viewer, holding his right
arm across his waist and standing against an undefined brown-and-black back-
ground. Pareja is not depicted as a slave in the way that Weiditz, Hoefnagel, and
Villoldo portrayed slaves. Instead, he is portrayed as a Spanish gentleman wearing a
dark grey velvet doublet and coat with an exclusive white lace collar from Flanders,
Walleye lace or ‘Wallonne lace’, ‘forbidden in Spain to free men and shunned by
Philip IV, who favoured austere dress’.21
However, depictions of enslaved Afro-Spanish people with members of the
royal family emerged in Bourbon Spain. In the 1737 portrait Charles VII, King of
Naples and future Charles III of Spain, with his black page by the Italian painter
known as Il Molinaretto (Giovanni Maria delle Piane, 1660–1745), a little black
attendant is holding the train of his master’s mantle. The slave of the King is wear-
ing a silver collar (argolla) and looks at his master in awe while the former is
looking to his audience. The black child has also been ignored in the title of this
work, which was made in Spanish Naples and now belongs to the Museo in
Pontevedra (Galicia, Spain) although it is stored in the basement of the Museo del
Prado (see Fig 6.3).22 The king’s son, Charles IV, is also depicted with a young
17 Fernando Bouza, Locos, enanos y hombres de placer en la corte de los Austrias: Oficio de burlas
(Madrid: Ediciones Temas de Hoy, 1996), p. 115; Moreno Villa, Locos, enanos, negros y niños palacie-
gos, p. 29. Magdalena Ruiz also had another two servants, see Ravenscroft, ‘Dwarfs— And A Loca—
As Ladies’ Maids at the Spanish Habsburg Courts’, in The Politics Of Female Households, edited by
Akkerman and Houben, p. 164.
18 On Juan Bautista Martínez del Mazo, see María del Mar Doval Trueba, Los ‘Velazqueños’: pin-
tores que trabajaron en el taller de Velázquez (PhD dissertation, Universidad Complutense, 2000),
pp. 108–216, and on his Hunting scenes, see pp. 141–4.
19 See https://www.museodelprado.es/en/the-collection/art-work/watching-the-hunt-in-aranjuez/
ed83c253-d1e2-42d2-9001-4cdc7813f591.
20 See Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 29 (1970/71).
21 Velázquez, edited by Julián Gállego, et al. (Madrid: Museo del Prado, c.1990), p. 391. See also:
http://www.metmuseum.org/Collections/search-the-collections/110002322, accessed 31 August 2012.
22 Jesús Urrea Fernández, ‘El Molinaretto y otros retratistas de Carlos III en Italia’, Boletín del
Museo del Prado, 25–7 (1988), pp. 82–91.
Fig. 6.3. Il Molinaretto (Giovanni Maria delle Piane), Charles VII, King of Naples
(future Charles III of Spain), with his black page, 1737. © Museo Nacional del Prado.
Afro-Spanish man, either a slave or a freedman, in the 1796 drawing, The Royal
Riding School of Carlos IV of Bourbon by Antonio Carnicero (1748–1814), now at
the Calcografía Nacional, Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando (see
Fig 6.4). He is standing slightly to the rear of the image, on the right of prime
minister Manuel Godoy who commissioned this drawing, and alongside a horse.
He is portrayed in the presence of Charles IV and his family, who are looking at
this scene from the balcony.23
The extant portrait of Juan de Pareja, now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art
(New York), by contrast, radically differs from these royal portraits. In Velázquez’s
Juan de Pareja, the sitter is the sole figure and his powerful gaze totally dominates
the canvas and engages the viewer. This superb yet unusual portrait of an Afro-
Hispanic enslaved man was painted at the papal court in Rome between 1649 and
23 María Antonia Martínez Ibáñez, Antonio Carnicero Mancio (Salamanca: Caja Salamanca y Soria,
1997); Matilde López Serrano, Real Picadero. Láminas de equitación grabadas en el siglo XVII
(Barcelona: Gustavo Gili, 1968) and Antonio Carnicero, [1796–1800]. Real Picadero, edited by Antonio
Álvarez Barros (Madrid: Frame, 1996).
160 Black but Human
Fig. 6.4. Antonio Carnicero, The Royal Riding School of Carlos IV of Bourbon, 1796,
D. 296 bis. Courtesy of Calcografía Nacional, Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San
Fernando, Madrid.
19 March 1650, as we shall see in the next section of this chapter.24 Juan de Pareja
was made possible by the availability of black models, amongst them Pareja himself,
or either from Velázquez’s family or from his wife Juana Pacheco’s family. The
painter’s father, Juan Rodríguez de Silva—an ecclesiastical notary—was himself a
slave owner. In 1621, the daughter of one of his female slaves was baptized in the
parish church of San Lorenzo, in Seville, where the painter and his family lived.25
The painter was also provided with the visual template of the more realistic repre-
sentation of black people produced in the Netherlands in the early decades of the
seventeenth century, when there was a greater presence of African slaves and their
descendants from the Iberian empire in their territories. The Four studies of a young
Moor’s head (c.1613–15) by Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640), who came as a diplomat
at the Hapsburg court in Madrid (1625–8) where Velázquez met him in 1628, proved
most influential for the Spanish court painter.26 Velázquez would also have had in
his mind one of the now lost half-bust portraits of the first Afro-Hispanic writer, the
freedman humanist and Latinist Juan Latino (1518?–c.1594), recorded in 1636 at
the Alcázar in Madrid: ‘portrait from the chest up of a black man, who is Juan
Latino, with a label that says he was ninety years old’ (retrato de los pechos arriba
de un negro, que es Juan Latino, con un letrero que dice de edad de 90 años).27
The portrait Juan de Pareja transcends the visual vocabulary that was available
at the time. In order to absorb the ‘slave subject’, Velázquez follows, and at the
same time subverts, the conventions of European and Hispanic portraiture
restricted to the upper echelons of Spanish society. In the first European treatise
on portraiture since antiquity, Do tirar polo natural, written in Portuguese in 1548
and translated into Spanish in 1563, the painter and writer on art, Francisco de
Holanda, laid the foundations for the genre. He categorized portraiture as the most
dignified genre among the arts, believing that it was ‘an imitation of God’s work
of creation’.28 The essence of the genre was therefore the moral or intellectual
prestige of the worthy sitter. The restricted nature of portraiture, which was
24 Corpus Velazqueño. Documentos y Textos, edited by Ángel Aterido Fernández, 1 (Madrid:
Ministerio de Educación, Cultura y Deporte, 2000), p. 863. See Salvador Salort, ‘La misión de
Velázquez y sus agentes en Roma y Venecia: 1649–1653’, Archivo español de arte, 72 (1999), pp. 415–68.
25 Luis Méndez Rodríguez, ‘Entre la vida y la muerte. Nuevas aportaciones documentales sobre
Velázquez en Sevilla’, Archivo español de arte, 288 (1999), p. 538; Luis Méndez Rodríguez, ‘Gremio y
esclavitud en la pintura sevillana del siglo de oro’, Archivo Hispalense, 256–7 (2001), p. 245.
26 For Rubens’s paintings Four heads (Musées Royaux d’Art et d’Histoire de Belgique, Brussels) and
A head, c.1620 (The Hyde Collection Art Museum, Glens Arts, Brussels), see Black is beautiful: Rubens
to Dumas, edited by Elmer Kolfin and Esther Schreuder (Zwolle: Waanders Publishers, 2008),
pp. 76–8. See also Ernst van den Boogaart, ‘Black Slavery and the “Mulate Escape Hatch” in the
Brazilian Ensembles of Frans Post and Albert Eckhout’, in The Slave in European Art, edited by
McGrath and Massing (2012), p. 234.
27 This reference is found in Elizabeth R. Wright, The Epic of Juan Latino: Dilemmas of Race and
Religion in Renaissance Spain (Toronto, Buffalo and London: University of Toronto Press, 2016), pp. 7,
196, endnote 13. See also Baltasar Fra-Molinero, ‘Juan Latino and his Racial Difference’, in Black
Africans in Renaissance Europe, edited by Earle and Lowe, pp. 326–44.
28 Lorne Campbell, Renaissance Portraits: European Portrait-Painting in the Fourteenth, Fifteenth
and the Sixteenth Centuries (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1990), p. 195.
162 Black but Human
exemplified by the Hapsburg Court in Spain, was reiterated by Covarrubias, who

defined the subject of the portrait as a ‘principal persona’ whose portrayal will be
remembered for posterity: ‘the simulated figure of some principal person of note,
whose image and semblance it is right should be remembered in the coming
centuries.’29 However, the practice must have been different since the painter and
theorist Vicente Carducho, in his 1633 Diálogos de la Pintura (Dialogues of
Painting) bitterly complains about the abuse involved in portraying ordinary
people as noblemen, and advises that they should at least be depicted with their
professional attributes.30 In his 1649 Arte de la Pintura, Pacheco sets out the two
fundamental ‘obligations of portraiture’:
He who paints portraits is obliged to do two things—if I am not mistaken—and

if he fulfils both, he is deserving of praise. The first is that the portrait appears
very much like the sitter, and this is the principal end for which portraits are
made [. . .]. The second obligation is that the portrait be well drawn, and painted
in a good manner of colorido, with strength and relief.31
Velázquez’s father-in-law raised the dignity of the genre of portraiture by attaching

the notion of ‘inventiveness’ to it, along with the traditional requirement of
‘imitation’.32 His defence of the innovative values of portraiture was paramount
for El Museo Pictórico y Escala Óptica (The Pictorial Museum and Optical Scales),
written by Antonio Palomino de Castro y Velasco between 1715 and 1724, where
notions associated with the genre of portraiture, such as ‘likeness’ and ‘faithful
description’ as ‘visual truth’ were given greater relevance. Palomino explains how
the ‘visual truth’ that is the quintessence of the genre of early modern portraiture
could be achieved:
The facial metaphor is that which reveals, through the expression of the human
countenance, the work of those passions that hold concealed sway within indi-
viduals. For the countenance is like the clock-face that indicates all the hidden
stirrings that lie within ourselves. It reveals the sex, the age, the thinking mind
and the perturbations of the soul [. . .]. But these [the sex and the age] are the
simpler things to accomplish, whereas it is the other two which are intimately
connected with the most precious and refined accomplishment of painting; as
for the mind, we must look to see how far it reveals its working in the face [. . .].
Martín de Riquer (Barcelona: Horta, 1987), p. 908.
30 Alfonso E. Pérez Sánchez, ‘Velázquez y el retrato barroco’, in El retrato español: del Greco a
Picasso, edited by Javier Portús Pérez (Madrid: Museo Nacional del Prado, 2004), pp. 182–3 and
Portús Pérez, ‘Varia fortuna del retrato en España’, in El retrato español, edited by Portús Pérez (2004),
pp. 29–30, 43.
31 Francisco Pacheco, Arte de la pintura: antigüedad y grandeza (1649), in Art in Theory 1648–1815.
An Anthology of Changing Ideas, edited by Charles Harrison, Paul Wood and Jason Gaiger (Malden,
MA and Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2007), p. 268.
32 Portús Pérez, ‘Varia fortuna del retrato en España’, in El retrato español, edited by Portús Pérez,
pp. 29–30.
We must also look how the perturbations of the soul inflict the authentic and
natural appearance of the face [. . .]. In the present case one deduces some internal
and personal form of behaviour from external indications. And this is what it
means to paint the expression of the soul, without which indeed the painting
would appear lifeless, as if it were sculpture; for in living beings the soul alone
reveals itself in such signs and expressions. Thus, when we see the latter presented
through paintings, we are ready to excuse him who takes the image for life itself.33
In Velázquez’s Juan de Pareja, the slave-sitter could not have been painted as
a gentleman, since his legal status would not have qualified him to be an individ-
ual worthy of portrayal for posterity. Nor could he be represented as a painter,
according to the classical tradition. Only a free man could be an artist, as
Palomino reminds us:
One should know that the Romans distinguished between the free and free-born
and slaves and servants. The latter alone were permitted to exercise the sordid
or mechanical arts which were therefore known as servile arts. The noble and
so-called liberal arts were reserved for the free or the noble and prohibited to
slaves, a distinction of classes, which corresponds in Spain to that between
noblemen and commoners.34
This was an important issue in Hapsburg Spain, since the classical tradition
became the premise for the claim that painting be regarded as a liberal-intellectual
art against the perception, until the end of the eighteenth century, that painting
was a craft.35 However, this situation was undermined by widespread atelier practice
since most artists owned one or two slaves and used them in their workshops,
as did the painter-theorists Carducho and Pacheco.36 Pareja was not the only
slave painter in early modern Spain. The other notable seventeenth-century
case was the Granada-born Sebastián Gómez (1646–82), called El mulato, who
became a painter in his own right after having been manumitted by his master,
the painter Bartolomé Esteban Murillo (1617/18–82).37 New documents reveal
that economic considerations allowed slaves from different ethnicities and
33 Antonio, Palomino de Castro y Velasco, El Museo Pictórico y Escala Óptica (1715–1724) and in
English, see Antonio Palomino de Castro y Velasco, The Pictorial Museum and Optical Scale, in Art in
Theory 1648–1815. An Anthology of Changing Ideas, edited by Charles Harrison, Paul Wood and Jason
Gaiger (2007), pp. 322–3.
34 Palomino, The Pictorial Museum and Optical, in Art in Theory 1648–1815, edited by Harrison,
Wood, and Gaiger, p. 319.
35 See Alfonso E. Pérez Sánchez, ‘El retrato clásico español’, in El Retrato, edited by Fundación
Amigos del Museo del Prado (Barcelona: Galaxia Gutemberg, 2004), p. 228.
36 See Méndez Rodríguez, ‘Gremio y esclavitud en la pintura sevillana del Siglo de Oro’ (2001), pp.
243–55. See also the translation of this article into English in Luis Méndez Rodríguez and Jeremy Roe,
‘Slavery and the Guild in Golden Age Painting in Seville’ Art in Translation, 7 (1) (2015), pp. 123–39
and Alfredo J. Morales, ‘El Ayuntamiento de Sevilla: maestros canteros, entalladores e imagineros’,
Laboratorios de Arte, 4 (1991), pp. 61–82.
37 María de los Santos García Felguera, La fortuna de Murillo (1682–1900) (Seville: Diputación
Provincial de Sevilla, 1989), pp. 174–8.
164 Black but Human
g eographical origins to work in artistic workshops. They were present at least

from the fifteenth century if not earlier, as in the Cathedral at Palma de Mallorca,
where the choir stalls were made almost entirely by slaves between 1330 and
1338.38 The latter and freed slaves, including females, were recorded as artisans,
painters, sculptors, glassmakers, and silversmiths in their owners’ premises, such
as printing houses or artistic workshops, especially in Seville and Granada, the
two cities with the highest concentration of Afro-Hispanic slaves, and Málaga,
where enslaved artisans were recorded from as early as 1487.39 In addition to
mechanical activities, Afro-Hispanic people sold their master’s work in the street,
such as the case in 1667 in Cádiz of Francisco Nuñez, who kept sending his
mulato slave to the streets asking, ‘Who wants to buy these paintings?’40
The exceptional inclusion of Pareja in the Spanish Parnassus written by
Palomino, his first biographer, is centred around Pareja’s life and his paradoxical
condition as both slave and painter. Palomino resorted to the ethnic definition of
Velázquez’s slave and classifies him as ‘of a Mestizo Breed [. . .] he was of an odd
Hue’ (de generación mestizo, y de color extraño).41 Documentary evidence in the
province of Málaga, where Pareja was born, but also in Seville, shows that the
term ‘mestizo’ refers mainly to those born as the result of the union of a white
male Spaniard and a Afro-Hispanic woman, and very occasionally to the union
with a Native American woman or from the Canary Islands who were less available
in the kingdoms of Aragon and Castile.42 Palomino also felt the need to differen-
tiate the ‘slave’ Pareja’s occupation from that of the other assistants in Velázquez’s
workshop by listing his manual tasks, typical of those of a slave: ‘[Pareja would]
grind his [Velázquez’s] Colours and prepare the Canvas, and [perform] other
servile Offices belonging to the Art and about the House’ (moler colores, y aparejar
algún lienzo, y otras cosas ministeriales del arte, y de la casa).43 In addition, in
order to justify the apprenticeship and collaboration of an enslaved man at the
Hapsburg court, Palomino turned to one of the constant topoi of artistic biographies,
that of the pupil-painter who secretly learns from his master:
38 Catalogue of Sculpture (Thirteenth and Fifteenth Centuries) in The Collection of The Hispanic
Society of America, edited by Beatrice I. Gilman (New York: The Hispanic Society of America, 1932),
p. xli.
39 See Raúl González Arévalo, ‘Ordenanzas municipales y trabajo esclavo en la Corona de Castilla
(Siglos XV–XVI)’, in Schiavitù e servaggio nell’economia europea Secc. XI–XVIII. Serfdom and Slavery
in the European economy, 11th to 18th centuries, edited by in Simonetta Cavaciocchi (Florence: Firenze
40 Miguel Morán Turina and Isabel Sánchez Quevedo, Pintura y Sociedad en la España de Velázquez
(Madrid: Akal, 1999), pp. 84–5.
41 Palomino, An Account of the Lives and Works of the Most Eminent Spanish Painters, Sculptors and
Architects (1739), p. 73. For the original version, see Palomino, ‘Juan de Pareja’, in El Museo Pictórico y
Escala Óptica (1715–1724), p. 960.
42 Raúl González Arévalo, La esclavitud en Málaga a fines de la Edad Media (Jaén: Universidad de
Jaén, 2006), p. 65 and Alfonso Franco Silva, La esclavitud en Sevilla y su tierra a fines de la Edad Media
(Seville: Diputación provincial de Sevilla, Servicio de Publicaciones, 1979), p. 139.
Escala Óptica (1715–1724), p. 960.
[Pareja] being very handy and ingenious, and taking all opportunities of his
Master’s Absence and passing whole Nights in study when he might have taken
his rest, he came to do Things very worthy of esteem; and in order to prevent the
effects of his Master’s Resentment, which he apprehended would necessarily
follow upon the Discovery, he made use of the following Stratagem. He had
observed that whenever the King (Philip IV) came down to the Apartments to
see Velasquez paint, and chanc’d to see any Picture set up against the Wall, his
Majesty wou’d turn it, or order it to be turn’d to see what it was. Upon this Pareja
resolv’d within himself to set up a small Piece of his own painting against the
Wall, and to place it so, as to make seen to have been left there undesignedly. The
King no sooner saw it, but he turn’d it about, and at the same Time Pareja, who
waited for the Opportunity, fell on his Knees and humbly begg’d his Majesty to
interpose between him and his Master, without whose Consent he had presum’d
to learn the Art and wrought that Piece.44
Palomino’s myth states that Pareja’s clandestine activity ended with the slave’s
freedom thanks to the intervention of the king, after the monarch claimed to
Velázquez that a person ‘who had such a Talent, cou’d not be a Slave’ (‘que quien
tiene esta habilidad, no puede ser esclavo’).45
It is obvious that Palomino’s legend signifies that the case of the Afro-Hispanic
Juan de Pareja is an extraordinary and exceptional phenomenon in Early Modern
Spain.46 The portrait Juan de Pareja by Velázquez, which was not commissioned
by the sitter, could also be seen as a sign of his master’s affection for Pareja, and
very close relationship to his slave-disciple and later freedman. In a letter of pres-
entation of Velázquez from Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar y Mendoza, Duke del Infantado
and Spanish ambassador to the Cardinal Carlo de Medici in Florence, dated 26
November 1650, he refers to the relationship between the Spanish painter and his
‘servant’: ‘Diego de Velázquez [. . .] and a servant to whom much esteem is shown,
comes to Venice to do some things in his service [. . .].’47 Velázquez certainly
trusted his slave and authorized Pareja to be a legal witness and sign documents
Architects (1739), pp. 74–5. For the original version, see Palomino, ‘Juan de Pareja’, in El Museo
Pictórico y Escala Óptica (1715–1724), p. 960: Y previniendo en esto el disgusto forzoso de su amo, se
valió de una industria peregrina; había pues observado Pareja, que siempre, el señor Felipe Cuarto
bajaba a las bóvedas, a ver pintar a Velázquez, en viendo un cuadro arrimado, y vuelto a la pared, lle-
gaba Su Majestad a volverlo, o lo mandaba volver, para ver, qué cosa era. Con este motivo, puso Pareja
un cuadrito de su mano, como a el descuido vuelto a la pared: apenas lo vio el Rey, cuando llegó a
volverlo; y a el mismo tiempo Pareja, que estaba esperando la ocasión, se puso a sus pies, y le suplicó
rendidamente le amparase para con su amo, sin cuyo consentimiento había aprendido el arte, y hecho de
su mano aquella pintura.
Architects (1739), pp. 74–5. For the original version, see Palomino, ‘Juan de Pareja’, in El Museo
Pictórico y Escala Óptica (1715–1724), p. 960.
46 For the original version, see Palomino, ‘Juan de Pareja’, in El Museo Pictórico y Escala Óptica
(1715–1724), p. 961.
47 Corpus Velazqueño, edited by Aterido Fernández, p. 232. See original: Diego de Velázquez [ . . .] y un
criado de quien faze mucha estimación, passa a Venecia a algunas cosas de su serv°.
166 Black but Human
involving his master and his family: a Velázquez lawsuit (21 July 1642), and two
documents (20 October 1647), one the inheritance to Juana Pacheco and the
other the hiring of a domestic servant, a twelve-year-old girl María Sánchez
Calderón. There is also an authorization to administer the properties owned by
the Velázquez family in Seville (17 December 1647), and Pareja gave authoriza-
tion to Francisca Velázquez to make her will (8 November 1653).48
The freedman Pareja managed to forge a career as a painter at the Spanish
Court.49 Pareja’s artistic success was achieved, according to Palomino, despite ‘the
disgrace of his nature’ (no obstante la desgracia de su naturaleza).50 Freedom from
slavery in Palomino’s biography of Pareja justifies and reconciles the contradictory
nature of being a slave and a painter who was considered ‘eminent in Painting’
(eminente en la Pintura).51 This claim allows Palomino to praise Pareja’s portraits:
‘Our Pareja had a most singular Ability in painting Portraits’, some of which the
writer had the occasion to see: ‘of which I have seen some that are most excellent,
such as the one of José Ratés (Architect in this Court)’.52 Here, Palomino refers to
the portrait The Architect José Ratés Dalmau, c.1660–70, now in the Museo de
Bellas Artes in Valencia (see Plate 6.3). The art writer claims that these portraits
are executed in the manner of his master so that Pareja’s portraits are, in his opin-
ion, sometimes thought to be by Velázquez: ‘in which one recognizes totally the
manner of Velázquez, so that many believe it to be his.’53
Pareja’s presence in Madrid, at the Hapsburg court along with Velázquez, was
first recorded on 25 February 1634, when he signed the dowry letter of his mas-
ter’s daughter Francisca, as a legal witness: ‘Juan de Pareja [. . .] resident at this
court’ (matias de santos, juan de parexa y andres de rruvias vsº [vecinos] y estantes
en esta corte)’.54 There is also visual evidence that Pareja had already been a
48 Corpus Velazqueño, edited by Aterido Fernández, pp. 100, 151, 182–5, 290.
49 Aurelia Martín Casares, La esclavitud en la Granada del siglo XVI: género, raza y religión
(Granada: Editorial Universidad de Granada, 2000), pp. 435–69.
50 See the original version, Palomino, ‘Juan de Pareja’, in El Museo Pictórico y Escala Óptica
(1715–1724), p. 961: [Pareja ha] llegado a ser eminente en la Pintura. Palomino’s claim was not
translated in the 1739 English biography of Pareja. See instead, the English translation by Hilary
Macartney, in Carmen Fracchia, ‘The Fall into Oblivion of the Works of the Slave Painter Juan de Pareja’,
Art In Translation, 4 (2) (2012), p. 167.
(1715–1724), p. 961. Palomino’s claim was not translated in the 1739 English biography of Pareja. See
instead, the English translation by Hilary Macartney, in Carmen Fracchia, ‘The Fall into Oblivion of
the Works of the Slave Painter Juan de Pareja’, Art In Translation, 4 (2), p. 167.
52 Palomino, English translation, ‘Life of Juan de Pareja’, p. 75. For the original version, see
Palomino, ‘Juan de Pareja’, in El Museo Pictórico y Escala Óptica (1715–1724), p. 961: Tuvo especial-
mente nuestro Pareja singularísima habilidad para retratos, de los cuales yo he visto algunos muy
excelentes, como el de José Ratés (Arquitecto en esta Corte).
Escala Óptica (1715–1724), p. 961: en que se conoce totalmente la manera de Velázquez, de suerte, que
muchos lo juzgan suyo.
54 Corpus Velazqueño, edited by Aterido Fernández, pp. 100–1.
painter in his own right before his manumission from slavery,55 as the restoration
of his two paintings at the State Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg revealed:
his signature on the back of the canvas of the Portrait of a Gentleman of the Order
of Santiago, possibly dated in the 1630s and the date ‘1651’ in his Portrait of a
Capuchin Provincial, soon after his manumission.56 In 2000, María del Mar Doval
Trueba identified thirty paintings by Pareja, though the whereabouts of almost
twenty of them are still unknown: Portrait of Philip IV, King of Spain and those of
unidentified subjects, including, the Bust-length Portrait of a Gentleman, portraits
of a Boy, a Man, a Cleric, a Knight, and a Lady Wearing a Nun’s Habit.57 There are
also religious paintings in this category: The Presentation of the Christ Child in the
Temple, The Annunciation, The Visitation, and the St Barbara signed by Pareja.
Besides, four paintings, now destroyed, which the traveller Antonio Ponz saw
in the Augustinian Monastery of los Recoletos in Madrid in 1776: ‘St John the
Evangelist, St John the Baptist, St Orentius, and Our Lady of Guadalupe of
Mexico’ (S. Juan Evangelista, S. Juan Bautista, S. Oroncio, y N. Señora de Guadalupe
de México).58
Gaya Nuño, Pareja’s second biographer in 1957, also noted the painting repre-
senting The Battle of the Hebrews and the Canaanites in the University of
Saragossa—recently attributed to the painter Matías de Torres on stylistic grounds,
even though the inscription on a label on the back reads: Juan de Pareja (el mulatto) /
año 1660–1 / autor de la Vocación de San Mateo de Sevilla (‘Juan de Pareja
(the mulatto) / year 1660–1 / author of the Calling of St Matthew in Seville’).59
Two portraits attributed to Pareja are in the Hispanic Society of America in
New York: Don Martín de Leyva and Don Alonso de Mora y Villalta, the latter
with the inscription Alonso d Mora/y ViIlalta, Natª. de Malaga/Cauallero de el
Orden/de Santiago (‘Alonso de Mora y Villalta, native of Málaga, knight of the
Order of Santiago’),60 revealing the connection that Pareja had with his place of
birth. Three portraits are also attributed to Pareja: that of the playwright, lawyer,
and priest Agustín Moreto y Cabañas, now in the Museo Lázaro Galdiano in
Madrid, probably dated in the 1650s, therefore this is considered one of the
55 Corpus Velazqueño, edited by Aterido Fernández, pp. 100–1, 151, 182–5, 290.
56 Ludmila Kagané, La pintura española del Museo del Ermitage. Siglos XV al XIX (Seville:
Fundación del Monte, 2005), pp. 94, 160, 318, 322, 410, 477.
57 María del Mar Doval Trueba, Los ‘Velazqueños’: pintores que trabajaron en el taller de Velázquez,
pp. 238–41.
58 Antonio Ponz, Viaje de España en que se da noticia de las cosas más apreciables, y dignas de
saberse, que hay en ella, 5 (Madrid: D. Joaquín Ibarra, Impresor, 1776), p. 55.
59 Juan Antonio Gaya Nuño, ‘Revisiones sexcentistas: Juan de Pareja’, Archivo español de arte, 30
(1957), p. 280. The oil on canvas is kept in the Museo del Prado Museum, but was originally in the
Museo de la Trinidad. Pareja’s painting has been attributed to Matías de Torres (Aguilar de Campoo,
Palencia, 1635–Madrid, 1711) by José María Quesada, ‘Perspectivas y batallas de Francisco
Gutiérrez y Matías de Torres’, Boletín de la Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, 79 (1994),
pp. 278–82.
60 Doval Trueba, Los ‘Velazqueños’: pintores que trabajaron en el taller de Velázquez, pp. 237–8.
168 Black but Human
earliest portraits we know by the artist.61 Moreto (1618–69) was known at

the Madrid Court and his play La negra por el honor (‘Black for Honour’, 1668)
explores the ideology of the time rather than simply mocking Afro-Hispanic
people. It is c entred on the story of an aristocratic white Spanish woman (Leonor)
‘turning into’ a black man (Celio) to escape the violence of patriarchy (her hus-
band Cosme, who tried to rape her before their wedding) to preserve her honour.
Leonor is a woman and a man, she is white and also black, and she belongs to the
high and the low class. It is a play of reconfigurations and transformations in
terms of gender and notions of human diversity.62
Pareja’s surviving works, mainly religious compositions that are signed and
dated, are: The Flight into Egypt, signed ‘Pareja, 1658’ (see Plate 6.4), now at the
John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, Sarasota, Florida;63 The Calling of
St Matthew (1661), stored in the Museo del Prado, as we shall see in the next section
of this chapter; The Baptism of Christ, signed ‘Iv.ª de Pareja F. 1667’, also a very
large oil on canvas that is now stored in the same museum (see Plate 6.5); Judith,
in the Museo Nacional de La Habana, Cuba with his signature ‘Pareja’; The Last
Communion of St Mary of Egypt, signed ‘Pareja P.’, now in a private collection, and
the Mystic Marriage of St Catherine (1669), signed ‘ Ju.ª de Pareja F. 1669’, in the
parish church of Santa Olaja de Eslonza (León), executed a year before his death.64
Pareja also painted at least three versions of the Immaculate Conception: the
canvas signed and dated 1616, ‘JV. De Pareja 16 F 16’, in a private collection65 and
another signed ‘Juan de Pareja f (…) 8’ in the church of Saint Lucy in the town of
El Almiñe (Burgos).66 The third painting of the Immaculate Conception by Pareja
signed ‘Jv DE PARE/JA F ’ was first mentioned in 1941 as part of the Ordoñéz
Collection.67 It was considered lost until recently.68 I can, however, confirm that
this image is not lost and that it is the Pareja version published by Lafuente
Ferrari. It did indeed belong to the Ordoñéz family and their successors decided
to sell this painting to another private collector in 2013. Pareja’s painting was
described as ‘No. 32 Canvas Conception signed by Juan de Pareja, mulato servant
raised by Velázquez, released by Philip IV. Due to the small number of works,
61 Josè Camón Aznar, La pintura española del siglo XVII, Summa Artis, 25 (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe,
1978), pp. 390–2.
62 Moses E. Panfort, ‘ “La negra por el honor”: una aproximación postcolonial’, in Locos, figurines y
quijotes en el teatro de los Siglos de Oro, edited by Germán Vega García-Luengos and Rafael González
Cañal (2007), pp. 333–44.
63 Gaya Nuño, ‘Revisiones sexcentistas: Juan de Pareja’, p. 276 and Anthony F. Janson, ed., Great
Paintings from the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art (New York: The John and Mable Ringling
Museum of Art, 1986), p. 113.
64 Doval Trueba, Los ‘Velazqueños’: pintores que trabajaron en el taller de Velázquez, pp. 234–6.
65 Doval Trueba, Los ‘Velazqueños’: pintores que trabajaron en el taller de Velázquez, p. 236.
66 René Jesús Payo Hernanz, ‘Una Inmaculada de Juan de Pareja’, 186 (341) Archivo español de arte
(2013), pp. 60–4.
67 Enrique Lafuente Ferrari, ‘Cuadros de maestros menores madrileños (Pareja, Solís, Arredondo,
García Hidalgo), Arte Español, 13 (1941), pp. 22–7. The image is on p. 22.
68 Doval Trueba, Los ‘Velazqueños’: pintores que trabajaron en el taller de Velázquez, p. 238 and René
Jesús Payo Hernanz, ‘Una Inmaculada de Juan de Pareja’, 186 (341) Archivo español de arte, pp. 61, 64.
interest [in Pareja’s works] has been shown’ in the 1932 inventory of the Ordoñéz
family’s successors.69
It is significant that most of Pareja’s works, unlike those of his master, are
devotional paintings that show his engagement with post-Tridentine Catholic
theology and the key narratives promoted for the conversion and catechism of
Afro-Hispanic slaves and their descendants.
The Emergence of the Slave Subject
In the Velázquez portrait Juan de Pareja, the distinctive non-white colour of

Pareja’s skin would have been seen as the inherent attribute that defined him as a
slave in early modern Spain and Europe.70 Even if Velázquez had decided to
depict Pareja as a Spanish gentleman devoid of any signifiers that might mark his
legal and social functions, this is nevertheless the portrait of an Afro-Hispanic
enslaved subject. Juan de Pareja is thus an exceptional work in being the only
surviving depiction of an enslaved, mixed-race man (mestizo) in Hapsburg Spain.
The fable-like origins of the Velázquez portrait, Juan de Pareja, executed dur-
ing Velázquez’s second trip, with his slave, to Italy (May 1649–December 1651),
are also laid out by Palomino:
When it was decided that Velázquez should make a portrait of the Sovereign
Pontiff [Innocent X], he wanted to prepare himself beforehand with the exercise
of painting a head from life; and he made one of Juan de Pareja, his slave and a
painter himself, with such likeness and liveliness that when he sent it with Pareja
for the criticism of some friends, they stood looking at the painted portrait and
the model with admiration and amazement, not knowing which one they should
speak to and which was to answer them.71
The court portraitist to Philip IV faced a challenge in depicting a non-European

subject at the papal court. More significantly, though, in this very acceptance and
cultural inclusion of an enslaved man of African descent, Velázquez signified the
magnanimity of the Spanish empire and the universality of the Catholic Church.
69 I was approached by the antiquarian Ángel Benito Pradal who facilitated the sale of the
Inmaculada from the Ordoñéz family in 2013 and he provided me with documents about this painting.
The original description reads: N° 32 Lienzo Concepción firmada por Juan de Pareja, fue criado de
Velázquez era mulato, libertado por Felipe IV. El escaso número de sus obras, hace que se soliciten con
interés.
70 The Slave in European Art, edited by McGrath and Massing (2012), p. ix.
71 Enriqueta Harris, Velázquez (Oxford: Phaidon Press, 1982), p. 209. For the original version, see
Palomino ‘Diego Velázquez de Silva’, in El Museo Pictórico y Escala Óptica (1715–24), edited by Nina
Ayala Mallory (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1986), p. 175: Cuando se determinó retratarse al Sumo
Pontífice quiso prevenirse antes con el ejercicio de pintar una cabeza del natural; hizo la de Juan de
Pareja, esclavo suyo, y agudo pintor, tan semejante y con tanta viveza, que habiéndolo enviado con él
mismo Pareja a la censura de algunos amigos, se quedaban mirando el retrato pintado, y al original, con
admiración y asombro, sin saber con quién habían de hablar, o quién les había de responder.
170 Black but Human
There is no doubt that in this extraordinary portrait Velázquez brings to the

fore Pareja’s ‘truth’. In fact, Palomino reminds us that the key to the painting’s
huge success was Velázquez’s achievement of the illusion of the ‘truth’, the ancient
concept of the likeness of the sitter:
Of this portrait (which is half-length, from life) a story is related by Andreas

Schmidt, a Flemish painter now at the Spanish court, who was in Rome at the
time. In accordance with the custom of decorating the cloister of the Rotunda
(where Raphael of Urbino is buried) on Saint Joseph’s day [19 March], with
famous paintings, ancient and modern, this portrait was exhibited. It gained
such universal applause that in the opinion of all the painters of the different
nations everything else seemed like painting but this alone like truth. In view of
this Velázquez was received as Roman Academician in the year 1650.72
Palomino no doubt raises the uniqueness of the Pareja portrait by echoing

an ancient story when he refers to the confusion made between the sitter and
the portrait.73
Enriqueta Harris clarifies Palomino’s confusion about the membership of
Velázquez’s acceptance in two organizations of artists in Rome in 1650: in January
of that year, Velázquez was invited to become a member in the Roman Academy
of St Luke because of the success of his portrait of the Pope who also rewarded
the Spanish painter ‘with a gold papal medal on a chain, and two gold medals
of Innocent X’.74 A month later, in February, Velázquez joined the Roman
Congregazione dei Virtuosi in the church of Santa Maria della Rotonda (Pantheon)
and, as a member, he exhibited his portrait Juan de Pareja there on 19 March of
the same year outside the Pantheon in the portico facing the main square and,
according to contemporary sources, the paintings were hung against Oriental
carpets, which covered the columns.75
One of the main functions of the Juan de Pareja painting was to heighten
Velázquez’s social status and self-promotion. Merely by the act of painting his
own slave, Velázquez, a slave owner like many other artists, may have sought to
72 Enriqueta Harris, Velázquez, pp. 209–10. For the original version, see Palomino, ‘Diego
Velázquez de Silva’, in El Museo Pictórico y Escala Óptica (1715–24), edited by Nina Ayala Mallory
(Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1986), p. 175: Este retrato (que era de medio cuerpo, del natural) contaba
Andrés Smidt (pintor flamenco en esta Corte, que a la sazón estaba en Roma) que siendo estilo, que el día
de San Jose, se adorne el claustro de la Rotunda (donde está enterrado Rafael de Urbino) con pinturas
insignes antiguas, y modernas, se puso este retrato con tan universal aplauso en dicho sitio, que a voto de
todos los pintores de diferentes naciones, todo lo demás parecía Pintura, pero éste solo verdad. Carmen
Fracchia, ‘Metamorphosis of the Self in Early Modern Spain: Slave Portraiture and the Case of Juan de
Pareja’, in Slave Portraiture in the Atlantic World, edited by Agnes Lugo-Ortiz and Angela Rosenthal
(Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 152–3.
73 Carmen Fracchia, ‘Metamorphosis of the Self in Early Modern Spain’, in Slave Portraiture in the
Atlantic World, edited by Lugo-Ortiz and Rosenthal, p. 153.
74 Enriqueta Harris, Velázquez, p. 27.
75 Carmen Fracchia, ‘(Lack of) Visual Representation,’ Journal of Iberian and Latin American
Studies, 10 (1) (2004), p. 25. Everett Fahy, ‘Juan de Pareja by Diego Velázquez: A History of the Portrait
and its Painter’, Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 29 (2) (1971), p. 472.
legitimize his own claims to nobility as well as advertising his own art in Rome.76
Thus, Velázquez did not hesitate to seek the support of his sitter, Pope Innocent X,
for the complicated process of his admission to the powerful military Order
of Santiago, which took place on 28 November 1659. The Spanish artist took
this decision to protect his Judeo-Converso roots,77 since the most important
requirement to join the Order was to be an ‘Old Christian’. He might have been
aware of the notorious cases of ‘New Christian’ artists who publicly suffered the
humiliation and threat of death by the Inquisition: Pompeo Leoni (1533–1608), the
Italian sculptor who worked at the Escorial and in Madrid at the Hapsburg Court
from 1556 until 1558, when the Inquisition decided to arrest him for Lutheranism
and subjected him to an auto-da-fé in Valladolid. He was confined in a monastery
for one year but completed his work in 1564 with his father, Leone Leoni,78 and
the earlier case of the most talented sculptor working in Cuenca, Esteban Jamete
(1515–65), who was arrested on 4 April 1557 as a suspected heretic on charges of
luteranismo (‘Lutheranism’). Even if he insisted that he came from ‘gente limpia’
by declaring that in France where he was born ‘they do not know what a convert
is. There aren’t any. Only Knights, gentlemen, noblemen, and workers. In France,
there aren’t any Jews nor Muslims nor slaves’,79 and denied his ‘crime’, Jamete was
subjected to an auto-da-fé in the main square of Cuenca on 15 May 1558. He could
not resume his work as a carver or sculptor ‘as a result of the tortures he suffered
under questioning’.80 Artists and artisans were also tried for having ‘produced a
work considered heretical [. . .] even if it did not violate Catholic orthodoxy’.81
On the other hand, in spite of the fact that the purity of blood policy, which placed
‘the faith at the apex of the Spanish hierarchical order’, created a caste society in
the New World,82 the acceptance case of Melchor Carlos Inga (Cuzco, Peru,
1574–Alcalá de Henares, Spain, 1610), Huayna Capac’s descendent, into the
military Order of Santiago in 160683 would have been puzzling to Velázquez.
76 Juan José Martín González, El artista en la sociedad española del siglo XVII (Madrid: Cátedra,
1993), pp. 34, 198, 200, Julián Gállego, El pintor de artesano a artista (Granada: Universidad de
Granada, 1976), p. 85, and Méndez Rodríguez, ‘Gremio y esclavitud en la pintura sevillana del Siglo de
Oro’, pp. 243–55.
77 Kevin Ingram, ‘Diego Velázquez’s Secret History: The Family Background the Painter was at
Pains to Hide in His Application for Entry into The Military Order of Santiago’ Boletín del Museo del
Prado, 17 (35) (1999), pp. 69–86.
78 Fernando Marías, ‘Censuring Public Images: A Woodcut in the Inquisition Trial of Esteban
Jamete’, in The Early Modern Hispanic World. Transnational and Interdisciplinary Approaches, edited
by Kimberly Lynn and Erin Kathleen Rowe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), p. 318.
79 My emphasis. See Inquisitorial Enquires: Brief Lives of Secret Jews and Other Heretics, edited and
translated by Richard Kagan and Abigail Dyer (John Hopkins University Press, 2011), pp. 36–63.
80 See Inquisitorial Enquires: Brief Lives of Secret Jews and Other Heretics, p. 62.
81 Marías, ‘Censuring Public Images: A Woodcut in the Inquisition Trial of Esteban Jamete’,
pp. 312–14.
82 Claudio Lomnitz-Adler, Exits from the Labyrinth. Culture and Ideology in the Mexican National
Space (Berkeley, Los Angeles, Oxford: University of California Press, 1992), p. 263.
83 Jesús Larios Martín, ‘Hidalguías e hidalgos de Indias’, I Congreso Ítalo-español de Historia Municipal
y de la Asamblea de la Asociación de Hidalgos (Madrid: Hidalguía, 1958), pp. 208–11.
172 Black but Human
It does not come as a surprise that the portrait Juan de Pareja, which is in
excellent condition,84 became a popular image, since at least five copies were
made subsequently. The history of this work and its copies is uncertain until the
eighteenth century and much research needs to be done to trace their trajectories.
Their history is not entirely reliable in part because of speculation and confusion
regarding their ownership.85 The first written evidence for Velázquez’s portrait of
Juan de Pareja is to be found on 20 October 1765 in a letter by Francisco Preciado
de la Vega, Director of the Spanish Academy in Rome, in which he claims that the
Pareja portrait belonged to ‘the Most Eminent Trajano de Acquaviva’ (1694–1747)
from Spanish Naples.86 However, in 1944, Elizabeth du Gué Trapier claimed that
the portrait in the collection of Cardinal Trajano de Acquaviva in Rome was
not the original, but the version of the portrait from the Earl of Carlisle, Castle
Howard (Great Britain) presented to the Hispanic Society of America in New
York in 1925 (see Fig 6.5).87 The original Juan de Pareja portrait by Velázquez88
was identified by the art historian in the ‘Radnor version’: ‘this portrait belonged
to Cardinal Acquaviva and suggests that what Preciado saw was a copy.’89 Trapier’s
assertions had been confirmed in 1971, after details of the provenance and X-rays
of the portrait Juan de Pareja by Diego Velázquez at the Metropolitan Museum of
Art were provided by Everett Fahy. The original portrait probably did not leave
Italy until 1776, when it was acquired by Sir William Hamilton, the British envoy
to Naples from 1764 to 1798, who took it back to London.90 Between 1814 and
1970, it belonged to the Earls of Radnor at Longford Castle, Salisbury (Wiltshire)
in Great Britain until it was purchased by the Metropolitan Museum of Art at
auction in 1970 for a record-setting price.91 Velázquez’s portrait was for the first
time accessible to a wider audience. Two out of the three other copies after
Velázquez’s portrait that are known belong to private collections: one was sold at
Christie’s, in London, on 29 May 1992, no. 321 and was originally in the collection
84 Hubert von Sonnenburg, ‘The Technique and Conservation of the Portrait,’ Metropolitan
Museum of Art Bulletin, 29 (2) (1971), p. 476.
85 Everett Fahy, ‘Provenance’, Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, 29 (2) (1971), p. 475 and
Velázquez in New York Museums, edited by Joseph Focarino (New York: The Frick Collection, 1999),
pp. 14–18.
86 For the transcription of Preciado de la Vega letter to Giovanni Battista Ponfredi, see Corpus
Velazqueño, edited by Aterido Fernández, pp. 632–3.
87 Catalogue of Paintings (16th, 17th, and 18th Centuries) in the Collection of The Hispanic Society
of America, edited by Elizabeth du Gué Trapier (New York: The Trustees of The Hispanic Society of
America, 1929), p. 164 and Burke, ‘Velázquez and New York’, in Velázquez in New York Museums,
edited by Focarino, p. 16.
88 Elizabeth du Gué Trapier, ‘Velázquez: New Data on a Group of Portraits’, Notes Hispanic 4 (1944),
pp. 48–54, 57.
89 Fahy, ‘Provenance’, Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, 29 (2), p. 475 and https://metmuseum.
org/art/collection/search/437869, accessed 27 January 2018.
90 Marcus B. Burke, ‘Velázquez and New York’, in Velázquez in New York Museums, edited by
Joseph Focarino, p. 14. Gustavo Frizzoni, ‘Intorno al secondo viaggio del Velázquez in Italia’, Rassegna
d’Arte 17 (1917), p. 110, mentions the Castle Howard and Radnor versions as both claiming to be the
original. Everett Fahy, ‘Provenance’, Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, 29 (2), p. 475.
91 Fahy, ‘Provenance’, Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, 29 (2) (1971), p. 475. http://www.
metmuseum.org/Collections/search-the-collections/110002322, accessed 31 August 2012.
Fig. 6.5. Unknown Artist (after Diego Velázquez), Attributed to Juan de Pareja,
Juan de Pareja, A1897. Courtesy of the Hispanic Society of America, New York.
of Captain J. B. Blackett in Arbigland, Dumfries, Scotland, while the other is a
nineteenth-century copy that was recorded in the Peruvian Embassy in Washington,
and for the last time in 1973 in the residence of the ambassador, Fernando
Berckemeyer, in San Francisco, USA. The third copy, considered ‘mediocre’ by
José López-Rey, is a slightly larger version and it has been in France, in the Musée
des Beaux-Arts Jules Chéret, Nice, since 1903.92
There have been discussions whether the copy seen by Preciado was by
Velázquez or by one of his assistants, Pareja or Martínez del Mazo.93 I support
Trapier’s suggestion that the Acquaviva version of the Pareja portrait at the
Hispanic Society of America in New York is a copy after Velázquez’s Juan de
Pareja that might have been executed by Pareja himself in his master’s studio
under his supervision,94 and not only because of the softening of Velázquez’s
form, something that echoes with Pareja’s portraits and pictorial language.
92 See records of the five copies after this painting in the link: https://www.metmuseum.org/art/
collection/search/437869, accessed 26th September 2018 and José López-Rey, Velázquez. Painter of
Painters (Köln: Taschen, 1996), p. 301.
93 For the history of this painting and attributions, see Catalogue of Paintings (16th, 17th, and 18th
Centuries), edited by Gué Trapier (1929), pp. 162–5.
94 Gué Trapier, ‘Velázquez: New Data on a Group of Portraits’, pp. 48–54, 57.
174 Black but Human
Eight months after the successful exhibition of the Juan de Pareja portrait
in the Roman Pantheon, Velázquez decided to liberate his slave legally on
23 November 1650 in Rome:
The most illustrious Diego de Silva Velázquez, Spaniard [. . .] declares that for
many years he has held in his power as captive—that is, as it is commonly said,
as slave—Juan de Pareja, the son of the aforementioned Juan de Pareja de
Antequera, in the diocese of Málaga [. . .] who has performed service and works
in a proper and faithful manner; and wishing to demonstrate to him his grati-
tude for the previous good service and considering that he can do nothing more
pleasing than to grant him his freedom. Given the above and other causes that
move his [. . .] he voluntarily grants and concedes and in the best way possible
as something irrevocable to the said Juan de Pareja in person [. . .] and to his
children and descendants in perpetuity [. . .] freedom and every right, action and
claim [and cause] that Don Diego [. . .] might have on the said Juan as captive
and the descendants [the latter] might have had or may have [. . .]. With power
and free, pure and true action he and those subject to him comes to the condi-
tion of a free man. In this way, in the future in fulfilment of the above, no service
or servitude or captivity to and with Don Diego or his kin will ever be required
[. . .] and Juan will never be enslaved again.95
In his manumission document, Donación de libertad (Donatio Libertatis), Pareja

is treated as a free man and, as was usual in Roman legal documents of the
Baroque period, his father’s name and place of birth are given, but neither his
ethnicity nor his colour are specified: Joannes de Parecha filium quondam altris
Joannis de Parecha de Antequera Maleghens diocesis.96 These biographical notes
also correct the earliest historiographical claim that Juan de Pareja was from
95 Pareja’s manumission document is written in Latin and it has been translated for the first time
into Spanish for the novel El esclavo de Velázquez by Fernando Villaverde (Madrid: Suma, 2014),
pp. 260–1: El ilustrísimo señor Diego de Silva Velázquez, hispalence [. . .] declarando haber mantenido
durante muchos años en su poder como cautivo-dicho comúnmente esclavo-a Juan de Pareja, de
Antequera en la diócesis de Málaga, cuya obra y servicio el propio Juan ha cumplido bien y fielmente; y
queriendo mostrale su gratitud por su antedicha buena servidumbre, y considerando que no puede hacer
nada más grato para el que concederle la libertad Por las antedichas y otras causas [. . .] da y concede,
voluntariamente y en el modo major, y también como donación irrevocable entre vivos, al dicho Juan de
Pareja en persona [. . .] y a sus hijos y descendientes hasta el infinito [. . .] la libertad y todo derecho,
acción y pretensión, las cuales y lo que el dicho don Diego en persona de cualquier modo, y la causa sobre
dicho Juan como cautivo y sus hijos y descendientes que haya tenido y tenga hasta ahora, o en un futuro
pudiera tener [. . .]. Con potestad y libertad libre, verdadera y pura se dispone para él y los a él sujetos la
condición de hombre libre. Así en lo sucesivo, o en un futuro, en cumplimiento de lo anterior no se aten-
drá a ningún servicio o servidumbre o cautividad con respecto al dicho don Diego y los suyos [. . .] dán-
dole la licencia y la facultad de sí mismo [. . .] el servicio y la diligencia para disponer a su placer de modo
que nunca el dicho Juan vuelva a ser cautivo.’
This is the first time that this document has been translated into English by Philip Derbyshire. See
Jennifer Montagu, ‘Velázquez Marginalia: His Slave Juan de Pareja and his Illegitimate Son Antonio’,
Burlington Magazine 125 (1983), pp. 683–5.
96 Montagu, ‘Velázquez Marginalia: His Slave Juan de Pareja and his Illegitimate Son Antonio’, p. 684.
Seville and confirm that his parents were slaves, as was common in Spain.97 It
solves the confusion about Pareja’s status as an enslaved subject that prevailed for
most of the twentieth century. This misunderstanding was sparked by the publi-
cation in 1932 of a document dated 12 May 1630 in which a certain ‘Juan de
Pareja’ asked the mayor of Seville for permission to go to Madrid for four months
to carry on his studies as a painter with his brother Joseph.98 The publication of
Pareja’s document of manumission shows, as Montagu rightly states, that the
painter Juan de Pareja in the 1630 Sevillian document was not Velázquez’s slave.99
The Italian legal document clearly specifies that Pareja’s freedom will be applicable
in Spain: ‘Don Diego has wished that this document be effective in Spain and
in such other jurisdictions and parts of the world.’100 This decision follows the
traditional formula that he should serve his master for another four years.101 This
was a standard legal requirement for the liberation of slaves in Spain and Italy, so
that they were able to buy their own freedom: ‘and after four years from now, during
which time the said Juan must serve the said Don Diego and his relations as
he has in the past and as the said Juan has promised to do on other occasions.’102
Indeed after Velázquez’s death in 1660, Pareja worked for his master’s son-in-law,
Juan Bautista Martínez del Mazo (1611–67) who became Court painter in 1661:
‘Upon this [royal intervention], Velázquez immediately gave Juan de Pareja a
Letter of absolute Liberty and Discharge from his Service; but Pareja was so
honourable as to continue not only to serve Velázquez, as long as he liv’d, but his
Daughter after him.’103
Velázquez probably freed his slave in Rome because the year 1650 was the 14th
Jubilee (a fifty-year Jubilee, called a ‘Great Jubilee’) proclaimed by Pope Innocent
X (Giovanni Battista Pamphili, 1574–1655). The word Jubilee and the implicit
97 For the original version, Palomino, ‘Juan de Pareja’, in El Museo Pictórico y Escala Óptica (1947),
p. 960; Juan Agustín Ceán Bermúdez, Diccionario histórico de los más ilustres profesores de las Bellas
Artes en España, 4 (Madrid: Imprenta Viuda de Ibarra, 1800), p. 50.
98 Corpus Velazqueño, edited by Aterido Fernández, p. 87.
99 Montagu, ‘Velázquez Marginalia: His Slave Juan de Pareja and his Illegitimate Son Antonio’, p. 684.
100 Villaverde, El esclavo de Velázquez, p. 263: el dicho don Diego ha querido que presentando su
documento tenga y pueda tener efecto en el reino de España, en cualesquiera derechos y partes del
mundo.
101 Steven A. Epstein, Speaking of Slavery: Color, Ethnicity, and Human Bondage in Italy (Ithaca and
London: Cornell University press, 2001), pp. 170–2.
102 Villaverde, El esclavo de Velázquez, p. 261: y cuando hayan transcurrido desde hoy los cuatro años
siguientes, tiempo en el que el dicho Juan se oblige a servir al dicho don Diego y los suyos etc., tal y como
ha hecho en el pasado y como el dicho Juan ha prometido hacer en otras ocasiones.
103 Palomino, An Account of the Lives and Works of the Most Eminent Spanish Painters, Sculptors
and Architects (1739), p. 75. See also Montagu, ‘Velázquez Marginalia: His Slave Juan de Pareja and his
Illegitimate Son Antonio’ (1983), p. 684: Velázquez hallándose preocupada la libertad con precepto tan
soberano, obedeció ciegamente a su Majestad en todo dándole desde luego carta de libertad absoluta a
Juan de Pareja, el cual procedió tan honradamente, que todo lo restante de su vida sirvió, no sólo a
Velázquez lo que sobrevivió a este caso; sino después a su hija. For the original version, see Palomino,
‘Juan de Pareja’, in El Museo Pictórico y Escala Óptica (1715–1724), p. 961. Velázquez’s daughter
Francisca, who was married to Juan Bautista Martínez del Mazo, as the original version reminds us,
died before her father in 1660.
176 Black but Human
idea that involves a special year of liberation were borrowed from the Book of
Leviticus (25:8–13):
And thou shalt number seven sabbaths of years unto thee, seven times seven
years; and the space of the seven sabbaths of years shall be unto thee forty and
nine years [. . .]. And ye shall hallow the fiftieth year and proclaim liberty
throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof: it shall be a jubilee unto
you; and ye shall return every man unto his possession, and ye shall return every
man unto his family.
When the Jesuit Sandoval claimed that in most of the Italian Republics slavery
was not recognized and if slaves went to those places they were automatically
liberated,104 he was certainly referring to the Church’s practice in Rome during
the Jubilee year, when ‘a year of remission’ from the penal consequences of sin,
was traditionally granted to prisoners, criminals, foreigners, and slaves. In 1535,
the Roman tradition that all slaves, regardless of origin, taking refuge on the
Capitoline Hill (Campidoglio) in the papal city were to be considered Roman citi-
zens and free became so popular that the excessive number of slaves manumitted
and the complaints from slave owners led to the tradition being put on hold, even
if it was later reinstated. In fact, slaves regarded the city of Rome as the land of
freedom until the beginning of the eighteenth century.105
In the 1650 Jubilee, in Rome, the most important ceremony was the Mass cele-
brated by the Pope in Piazza Navona, opposite the Castilian church of St James of
the Spaniards (San Giacomo degli Spagnoli). Approximately 700,000 pilgrims
attended and the massive investment by Philip IV of Spain for its staging sur-
passed all other in magnificence and splendour.106 The beginning of the Jubilee
ceremony would start with the Pope opening the Holy Door of the Basilica of
St Peter’s in Rome with the golden hammer to evoke the opening of the King’s
Gate at Jerusalem.107 The ‘central idea of the throwing open of the gates’ is seen as
a symbol of the outpouring of God’s mercyand as a reminder of Moses striking
the rock in Sinai and the waters flowing that is the waters ‘of grace and pardon’.108
This is a clear reference to the sacrament of Baptism as the gateway to the spir-
itual world, where all baptized human beings are equal and free. Palomino identi-
fies the roots of Pareja’s shift from slavery to freedom in the artist’s own moral
104 Jesús María García Añoveros and José Andrés-Gallego, La Iglesia y la esclavitud de los negros
(Pamplona: Eunsa, 2002), p. 101 and Alonso de Sandoval, Un tratado sobre la esclavitud (De instau-
randa Aethiopum salute) (1627), edited by Enriqueta Vila Villar (Madrid: Alianza, 1987), p. 82.
105 Salvatore Bono, cited by in Renzo Giacomelli, ‘Quei musulmani ‘schiavi di Roma’, Famiglia
Cristiana, accessed 12 March 2000, ttp://www.stpauls.it/fc00/0010fc/0010fc40.htm.
106 Ludwig von Pastor, History of the Popes from the close of the Middle Ages drawn from the
secret archives of the Vatican and other original sources, 30 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner,
1940), pp. 4, 51.
107 Pastor, History of the Pope from the close of the Middle Ages, p. 5.
108 Pastor, History of the Pope from the close of the Middle Ages, p. 51.
qualities—‘his ‘inventiveness, skill and honourable thoughts’. In his opinion, these

qualities son patrimonios del alma (‘belong to the soul’s inheritance’).109
This claim is remarkable since, as Palomino states, ‘all souls are of a single
colour and they are wrought in the same workshop’.110 Pareja’s biographer also
claims that he forged a new identity: ‘he [Pareja] was responsible for his destiny
and he forged a new being for himself, another, second nature, by his honourable
behaviour and dedication.’111
In his Juan de Pareja, Velázquez comes to elaborate the emergence of the slave
subject in Hapsburg Spain. The court painter acknowledges and expresses the
inner life of his slave by depicting his ‘thinking mind’ and the ‘perturbations of
his soul’. Thus, Velázquez endows Pareja with his own humanity: his slave has an
equal gaze to that of his viewers. The powerful sitter of this extraordinary portrait
is not depicted as a subordinate subject as in Weiditz’s drawings or as the sacrifi-
cial Ethiopian victim of the Miracle of the Black Leg. The slave Pareja is shown as a
free subject even before his emancipation. Velázquez’s adoption and adaptation of
the restrictive genre of portraiture to include his slave magnifies the effect of
Pareja’s sense of humanity and worth. The depiction of a mestizo/mulato slave in a
portrait defamiliarizes the essence of this genre and produces a dislocation in the
viewer’s mind. Juan de Pareja transcends the hegemonic norm in imperial Spain
and could only be regarded as oxymoronic. The portrayal of the enslaved Afro-
Hispanic man embraces and at the same time undermines the restrictions of the
genre of portraiture as codified by Spanish art theorists. Velázquez’s powerful
depiction of his slave, as we shall explore in the next part of this chapter, provides
the conceptual scaffolding and the form that Pareja uses in his own self-portrait
as a freed slave and in the depiction of the emancipatory slave subject in his painting
The Calling of Saint Matthew, produced for the Hapsburg court, one year after his
master’s death in 1660.
The Emergence of the Emancipatory Subject
In 1661, in his extraordinary painting The Calling of St Matthew, Juan de Pareja

depicts himself and represents his ‘second nature’ or new identity in the context
of the religious narrative of the Apostle of Ethiopia (see Plate 6.6). I believe that in
(1715–1724), p. 961: el ingenio, habilidad, y honrados pensamientos. Palomino’s claim was not trans-
lated in the 1739 English biography of Pareja.
110 Original version, Palomino, ‘Juan de Pareja’, in El Museo Pictórico y Escala Óptica (1714–1724),
p. 961: las almas todas son de un color; y labradas en una misma oficina.
(1715–1724), p. 961: por sus honrados procederes, y aplicación, se labró un nuevo ser, y otra segunda
naturaleza. See also Stoichita, ‘El retrato del esclavo Juan de Pareja,’ 375–9.
178 Black but Human
his monumental painting (225 x 325 cm), Pareja not only articulates the
e mergence of the Afro-Hispanic subject and his attachment to Christian Africa,
but also embodies in his work the collective longing for freedom and the solidar-
ity forged in the black confraternities. Here, the freedman depicts the precise
moment of the calling of the apostle and evangelist Matthew. This episode is
related in the Gospel of Matthew (9:9): ‘Jesus saw a man called Matthew at his
seat in the custom house, and said to him, “Follow me”, and Matthew rose and
followed him.’ In The Golden Legend, Voragine recorded that ‘Matthew the apostle
was preaching in Ethiopia in a city called Nadaber’ and also ‘in Egypt’.112 The
Andalusian painter has set this event in the narrow space of a tax office. The
room is unevenly divided by a column into two different spaces and times shaped
respectively by the spiritual and material worlds that converge in the figure of
Matthew. He sits in front of the column that is wrapped in a red curtain at the
desk covered by an oriental carpet, where symbols of material wealth are dis-
played before him. Matthew is looking towards Christ with a surprised expression
and pointing to himself in wonder at the Redeemer’s call to follow Him. He is
depicted as an orientalized Jew dressed in a turban, soft fur, silk, and jewellery.
On the left of the composition, the material world defines a space crowded
with account-books, sheets of paper, gilded urns, and the painting Moses and the
Serpent hanging on the wall. This material world is peopled by elegant tax officials,
bookkeepers, and members of the public, among whom Pareja included himself.
There are two other men sitting at the table: closer to Matthew is a bespectacled
bookkeeper who looks up from his work at the moment of Christ’s entrance,
while the client sitting at the corner of the table is viewed in profile and from
behind. He is holding a document while looking at the miraculous event and is
dressed as a contemporary knight with his sword and a feathered hat. Pareja
inserts himself on the left of the elegant client and stands below the window next
to another man who is looking out of the picture. On the right of the composition,
the spiritual world is represented and defined by the presence of Christ and his
three disciples, of whom two are distinguishable from the third follower by the
same motif of a white star that is a symbol of divine light above their heads.
This is a clear reference to the black carols we saw in chapter 1, such as the
poem A Belén han venido, where Afro-Hispanic slaves asked to be given the
divine light of grace to keep their souls white and immaculate even if they were
black, because they believed that Jesus came to liberate them from slavery. Christ
and his three disciples are barefoot and wearing historically indeterminate robes
and stand against a large open window with a balustrade, which allows a view of a
landscape in the manner and colour of Venetian painters, such as Titian in his
112 Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend: Readings on the Saints, translated by W. Granger Ryan,
with an Introduction by Eamon Duffy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), p. 570.
signed painting of Supper at Emmaus (c.1533).113 These iconographic details were

absorbed by painters working in Madrid in the second half of the seventeenth
century, such as Antonio Castejón, Claudio Coello, Juan Carreño de Miranda,
and Francisco Rizzi, amongst others.114 Pareja was already familiar with the
Venetian painters at the Hapsburg Court, before going to ‘the Republic of Venice’
with his master who, according to Palomino, ‘saw many works by Titian,
Tintoretto and Paolo Veronese, the authorities whom he had attempted to follow
and imitate after the year 1629, when he was in Venice for the first time’.115
The spatial arrangements of Pareja’s canvas, in which the indoor area opens
onto the outdoor space on the right of his composition, as well as the use of a
column with knotted red drapery as a spatial demarcation and a table covered by
an oriental carpet, show the impact that the Purification of the Temple by Jacopo
Bassano (1580, National Gallery, London) (see Plate 6.7) and the replicas made by
his sons Francesco and Leandro had on The Calling of St Matthew.116 The only
visible Afro-Hispanic man of the composition, who probably belongs to one of
the scribes or taxpayers represented in the painting, is peering from behind the
column and standing above Matthew’s head, with his face pierced by the divine
light which Crowns the apostle’s turban. He is also another visual reference to
Bassano’s young man showing his head round the column in his Purification of
the Temple. Bassano and his workshop paintings were extremely popular in
seventeenth-century Spain, and Pareja shows that he was well aware of this trend
at the Madrid court.
In the background of Pareja’s painting, between Matthew and the bespectacled
bookkeeper, is a young man holding a large folio volume and behind him is a
group of four figures. On the left is a man with a turban, who looks in surprise at
the central event and next to him is another man counting his golden coins, at
which a youth behind his left shoulder is peering. I believe that the unusual
motif of the column wrapped and knotted by a red curtain is a reference to the
quintessentially Counter-Reformation painting of the 1607 Madonna del Rosario
whose devotion amongst Africans and their descendants in the Hispanic world
is well known. This painting is by Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, known
as Caravaggio, for a Dominican church in Spanish Naples and now at the
Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna (see Plate 6.8). It was commissioned to
celebrate the Victory of the Holy League against the Turks at the Battle of Lepanto
in 1571 with Marcantonio Colonna in charge of the papal fleet and at the service
113 Titian’s Supper at Emmaus (c.1533) is at the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool. See http://www.
liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/picture-of-month/displaypicture.asp?venue=2&id=259, accessed 3 January 2013.
114 Joaquín Sáez Vidal, ‘Una Adoración de los magos firmada por Antonio Castejón: Nueva aport-
ación a su catálogo’, Archivo español de arte, 88 (2015), p. 203.
115 Enriqueta Harris, Velázquez, p. 208.
116 Miguel Falomir, ‘Jacopo Bassano and the ‘Purification of the Temple’, Artibus et Historiae 34
(67) (2013), pp. 275–84.
180 Black but Human
of Charles V and the Duke of Alba. This reference is clearly relevant if we consider
that Juan Latino recounts this military victory in his Austrias Carmen (1573)
dedicated to John of Austria, Philip II’s half-brother in command of the Catholic
Holy League.117 The motif of the column in Pareja’s painting does not only refer
to Colonna’s coat of arms, but it is a traditional symbol of the foundation of the
Church which, I believe Pareja adopted- to claim- that Christian Africa (Ethiopia)
is a foundational pillar of the Catholic Church.118
Nothing is known about Pareja’s client or the functions of The Calling of
St Matthew. However, the fleur-de-lis, symbol of the Farnese family, at the bottom
right of the canvas clearly indicates that this work belonged to the collection of
Queen Elizabeth Farnese (1692–1766), wife of King Philip V of Spain (1683–1746).119
It is mentioned as being in the pieza de la chimenea (‘chimney room’) in her 1746
inventory at the palace of San Ildefonso de La Granja and in the pieza de vestir
(‘dressing room’) twenty years later. Pareja’s painting was inherited by King
Charles III of Spain (1716–1788), who had it displayed in his pieza de vestir
(‘dressing room’) in the royal palace of Aranjuez, south of Madrid; later it was
inherited by Charles IV (1748–1819) who had it in the pieza de gentileshombres
(gentlemen’s room’) in 1794.120 This work was first recorded by Juan Agustín
Ceán Bermúdez in his 1800 Biographical Dictionary of the Principal Artists of
Spain.121 In the case of The Calling of Saint Matthew, Pareja’s work was not part
of a scheme of religious decoration.122 Pareja certainly saw Caravaggio’s painting
of the same subject in the Contarelli Chapel of the church of San Luigi dei
Francesi in Rome.123 It is in the same neighbourhood as the Castilian church of
St James of the Spaniards, where he lived with his master.124 In Pareja’s canvas, the
juxtaposition of the image of a mixed-race enslaved man with a sacred scene
is also a re-appropriation of Velázquez’s composition in his Kitchen Maid with
Supper at Emmaus, now at the National Gallery of Ireland, in Dublin (see Fig 6.6).
117 Wright, The Epic of Juan Latino: Dilemmas of Race and Religion in Renaissance Spain (2016),
pp. 3, 127–8 and Fra-Molinero, ‘Juan Latino and his Racial Difference’, in Black Africans in Renaissance
Europe, edited by Earle and Lowe, p. 326.
118 Helen Langdon, Caravaggio: A Life (London: Chatto & Windus, 1998), pp. 9–10, 333–5, 364.
119 See https://www.museodelprado.es/coleccion/obra-de-arte/la-vocacion-de-san-mateo/34917e11-
611e-451d-84df-a0efb1ac6381, accessed 29 May 2016.
120 For the origin of Pareja’s painting, see the inventories in the Royal Collection (colección Isabel
Farnesio, Palacio de La Granja de San Ildefonso, Segovia, 1746, nº 598; La Granja, 1766, nº 598;
Palacio de Aranjuez, Madrid, 1794, nº 598; 1818, nº 598). See also Pedro de Madrazo, Catálogo
descriptivo e histórico del Museo del Prado de Madrid. Escuelas Italianas y Españolas (Madrid:
Rivadeneyra, 1872), p. 513.
121 Ceán Bermúdez, Diccionario histórico de los más ilustres profesores de las Bellas Artes en
España, p. 52.
122 See Basil Yamey, Art and Accountancy (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1989), p. 66.
123 For the history and bibliography of the decoration of the Contarelli Chapel (1599–1600), see
Langdon, Caravaggio: A Life (1998), pp. 170–9.
124 Salvador Salort, ‘La misión de Velázquez y sus agentes en Roma y Venecia: 1649–1653’, Archivo
español de arte, 72 (1999), pp. 415–68 and Carmen Fracchia, Gaspar Becerra and the High Altar of
Astorga Cathedral (PhD dissertation, University College London, 1996), pp. 75–6, 182–3.
Fig. 6.6. Diego Velázquez, Kitchen Maid with Supper at Emmaus, 1622–1623, National
Gallery of Ireland Collection. Photo © National Gallery of Ireland.
Credit Line: Diego Velázquez (1599–1660) Kitchen Maid with the Supper at Emmaus, c.1617–18, Oil
on canvas, 55 × 118 cm, NGI.4538, National Gallery of Ireland Collection, Photo © National Gallery
of Ireland
In his 1622–3 Sevillian bodegón (a combination of genre painting and still-life in a

kitchen scene or tavern), the painter positions the anonymous female slave in the
centre of the canvas, in the kitchen adjacent to the room where the Supper at
Emmaus (Luke 24:13–32) is taking place.125 The anonymity of the subject is a
common feature of all Velázquez’s bodegones depicted in Seville before he moved
to the court of Philip IV in Madrid in 1623.126 This painting probably belonged to
the Archbishop of Seville, Castro y Quiñones who, in 1614, promoted the bap-
tism of Africans and their descendants in Seville.127 Needless to say, Pacheco was
collaborating with the Archbishop in championing the doctrine of the Immaculate
Conception. While the kitchen maid is depicted in a religious context, her fea-
tures have not been Europeanized, but her gaze has been lowered by the painter.
Her subjectivity had been denied, and her viewer could define her mainly by the
colour of her skin, in a society where the word ‘black’ signified ‘slave’. Thus, the
challenge for Pareja was to construct visually his own subjectivity, out of contem-
poraneous Spanish religious discourses. Velázquez recorded the same Kitchen
125 For a definitive dating of this work, see Charlotte Hale, ‘Dating Velázquez’s The Supper at
Emmaus’, Metropolitan Museum Journal 40 (2005), pp. 65–78.
126 See Rosemarie Mulcahy, Spanish Paintings in the National Gallery of Ireland (Dublin: The
Gallery, 1988), p. 80, David Davies and Enriqueta Harris, Velázquez in Seville (Edinburgh: National
Galleries of Scotland, 1996), pp. 128–9, 132–9. For the Dublin painting and Velázquez’s The Kitchen Maid
(Art Institute, Chicago), without the religious background, Carmen Fracchia, ‘La mulata de Velázquez’,
in Mujeres esclavas y abolicionistas en la España de los siglos XVI–XIX, edited by Aurelia Martín Casares
and Rocío Periáñez Gómez (Madrid and Frankfurt: Iberoamericana-Vervuert. 2014), pp. 17–32.
127 Tanya J. Tiffany, ‘Light, Darkness, and African Salvation: Velázquez’s Supper at Emmaus’,
Art History, 31 (2008), pp. 40, 42, 69, 79.
182 Black but Human
Maid without the religious background of the Dublin kitchen scene, now kept at the
Art Institute of Chicago in the United States of America in his The Black Servant
or The Mulatto Servant. The artist’s bodegones are a new hybrid genre that, in spite
of having its historical roots in the Netherlandish kitchen scenes of the late six-
teenth century, notably those by Pieter Aertsen and Joachim Bueckelaer, would in
my opinion be more appropriately categorized as a genre of portraiture of the
poor. In this way this group of paintings could relate to mostly anonymous work
depicting unknown Afro-Hispanic people in genre paintings, such as to the
unique Black Servant with Flowers, depicted around the middle of the sixteenth
century, by an anonymous Spanish painter and now at the Menil Collection in
Houston (see Plate 6.9). Jean Michel Massing noticed that the doublet with hang-
ing sleeves and full breeches that the young sitter is wearing indicates that he
moves in the circles of the prosperous upper middle class and nobility, and rightly
observes that this is ‘exactly the same kind’ of doublet as Juan de Pareja is wearing
in the Velázquez portrait.128
Eleven years after Pareja’s manumission from slavery in the city of Rome,
he inserted himself at the extreme left margin of his The Calling of St Matthew,
beneath the window, with his head against a halo-like golden plate (see Plate 6.10).
He is the only subject in his composition who directly engages with the viewers to
invite them to explore his Calling of the Apostle of Ethiopia. By establishing a link
between the figures in the paintings and the spectators, Pareja articulates his
personal account of freedom and the memory of the collective Christian African
past. The painter makes himself identifiable by a piece of paper, which he has
signed and dated (‘Jo.˚de Pareja F[ecit].1661’), that he is holding with his right
hand (see Plate 6.11).
If we compare Pareja’s self-portrait to Velázquez’s depiction of him, it is clear
that Pareja follows Velázquez’s template of a depiction of an Afro-Hispanic enslaved
man as a Spanish gentleman, but now full-length with his sword. He adopts some
aspects of Velázquez’s Las Meninas (1656), commissioned by Philip IV and now
in the Museo del Prado (see Fig 6.7), as visual references to convey his worth and
his nobility: the portrayal of his master’s self-portrait, with the same hairstyle and
moustache, as a nobleman and member of the Order of Santiago and his place in
the Hapsburg court by occupying a similar position on the extreme left of his
large composition. The difference is that unlike Velázquez, who depicted himself
in the act of painting, Pareja does not represent himself as a painter engaged in
manual activity. Instead, he chooses to embed himself as a Spanish nobleman in a
context of complex religious discourses and narratives. Both painters represent
themselves in the midst of an intricate network of relations established among
members of a group of people. The striking difference between Velázquez’s portrait
128 Jean Michel Massing, ‘The European Scene’, in The Image of the Black in Western Art, edited by
Jean Michel Massing, 3.2 (Cambridge, Mass., London: Harvard University Press, 2011), p. 247.
of his slave and Pareja’s self-portrait is that in his self-portrait Pareja decided to
represent the process of liberation from slavery by choosing to Europeanize his
features, as a visible sign of religious, cultural, and social assimilation. But x-ray
examination of the portrait by Velázquez shows that the latter had already started
this process, by Europeanizing his African features (see Fig 6.8). Thus, Pareja sub-
verts, even more radically than his master, the very essence of portraiture which
allows the sitter to be readily identified, since the fundamental requirement of the
genre is the true likeness of the sitter, as we saw in the first section of this chapter.
The functions of these two self-portraits are obviously different: Velázquez aimed
to improve his social status through the noble activity of painting to protect his
Fig. 6.7. Diego Velázquez, Las Meninas, 1656. © Museo Nacional del Prado.
184 Black but Human
Fig. 6.8. Diego Velázquez, Juan de Pareja, X-rays, X-radiograph under stretcher, the
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. © 2019. Image copyright the Metropolitan
Credit Line: Velazquez, Diego (1599–1660): Juan de Pareja (born about 1610, died 1670), 1650. Oil on
canvas, 32 × 27 1/2 in. (81.3 x 69.9 cm). Purchase, Fletcher and Rogers Funds, and Bequest of Miss
Adelaide Milton de Groot (1876–1967), by exchange, supplemented by gifts from friends of the
Museum, 1971 (1971.86). X-radiograph under stretcher. Department of Paintings Conservation.
Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art. © 2019. Image
copyright the Metropolitan Museum of Art/Art Resource/Scala, Florence.
converso roots while Pareja presented himself as an intellectual painter distanced

from manual labour in order to be perceived as a free man.129
In The Calling of St Matthew, Pareja’s self-portrait as a subject of freedom is
deeply embedded in this religious narrative where he paradoxically articulates his
attachment to his collective African Christian past and evokes a memory of his
existence as a commodity with exchange value. Matthew was the apostle of Ethiopia,
as Pareja reminds his audiences, when he decided to place the only Afro-Hispanic
man of the painted scene behind the Apostle (see Plate 6.12). Before his conversion
to Christianity and prior to becoming an apostle and one of the four evangelists,
Matthew was a tax collector known as Levi.130 His call signifies the transformation
129 See Fracchia, ‘Metamorphosis of the Self in Early Modern Spain’, in Slave Portraiture in the
Atlantic World, edited by Lugo-Ortiz and Rosenthal.
130 See Gospels of Mark 2:14 and Luke 5:27.
of Levi through his conversion to Christianity; the adoption of a new identity or

‘second nature’, which is conveyed by a star or a small circle of divine light above
Matthew’s head. In The Golden Legend Jacobus de Voragine reminds the reader of
the manner in which Matthew responded to Christ’s call: ‘When Christ called
him, he quit his customhouse immediately to become a follower of Christ and
nothing else, not fearing his superiors though he left his accounts own previous
unfinished.’131 There are no obstacles to deter the apostle from his new identity:
‘Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulations? Or distress? Or
famine?’132 In the Golden Legend Saint Ambrose, Doctor of the Church, explains:
‘Matthew now followed Christ, happy and supple, and exulted, saying: ‘I no longer
carry in me a publican, I no longer carry Levi, I put off Levi after I put on
Christ.’133 Ambrose makes the apostle define his new attachment to Christ by
turning the imagery of slave bondage into that of love: ‘I am bound with the nails
of faith and the soft shackles of love. Jesus, take away the rottenness of my sins
while you keep me bound with the fetters of love.’134 This is a clear indication of
the apostle’s new identity acquired after leaving everything behind, even his
previous self, so that the Doctor of the Church makes Matthew claim, ‘I hate my
race, I flee from my past life, I follow you alone, Lord Jesus, you who heal my
wounds.’135 It is clear that Christianity erased Matthew’s previous self and his past
to enable the creation of a new self. This is the way in which intellectuals and
theologians firmly believed that Christianity affected the souls of pagan Africans.
Pareja might well have been aware that Ethiopian saints, including Matthew, were
not only promoted in the visual form as we saw in chapter 3, but their lives were
introduced to the Marthyrologium Romanun at the end of the sixteenth century
soon after the Council of Trent.136 Besides, in 1635, a three-part comedy ‘Saint
Matthew in Ethiopia’ (San Mateo en Etiopía), was written by the Portuguese con-
verso theologian and playwright Felipe Godínez (Moguer, Huelva, 1582–Madrid,
1659), where the Andalucian writer followed very closely the narrative by Voragine
in associating Matthew with the Ethiopian saints, Iphigenia and Elesbaan.137
The main protagonists are the former, her father and uncle and St Matthew.138
This play is part of Godínez’s series of Life of Saints and the 1675 Auto Sacramental
131 Voragine, The Golden Legend, trans. Granger Ryan, p. 572.

132 Voragine, The Golden Legend, trans. Granger Ryan, pp. 573–4.
España de los siglos XVI–XIX, edited by Aurelia Martín Casares and Rocío Periáñez Gómez, p. 103.
137 Bernard Vincent, ‘Devoción a Santa Ifigenia en España’, in Mujeres esclavas y abolicionistas
en la España de los siglos XVI–XIX, edited by Aurelia Martín Casares and Rocío Periáñez Gómez,
pp. 101–3.
138 Bernard Vincent, ‘Devoción a Santa Ifigenia en España’, in Mujeres esclavas y abolicionistas en
la España de los siglos XVI–XIX, edited by Aurelia Martín Casares and Rocío Periáñez Gómez,
pp. 101–3.
186 Black but Human
de la Virgen de Guadalupe (‘Devotional Life of Our Lady of Guadalupe’), subject

of the lost depiction by Pareja.
In his The Calling of St Matthew, the freedman also establishes a direct geo-
graphical, spiritual and iconographic relationship between Matthew and Moses,
who had an Ethiopian wife (Numbers 12:1 and Acts 7:22),139 by positioning the
latter in the painting Moses and the Serpent, which hangs on the wall behind
Matthew. This is a copy made after the painting on the same subject by the converso
painter José Leonardo in the Museo de la Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San
Fernando, Madrid (see Fig 6.9).140 Moses is represented as the liberator of the
Israelites from slavery in Egypt where Matthew also preached. This image depicts
the story of the Exodus from Egypt when God tired of the Israelites’ complaints
and loosed poisonous snakes on them. Moses prayed for his people, and on God’s
command he made a serpent of brass, which he fixed to the top of a pole. All
those who gazed on it were safe from the poisonous snakes (Numbers: 21:4–9).
This story foretold the healing effect of Christ’s death and resurrection, which will
be accessible to African slaves and their descendants by the act of being baptized.
In the New Testament, John the Evangelist (3:13–15) explains that as the Israelites
were saved by looking at the bronze serpent at the top of the pole, so all those who
Fig. 6.9. José Leonardo, Moses and the Serpent, 1630–40. Courtesy of Calcografía
Nacional. Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando. Madrid.
139 See Elizabeth McGrath, ‘Jacob Jordaens and Moses’s Ethiopian Wife’, Journal of the Warburg and
Courtauld Institutes, 70 (2007), pp. 247–85.
140 Alfonso E. Pérez Sánchez, Pintura barroca en España: 1600–1750 (Madrid: Cátedra, 1992), p. 249.
gaze at Christ on the cross will be saved and enjoy eternal life. Catholic doctrine
interprets John’s comparison as an exaltation of Christ’s life. Pareja portrays
Moses as a precursor of Christ the liberator of Humanity. This association was
made very clear in 1597 in De la Conservación de la Salud del Cuerpo y el Alma
(The improvement of the health of the body and the soul), in the only treatise written
by the theologian and physician Blas Álvarez de Miraval:
Physician, heal thyself. And this is so, because Our Lord God had wished to be
called physician and exercised this ministry, so that in truth we might call on
His Divine Majesty to give us remedy for our maladies which is obvious because
having shown Moses the nature and virtue of that wood with which the waters
become sweet (as recounted in Exodus, chapter 15) says to him, I will lift from you
every illness that I brought upon Egypt because I am your physician and the one
who must give you health. And Christ Our Lord confessed to be a physician.141
In fact, Pareja depicts Moses and Christ as wearing the same robes and colours.
The canvas with the depiction of Moses and the Serpent evokes Pareja’s own freedom
from slavery during the Great Jubilee in Rome and the ceremony of the opening
of the Holy Gate of St Peter’s recalls the image of Moses striking the rock to allow
the waters of grace and forgiveness to flow. The painter also positions himself
opposite Christ and so refers to himself as a biblical Ethiopian. Pareja’s narrative
and self-portrait challenge the core of the Spanish policy of purity of blood.
Biblical Ethiopians are older and purer than ‘Old Christians’. Thus, Matthew, the
African slave and Pareja, as a freedman, belong to Ethiopia. This was the first
Christian nation, the first location of ‘Old Christians’, not imperial Spain.142
Pareja’s biblical claim legitimizes his self-representation as an ‘Old Christian’, a
Spanish gentleman, a free man, and subsequently as a free and intellectual painter.
He was in tune with the Afro-Hispanic poets and singers from the black confra-
ternities who believed that Christianity was a site of spiritual inclusion. By associ-
ating himself with Matthew, the painter and freedman Pareja becomes an example of
assimilation to the Spanish empire, where Afro-Hispanic enslaves who converted
to Christianity did not awaken the suspicions prompted by the conversion of
Muslims and Jews, whose religions were considered hostile to the Iberian empire.
One has to remember that Pareja was born in the diocese of Málaga and there-
fore he might have been of Muslim origin, since from the last decades of the
fifteenth century and especially during the wars of Cardinal Cisneros and then
141 See Blas Álvarez de Miraval, De la Conservación de la Salud del Cuerpo y el Alma (Medina del
Campo: por Santiago del Canto, 1597), fols. 414 r, 415v. The writer (Medina del Campo, 1560-?) stud-
ied Medicine and Theology at the University of Salamanca by1581 and he dedicated this treatise to
Philip II. Luis S. Grangel, Historia de la medicina española (Barcelona: Sayma Ediciones y
Publicaciones, 1962), pp. 40–1 and Luis S. Grangel, Ejercicio médico en el Renacimiento y otros capítu-
los de la medicina española (Salamanca: Universidad de Salamanca, 1974), p. 39.
142 Fra-Molinero, ‘Juan Latino and his Racial Difference’, in Black Africans in Renaissance Europe,
edited by Earle and Lowe, p. 339.
188 Black but Human
Charles V in North Africa (1505–1541), most slaves in this area had their origin
in North Africa.143 Thus, by identifying with the Ethiopians, Pareja and black
Christians distanced themselves from black Muslims, especially after the final
expulsion of the moriscos from Spain in 1609. Pareja certainly followed the
example of Latino who established ‘the dignity of all black Africans through their
association with the biblical Ethiopian’ in his poem Austrias Carmen.144 The
Spanish literary critic Fra-Molinero also sees the religious link between Afro-
Hispanic slaves and biblical Ethiopians as a process of liberation for black people
and different to the Christianization of the Jews and Moors. By identifying with
the Ethiopians, the black Christians Latino and Pareja detach themselves from
the image and fate of black Muslims.
The main visual problem that Pareja had to face as an emancipated slave, how-
ever, was the creation of a new visual motif in high art—the freed slave—which
would clearly convey his status as a man free from the stigma of slavery even as
the blackness of his skin would always have reminded his audience of his enslave-
ment and marginality. There is no doubt that Pareja had to resort to a visual strat-
egy that draws on religious discourses to represent himself as a free subject. He
was certainly aware of the early modern notions of the whitening of the soul
inherent in the sacrament of baptism and the missionary discourses directed at
Africans and their descendants in Spain and in the New World, due to the growth
of the transatlantic slave trade. This knowledge is attested to by his paintings for
the Augustinian Convent Recoletos in Madrid, and his previously mentioned
relationship with the Agustín Moreto who studied at the University of Alcalá
de Henares, and who dedicated part of his work to the Viceroy of New Spain
Francisco Fernández de la Cueva, the eighth Duke of Alburquerque (1653–60),
and protector of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. It is interesting that his last play (left
unfinished at his death, but completed by Pedro Francisco de Lanini), was about
the Peruvian Saint Rose of Lima (1587–1617). Canonized in 1671, she became the
first Tridentine saint of the New World, and patron of South America and the
Philippines. This network may explain the origins of the first Spanish image of
Our Lady of Guadalupe in México by Pareja.145 Besides, this no longer extant
decoration was adjacent to the Chapel of Our Lady of Copacabana, one of the
143 María Dolores Torreblanca Roldán, La redención de los cautivos malagueños en el Antiguo

Régimen (Siglo XVIII) (Málaga: Diputación Provincial de Málaga, 1998), p. 33; María Carmen Gómez
García and Juan María Martín Vergara, La esclavitud en Málaga entre los siglos XVII y XVIII (Málaga:
Diputación Provincial de Málaga, 1993), p. 77, and Raúl González Arévalo, La esclavitud en Málaga a
fines de la Edad Media, pp. 20, 59, 457–68.
144 Fra-Molinero, ‘Juan Latino and his Racial Difference’, in Black Africans in Renaissance Europe,
edited by Earle and Lowe, p. 326.
145 Ponz, Viaje de España en que se da noticia de las cosas más apreciables, y dignas de saberse, que
hay en ella (1776), p. 55 and Ceán Bermúdez, Diccionario histórico de los más ilustres profesores de las
Bellas Artes en España, p. 52 and Doval Trueba, Los ‘Velazqueños’: pintores que trabajaron en el taller de
Velázquez, pp. 239–40 does not mention Ponz.
most important devotions in the Americas, which had her origins in the Viceroyalty
of Peru, in a territory currently belonging to Bolivia.146
The whitening of the soul of Africans was popularized in the seventeenth-
century iconography of Philip Baptising the Ethiopian Counsellor (Eunuch), where
the only clue to the ethnicity of the African neophyte could be found in the written
inscription below the image, as in the 1640 engraving by Michel Lasne, after
Aubin Vouet: ‘You are not washing the Ethiopian in vain. Do not stop. The water
poured by the priest can illuminate the black night’,147 now at the British Museum,
London (see Fig 6.10). This image directly contradicts the popular Renaissance
belief that it was impossible to change the colour of the skin of the African man,
as we can see in the popular emblem LIX ‘Impossibile,’ in the Emblematum liber of
Andrea Alciati, published in 1534: ‘Why are you washing an Ethiopian in vain?
Ah, desist / No one can illuminate the darkness of black night’ (see Fig 6.11).148 In
my opinion, the spiritual legitimization of the process of self-whitening or the
Europeanization of Pareja’s African features gives a clear signal of his new status
of a freedman and his struggle to differentiate himself primarily from black
Muslims. However, Pareja’s transformation does not disguise, as we have previ-
ously seen, his attachment to his collective African past that was forged in the
black confraternities of imperial Spain. Whitening the self therefore does not
imply the achievement of freedom by the rejection of his African roots. It signifies
the adoption of the currency of freedom in imperial Spain. In his large canvas,
he elaborates his ‘new self ’ or second nature, as his biographer claimed, within
Spanish visual regimes and discourses on slavery and human diversity, which is
an extraordinary statement in Hapsburg Spain.
I would argue, as the case of Juan de Pareja shows, that the invisibilization and
marginalization of Africans did not completely exclude the struggle for freedom,
the emergence of the emancipatory subject and the black nation, the collective
solidarity. Nor, a fortiori, the contribution made by Africans in the visual field.
The last was achieved in spite of serious personal and social restrictions and in
the face of the theoretical belief that painting as a liberal or intellectual art could
only be practised by free men. This rejection of the premises established and
maintained since antiquity is visible in the self-portrait of the freedman Juan de
Pareja and the narrative of the Calling of the Apostle of Ethiopia as well as the
portrait of Pareja the slave by his master Velázquez and connotes expressions of
resistance and codifications of an exceptional instance of recognition of the
146 Francisco B. Luján López, ‘Nuestra Señora de Copacabana, una devoción andina patrona
de Rubielos Altos (Cuenca). Su origen y difusión’, Revista Murciana de Antropología, 8 (2002),
pp. 193–246.
147 Jean Michel Massing, ‘From Greek Proverb to Soap Advert: Washing the Ethiopian’, Journal of
the Warburg and the Courtauld Institutes, 58 (1995), pp. 188–91.
148 Massing, ‘From Greek Proverb to Soap Advert: Washing the Ethiopian’, Journal of the Warburg
and the Courtauld Institutes, 58 (1995), p. 185.
190 Black but Human
Fig. 6.10. Michel Lasne (after Aubin Vouet), St Philip Baptising the Ethiopian
Counsellor (Eunuch), engraving, 1640. © the Trustees of the British Museum.
Fig. 6.11. Andrea Alciati, LIX ‘Impossibile,’ Emblematum libellous, 1534, Paris: ‘Why
are you washing an Ethiopian in vain? Ah, desist/No one can illuminate the darkness
of black night.’ © the British Library Board, reproduced by permission.
192 Black but Human
subject’s humanity. It is clear that the emergence of the ‘slave subject’ and the
‘freed slave subject’ within visual regimes subvert the dominant languages and
theories of portraiture. In order to accommodate the different subjects consti-
tuted by the slave and the liberated within high art and so transcend hegemonic
and subordinated portrayals, Velázquez and Pareja both have to create new pictorial
languages within their chosen genres. Pareja’s self-portrait and Velázquez’s Juan
de Pareja express the discourses of slavery in imperial Spain that emerge from a
hierarchical account of human diversity, which is embedded in Catholic ideology
and underpins its religious categories: Old Christians, New Christians (Converso,
Morisco, Indian), and infidels (Turks, Muslims, Jews). Images of slavery as we saw
in the previous chapters mainly embody and reproduce hegemonic visions of
subaltern groups, but in the Pareja portraits studied here they offer material for
critical and emancipatory practices by enslaved and liberated Afro-Hispanics
themselves in Hapsburg Spain.
In the shift from the Hapsburg to the Bourbon dynasty, the Afro-Hispanic
proverb Black but Human, turned into the expression Black but Free: ‘Though black,
I am free: /and my soul no longer drags/ the dishonourable chain of tyranny/ that
the white rabble/ vilely drags along./The black always adores/ sacred liberty;/
shackles and chains/ cannot adapt to the black, and so, my blackness/ neither
dirties nor stains.’ This is the central message of an extraordinary song by an
anonymous Afro-Hispanic freedman, written at the turn of the eighteenth cen-
tury, discovered in 1993, on a separate piece of paper stitched in folio 177r-v of
the manuscript 3711, at the National Library in Madrid and fully transcribed for
the first time in 2004 by Labrador Herraiz and Di Franco:
I am black
Guinea is my homeland
Black my body
and black my soul,
and black too
all my lineage,
my glory is to be black,
and I make celebration of it.149
This song follows the canon of the black carols, as we saw in chapter 1. The
anonymous poet, as these two scholars noted, does not imitate ‘black speech’, or
149 I would like to thank Philip Derbyshire for the translation of this extraordinary poem from
Spanish into English. See José Labrador Herraiz, and Ralph A. Di Franco, ‘Villancicos de negros y
otros testimonios al caso en manuscritos del Siglo de Oro’, in De la canción de amor medieval a las
soleares. Profesor Manuel Alvar in memoriam (Actas del Congreso Internacional Lyra Mínima Oral III,
Sevilla, 26–8 de noviembre de 2004), edited by P. M. Piñero Ramírez (Seville: Fundación Machado y
Universidad, 2004), pp. 163–5.
incorporate any African vocabulary. Instead, he decided to write in perfect Castilian,

the language of the dominant culture. There is no doubt that the author of this
poem of liberation is a ‘real’ Afro-Hispanic person.
The Song of a Freedman is a poem of rage, pain, and freedom. The injustices
that the poet feels were committed against him and the Afro-Hispanic people in
the kingdoms of Castile and Aragon have deeply enraged him:
How many insults,

how many jokes,
how many indecencies
from the white race
in their clumsy words
has the black suffered.
Innocently
they would insult the black:
‘Let them die—they said—
those black souls’,
when their blackness
neither dirties nor stains.
In his song, the freedman decisively condemns the deep prejudices and actions
that founded the ideology of the enslavement of Afro-Hispanic people in the
Spanish empire. He attacks the inhumane sources of a slave-owning society and
he identifies the responsibility of slave owners in the implementation of this
inhuman process: ‘What is the white family/ made up of? /Men without virtues/
of ruined life,/fierce killers,/ soulless people,/ of hordes of thieves/ and other rab-
ble.’ The writer also claims that Afro-Hispanic people are different from their
white slave owners: ‘In the black sort/there is nothing of that:/their joyous black-
ness/ neither dirties nor stains.’
Instead, the song-writer defines white people as ‘slaves’: ‘The white is a slave/
who goes about exhausted /with thick and heavy/ chains,/ an immoral pervert
who profanes the law. The black detests/tyrannical power,/respects the laws/many
and ordered:/the black never dirties/it is always the white who leaves a stain.’ The
freedman explains the tyrannical decisions of turning Africans and Afro-Hispanic
people into slaves by white enslavers who at the same time honour their ‘holy
religion’: ‘The various songs/ of the white race/ are clumsy and lustful:/ that vile
rabble. / Bitter indecencies/ are all they sing and with that they honour/ holy reli-
gion!/ In days gone by the blacks/did not sing like that:/their black beauty/does
not dirty nor stain.’
Our anonymous Afro-Hispanic poet offers a radical new discourse of freedom
by making powerful statements against some of the beliefs that legitimized the
enslavement of Afro-Hispanic people in imperial Spain and by celebrating their
194 Black but Human
black appearance as a song of humanity, joy, beauty, and creativity. He undermines

the social prejudices that make the lives of Afro-Hispanic slaves and ex-slaves
unbearable by celebrating their physical and spiritual blackness, in the refrains of
this extraordinary poem: ‘my glory is to be black, / and I make celebration of it’,
‘their black beauty/does not dirty, nor stain’, ‘their joyous blackness/neither dirties
nor stains’, to conclude with the claim that ‘the black never dirties/it is always the
white who leaves a stain’.
The claim of blackness as a powerful articulation of the Afro-Hispanic counter-
culture fully exposes the inhumanity that forms the basis of the process of
enslavement in imperial Spain. Within the transition of dynastic power, this cele-
bration of the appearance of blackness and the ‘black’ beauty of the body and soul
of Afro-Hispanic people is extraordinary. It establishes blackness as independent
of whiteness and invokes the concepts of equality expressed in Hapsburg Spain
and conveyed by the colour of a baptized soul. The Song by a Freeman is another
exceptional moment in imperial Spain in which the subjects’ humanity, that had
already been anticipated in the visual articulation of the emancipatory Afro-
Hispanic subject articulated in The Calling of St Matthew by Juan de Pareja, is now
fully disclosed. This is a further step towards the full recognition of the humanity
of Afro-Hispanic slaves and ex-slaves that will eventually lead the Haitian Slave
Revolution (1791–1 January 1804), as the event that will mark the full agency of
Africans and their descendants.
Conclusion
The institution of slavery is a crime against humanity.

In Hapsburg Spain, slavery was inscribed on the skin of Afro-Hispanic slaves
and ex-slaves. Blackness signified slavery but slavery did not entail blackness.
This association was also well established during the Bourbon dynasty, when
Afro-Hispanic people were still bought and sold as commodities. Slave trading was
practiced on Spanish soil at least until the first quarter of the nineteenth century,1
as trading adverts in Spanish newspapers testify, such as in the Diario Mercantil
de Cádiz; Correo literario y económico de Sevilla; Diario de Valencia, or the
Seminario de Zaragoza; Diario de Madrid, Diario Noticioso Universal, Gaceta de
Madrid, and, the Diario de Avisos de Madrid, amongst others. Adverts in the
Diario de Madrid dated from 1789 to 1803 and in the Diario Noticioso Universal
(1774) from the Biblioteca Nacional in Madrid reveal that Afro-Hispanic people
were mainly from Spain, but also from Europe (France),2 from the colonies in the
New World, like La Habana in Cuba,3 and even from places in Africa, such as
Angola,4 Ethiopia,5 and Guinea.6 These advertisements include children, teenagers,
and young adults, from the age of nine to twenty-six, and they are mainly described
as black (negro, negra, negrillo, negrilla) or moreno, but also as mixed-race
(mulato, mulata, mulatilla, mulatillo). In addition, slaves are also denominated as
‘African’ (el negro africano),7 Ethiopian (negro Etíope),8 negro criollo,9 negro amer-
icano and negro indiano.10 The association of the terms ‘slave’ and ‘black’ is still
persistent, as in this advert in which an eighteen-year-old woman and orphan
requested two seats in a carriage to Cádiz, one for her and the other for her
personal ‘black female slave’ (de una negra esclava de ella propia),11 or as in ‘a
young black, aged twelve, slave of Don Nicolás Rodríguez’ (Un mozo negro, de
edad de 12 años, que fue esclavo de D. Nicolás Rodríguez) who knows how to read
and offered to take care of horses,12 or as in the case of a nineteen-year-old male
‘servant black’ (criado negro esclavo) who is a hairdresser, barber, shoemaker, cook,
and, tailor,13 and in another two separate accounts: a twenty-one-year-old male
1 José Miguel López García, ‘El mercado de esclavos en Madrid a finales del Antiguo Régimen,
1701–1830’, Historia Social, 85 (2016), pp. 47–62 and Jesusa Vega, ‘Estampas Calcográficas de la
Década Ominosa. Entre la devoción, la propaganda política y lo popular’, Archivo español de arte,
268 (1994), p. 343.
2 Diario de Madrid, 26 July 1798. 3 Diario de Madrid, 1 June 1794.
4 Diario Noticioso Universal, 24 March 1774. 5 Diario de Madrid, 27 October 1789.
6 Diario de Madrid, 3 February 1796. 7 Diario de Madrid, 20 February 1800.
8 Diario de Madrid, 12 October 1796. 9 Diario de Madrid, 28 January 1803.
10 Diario de Madrid, 3 March 1791. 11 Diario de Madrid, 30 October 1792.
12 Diario de Madrid, 5 June 1798. 13 Diario de Madrid, 12 January 1796.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198767978.001.0001
196 Black but Human
‘black slave’ (negro esclavo) who knows how to cook14 and a ‘mixed-race female
slave’ (esclava mulata) of imprecise age, between fifteen to twenty-five years old,
‘who is not ill’. She was put up for sale near Puerta del Sol, at the heart of Madrid.15
Afro-Hispanic slaves and ex-slaves were still employed in domestic service,
therefore in these announcements the social qualities and skills required from
Afro-Hispanic people are the same as in Hapsburg Spain: children would have no
personal defect (no tiene defecto personal), as we find in the sale of a very young
black girl of fifteen years of age from Angola, who knows how to cook, sew, and
iron16 or to be ‘a good Catholic’, as in the sale of an even younger black girl (una
negrita) of twelve to thirteen years of age who is learning how to cook and to
iron.17 The most common expectation of young adults is being of ‘good conduct’:
‘who would like to buy a nineteen or twenty-year-old black fairly tall, and of good
conduct that is outside Madrid’,18 or showing ‘decency’ (una persona decente),
such as in the sales of a twenty-three-year-old black man who is a ‘famous cook’19
and a twenty-five or twenty-six-year old ‘American moreno’ man who is also a
cook,20 a young ‘moreno’, or ‘well dressed’ (apreciables prendas), barber and hair-
dresser for men and women who cooks to perfection,21 a French ‘moreno’ cook to
be sold for 1,230 reales,22 a twenty-year-old French ‘moreno’ barber (sabe afeitar y
peinar) and ‘coach driver’ (y para volante de coches) who came from Cádiz.23 Other
qualities required would be, as in this selling of an eighteen-year-old black barber
and cook, to be of ‘good character’ (de buena índole) and ‘good appearance’
(de muy buena estampa) to be sold and to be taken to La Habana,24 or in this
advert about a twenty-two-year-old ‘mulata’: ‘very robust, and a good person’ (muy
robusta y de buena persona), she knows how to ‘iron a la inglesa, to sew in white
and in colour, to wash and cook with skill’.25 There is also another eighteen-
year-old ‘mulato’ who was a barber and a cook.26 There is an interesting advert
selling ‘a twenty-year-old black Ethiopian’, who is defined as ‘well educated’ and as
someone who knows how to read, write and count (bien formado, y que sabe leer,
escribir y contar), that addressed his sale to the potential slave-owner: either ‘a
person’ or ‘a Community’.27 Craftsmen also put adverts to sell their slaves perhaps
due to the economic crisis: a carpenter sells a twenty-six-year-old mulata, ‘tough
with various skills’,28 the enamel factory sells ‘a twelve-year-old white mulato boy’
with blondish hair who can read, write, count and is learning to be a hairdresser,29
14 Diario de Madrid, 23 February 1799. 15 Diario de Madrid, 27 March 1799.
16 Diario Noticioso Universal, 24 March 1774. 17 Diario Noticioso Universal, 16 April 1774.
18 Diario de Madrid, 19 November 1794: Quien quisiere comprar una Negra de 19 á 20 años,
bastante alta, y de buena conducta, que se halla fuera de Madrid.
19 Diario de Madrid, 1 May 1797. 20 Diario de Madrid, 1 May 1798.
21 Diario de Madrid, 9 July 1798. 22 Diario de Madrid, 22 July 1799.
23 Diario de Madrid, 26 de July 1798. 24 Diario de Madrid, 26 August 1798.
25 Diario de Madrid, 23 August 1798. 26 Diario de Madrid, 12 October 1798.
27 Diario de Madrid, 27 October 1789. 28 Diario de Madrid, 16 November 1799.
29 Diario de Madrid, 4 June 1799.
Conclusion 197
a surgeon’s shop sells a twenty-year-old black woman of ‘good character and lacking
vices’,30 and, the editors of Diario de Madrid sell a seventeen or eighteen-year-old
black man, ‘of good behaviour’.31 There are also adverts wanting to buy or sell
slaves which have precise requirements, such as selling ‘a mulato or black woman
who should be no older than fifteen or twenty years of age’,32 or to sell a ‘fine black
woman from nineteen to twenty-four years of age, who should have a healthy
complexion, be of good manners and well educated’ with two ‘fine four to six-
month-English puppies’.33 Announcements in the Diario de Madrid also refer to the
censorship of plays involving Afro-Hispanic people: for example, on 25 August
1800, the selling of the music for the comedy ‘el Negro sensible’ (1816) by Luciano
Francisco Comella (1816) that was censored by the Inquisition on 5 August 1809
because it ‘promoted’ the ‘insurrection of slaves against their legitimate owners’.34
During the Bourbon dynasty, Spain was still viewed as a provider for slaves in the
overseas empire, as the case of a young German theologian and businessman who
came to Madrid in 1786–7 shows: he came on a secret mission to convince the
Spanish government to buy ‘black slaves’ from the Danish possessions on the coast
of Guinea to avoid the collapse of the Danish company Det Ostersois-ke-Guinesiske
Handelselskab.35 Thus, the evidence provided by these adverts show that in Bourbon
Spain, the word ‘black’ became isomorphous with the social status of slavery.
In the visual form, the physical appearance of blackness as the sign of enslavement
was consolidated after Pareja’s death in 1670, and subsequently the depiction of
blackness tended to be erased and therefore the iconography suffered serious
misinterpretations as happens in the group of figures, Arsete and Clorinda, made
in porcelain and based on the epic poem Jerusalem Delivered (1581) by Torquato
Tasso, between 1771 and 1783. This group, now at the Instituto de Valencia de
Don Juan in Madrid, shows a scene from the Renaissance Italian poem that had
rarely been made into a visual image in early modern Europe. It is the episode in
which the Queen of Ethiopia is abandoning her own newly born baby Clorinda.
The baby is in her mother’s arms while the Queen is giving a purse full of money
to her eunuch slave Arsete to take care of her daughter. Arsete has already
received the Queen’s jewellery that is seen on the floor, while he opens his arms to
receive Clorinda. In the poem, this baby is not black as her mother is, but she has
the appearance of whiteness and this is the reason for which her mother is aban-
doning her; to avoid the suspicion of adultery.36 However, in this porcelain both
30 Diario de Madrid, 24 April 1799. 31 Diario de Madrid, 10 October 1799.
32 Diario de Madrid, 15 June 1799. 33 Diario de Madrid, 18 November 1797.
34 Antología del centenario. Estudio documentado de la literatura mexicana durante el primer siglo
de independencia (1800–1821) (1st edition), edited by Justo Sierra, Luis G. Urbina, Pedro Henríquez
Ureña and Nicolás Rangel (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1910), p. 424.
35 Gustav Henningsen, ‘Colección de Moldenhawer en Copenhague: una aportación a la archivo-
logía de la inquisición española’, Revista de Archivos, Bibliotecas y Museos, 80 (2) (1977), pp. 209–50.
36 The author of this work was Giuseppe Gricci (1720–1771) while the signature indicates that
Salvador Noferi was the person responsible for reproducing the former’s work in porcelain from the
198 Black but Human
mother and daughter are depicted as white. In Bourbon Spain, blackness was
persistently found unseemly to a Christian Queen because it could have given the
appearance that the queen was a slave.37 Salvador Noferi (d. Madrid 1793), who
was responsible for reproducing Arsete and Clorinda in porcelain between 1771
and 1783 from the original cast that had been provided in either clay or plaster by
Giuseppe Gricci (c.1720–71), subverted the fidelity of Tasso’s narrative. The
Italian artists had to change the colour of the skin of the Queen of Ethiopia more
than a century after the whitening of Pareja because of the Spanish persistence of
the perception of blackness. The group Arsete and Clorinda was produced at the
Real Fábrica de Porcelana del Buen Retiro (‘Royal Factory of Porcelain’), infor-
mally known as La China (1760) on a site in the Buen Retiro Park in Madrid,
where ‘models established at Capodimonte’ were met ‘to produce porcelain in the
form of dinner services, decorative objects and small-scale sculptures’.38 Visual
sources have not yet been identified for the iconography of Tasso’s poem, due in
part to the destruction of this factory during the Spanish War of Independence
against the French (1808–17), but Granados Ortega suggests that there might had
been other visual sources that influenced the making of Arsete and Clorinda. She
suggested a close relationship between Arsete and Clorinda and the plaster cast
that represents the ‘Bust of an African Youth’ (see Figure on the front cover), that
belonged to the Spanish Royal Collection and then to the Royal Porcelain Factory
until 1811, when they were moved (following those bought by Velázquez on his
second trip to Rome with Juan de Pareja) to the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de
San Fernando (Royal Academy of Fine Arts of Saint Fernando) in Madrid, in
which institution they are still kept.39
The erasure of blackness in Bourbonic visual form is a departure from Pareja’s
self-whitening in his superb Calling of St Matthew in 1661. Whiteness for Pareja
was the colour of freedom and the ex-slave painter adopted this colour as the vis-
ual motif of the emancipatory subject. Before the final abolition of slavery in the
Hispanic world, in Cuba in 1886, the only space in which Afro-Hispanic people
were considered to be equal to free subjects, from the theoretical, intellectual and
religious points of view, was the spiritual world offered by Christianity, and above
all, in the black confraternities. The evidence was the belief of the transformative
powers of baptism that whitened the soul of Africans and their descendants.
original cast either in clay or plaster. María Ángeles Granados Ortega, ‘Las porcelanas de la Real
Fábrica de su Majestad Católica’, in Carlos III. Majestad y ornato (Madrid: Patrimonio Nacional, 2016),
pp. 247–50.
37 Granados Ortega, ‘Las porcelanas de la Real Fábrica de su Majestad Católica’, p. 250.
38 The Cultural Aesthetics of Eighteenth-Century Porcelain, edited by Alden Cavanaugh and
Michael E. Yonan (London and New York, 2017), p. 184.
39 The plaster cast that represents the ‘Bust of an African Youth’ is in the Real Academia de Bellas
Artes de San Fernando, Inv. V-143, see Granados Ortega, ‘Las porcelanas de la Real Fábrica de su
Majestad Católica’, p. 250.
Conclusion 199
Pareja’s approach to the whitening of the soul and the body of Africans was firmly
linked with both his collective African past in Ethiopia as the first Christian
nation and with his present, with the Afro-Hispanic experience that had emerged
from the black confraternities, with their cult of Ethiopian saints, their public
engagement in religious processions, their writing and performance of black carols,
and their fight for freedom. Besides, Pareja did not forget to record visually his
painful past as a slave. In my opinion, he articulates the memory of the institution
of slavery that was responsible for turning Africans and their descendants into
commodities with exchange value by setting his narrative in a tax office. The
iconography of the Purification of the Temple by Bassano, where Christ violently
rejected trade and commerce inside the temple is resonant here. Pareja depicted
simultaneously a place of trading and the spiritual calling of Matthew that turned
the latter into the Apostle of Ethiopia. The painter also tried to remind his erudite
court audiences that the humanity of black slaves and ex-slaves has its roots in
Christianity, in an Ethiopia that had been converted to Christianity much earlier
than Hapsburg Spain. Therefore, in spiritual terms, where the distinction between
black and white did not exist, Afro-Hispanics had the right to be depicted as
white, the colour of equality, which was also thought to be the colour of souls.
Pareja’s self-fashioning as a Spanish nobleman made use of the post-Tridentine
discourses to undermine the deep beliefs in the imperial ideology of purity of
blood that was also responsible for the formation of a casta system created in the
main Spanish viceroyalties of the New World. This system had found visual
embodiment in the so-called casta paintings. Here the process of intermixture,
resulting from the union between Spaniards, Native Americans and Africans, is
displayed in family portraits, such as the Braemore castas (c.1725), the first known
set made of fourteen paintings from New Spain (Mexico), attributed to the
Mexican painter, Juan Rodríguez Juárez and now at Braemore House (Hampshire,
Great Britain).40 In 1770, the Archbishop of New Spain, Antonio Lorenzana
(1766–72), claimed that ‘in Old Spain only a single caste of men is recognized, and
in the New (Spain) many and different’.41 However, we must not forget that Old
Spain was also an ethnically diverse society and there was a feeling that there were
more black than white slaves in Spanish cities, such as cosmopolitan Seville. This
is the claim made by Damasio de Frías in 1582 who believed that the large pres-
ence of slaves corrupted the principle of purity of blood and endangered the city:
They run great danger, not only in government and customs, with the abun-
dance of this useless rabble, mainly of servants, but also that the lives, freedom
40 Carmen Fracchia, ‘Depicting the Iberian African in New Spain’, in Mexico 1680: Intellectual and
Cultural Life at the Apogee of the Barroco de Indias, edited by Jean Andrews and Alex Coroleu (Bristol:
Hiplam, 2007), pp. 45–62.
41 Ilona Katzew, Casta Painting: Images of Race in Eighteenth Century Mexico (New Haven and
London: Yale University Press, 2004), p. 39.
200 Black but Human
and affairs of the citizens are always at obvious risk of being lost, as in Seville
with such a multitude of black and Moorish slaves, as well as Lisbon, where they
are certainly many more than the free people and whites.42
Frías felt therefore lucky to live in Valladolid, since its population was ‘purer’ and
less contaminated.
The case of Pareja shows that the invisibilization and marginalization of
Africans and their descendants did not completely obscure the struggle and
contribution made by Afro-Hispanics and Afro-Europeans in the early modern
Spanish visual field. The freedman Pareja opened the way to other Afro-European
slaves at the Bourbon court having their careers accepted. Charles III brought
from Naples his royal architect Antonio Carlos de Borbón (d.1783) and the royal
painter Joseph Carlos de Borbón (d. Madrid, 1773).43 The latter provided stage
sets for the Theatre del Buen Retiro (Madrid) commissioned by the King and
his seascapes are kept in the Museo del Prado, while the architect produced the
buildings for the Royal Porcelain Factory and the Caballerizas Reales in Madrid.44
Charles III, who kept Pareja’s The Calling of St Matthew in his private quarters,
decreed the so-called Spanish ‘Black Codes’ (Códigos Negros, 1768–88) and
founded the Casa de Negros in the New Palace (Palacio Nuevo) in 1766 to keep his
1,500 personal slaves. Their court painters, such as Francisco de Goya (1746–1828)
also recorded other slave-owners of the aristocracy, such as the Duchess of Alba,
in his Indian ink sketch The Duchess of Alba Holding María de la Luz (1794–5)
where María de la Luz, who was a slave born in Cuba and given to the Duchess as
a present, is portrayed. Goya also recorded Afro-Hispanic slaves or freedmen in
his ‘The Sanctimonious’ with Luis de Berganza and María de la Luz in 1795. In
1802, the poet Manuel José Quintana, who saw the freeing of slaves as an important
element of Enlightenment, dedicated a poem, A una negrita protegida por la
duquesa de Alba, to this slave girl who was adopted by the Duchess.45 However,
the low visibility of Afro-Hispanic slaves and freedmen in Spanish visual culture
during the Hapsburg dynasty needs to be addressed and requires further research.
42 Damasio de Frías, ‘Diálogos de alabanza de Valladolid’ [1582], in Miscelánea Vallisoletana,

edited by Narciso Alonso Cortés (Valladolid: lmprenta de E. Zapatero Ferrari, 1955), p. 124.
43 José Miguel López García, ‘Los esclavos del Rey de España a finales del Antiguo Régimen’, in
La Corte de los Borbones: crisis del modelo cortesano, edited by J. Martínez Millán, C. Camarero Bullón
and M. Luzzi Traficante, 1 (Madrid: Polifemo, 2013), pp. 222, 223, 224–6, 228. See also José Moreno
Villa, Locos, enanos, negros y niños palaciegos. Siglos XVI y XVII: Gente de Placer que tuvieron los
Austrias en la Corte Española desde 1563 a 1700 (Mexico City: Ed. Presencia, La Casa de España en
México, 1939), pp. 31, 68.
44 López García, ‘Los esclavos del Rey de España a finales del Antiguo Régimen’, pp. 221–165.
45 Nigel Glendinning’s e-mails dated 1.12.2010 and Luis Monguió, ‘El negro en algunos poetas
españoles y americanos anteriores a 1800’, Revista Iberoamericana, 22 (1957), p. 253.
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Index
Note: Figures are indicated by an italic ‘f ’, respectively, following the page number.
Abolition v–vi, 7–8, 34–5, 116–17, 153, 198–9 Aristotle 35–8, 100–1
acculturation 34–5, 95, 103, 150–1 Austria, Juana de 23–4, 64–5, 125–6, 154–8
Acquaviva, Trajano de 172–3 Austria, Empress Maria of 125–6
Acta Sanctorum (see Cosmas and Damian) Austria, Margarita of 88–9
125–6, 153 Autopsy 124
Aertsen, Pieter 180–2 Ávila 7–8, 127, 143–5
African vi, 1–13, 34–9, 56–60, 91–108, 121–43, Ávila, Juan de 79–81, 80f
154–69, 195–200 Aztecs (see Native American and caciques)
Afro-Cuban 86 6–7, 115–18
Afro-European 67–9, 200
Afro-Hispanic 1–13, 34–9, 56–60, 91–108, Badajoz (see slave auctions) 118–20
121–43, 154–69, 195–200 Baptism 3–4, 30, 37, 39–40, 52, 168–9, 176–7
Afro-Iberian 1–2 black 22, 39–42, 85–6, 180–2
Afro-Portuguese 19–20 black carols 17
Aguas, Martín de 154–6 Christianization 3–4, 35–7, 39–40,
Alcázar 8–10, 106, 159–61 44–6, 187–8
Alciati, Andrea 189, 191f Conversion 33–5, 37–45, 55, 92–3, 151–2,
Alfonso X (see Las Siete Partidas, Leyes 169, 184–7
Nuevas, occupation laws) 100–1, 117 moor 39
Allegory 12, 66, 92–3, 153 slave 30, 32–3, 37–9, 44–5, 151
America 93 soul 188–9
Dominica 93 whitening (see also under White) 2–5, 30–2,
Hispania (Spain) 92–3, 94f 40–2, 70–1, 153, 188–9, 197–9
Hispania Nova (New Spain) 92–3 Barbarian (see infidel, moor, pagan) 33,
India 92–3 35–7, 87–8
Álvarez de Miraval, Blas 186–7 Barcelona 76–8, 88–9, 108–9
Amputation 7–8, 121–3, 131–7, 143, 145–8 Cathedal of Barcelona 140–2, 141f
Anargyroi/anagyric (see Cosmas and Church of Santa María de Terrassa 131–2
Damian) 123–4, 139–40 Confraternity of Sant Jaume 52–3, 101–2
Anatomy 124, 132–9 Museo Episcopal de Vic 129–31, 130f
Andújar Castillo, Francisco (see Museo Federico Marés (see devotional
slavery, branding) 105–6 jewellery) 106–8
Animals 64–5, 93, 100–1, 106 Baronio, Cardinal Cesare (see black saints) 76
Antequera (see Málaga) Bassano, Jacopo (see also Bassano, Jacopo dal
Aquinas, Thomas of 34–7, 40–2 Ponte) 8–10, 179, 198–9
Summa Theologiae (1265–74) 37–8 Battle of Lepanto (see Turks) 76–8, 88–9, 179
Aranjuez palace 106, 158, 180–2 Berber 1–2, 15–16, 54, 98–9, 106, 124, 128–9
Art treatises 58–9, 84, 161–2 Berganza, Luis de 200
Arce, Juan de 145–7 Berruguete, Alonso 143–5
Arce the Younger, Juan de 145–7 Berruguete, Pedro 118, 121–3, 125–6,
Argote de Molina, Gonzalo 64–5 131–7, 143–7
Arias, Bernardo 143–5 Bible
Arias, Francisco 143–5 Acts 40–2, 186–7
Arias, Gómez 5, 87 Book of Revelations 84
224 Index
Bible (cont.) Borbón, Antonio Carlos de 200

David 40–2 Borbón, Joseph Carlos de (see Theatre del
Exodus 40–2 Buen Retiro) 200
Genesis 12, 35–7 Bourbon
Gospels 60–1, 123–4, 177–8 Court 154–6, 200
Leviticus 175–6 Carlos (Charles) II of Spain 30–2
New Testament 40–2, 186–7 Carlos (Charles) III of Spain 54, 78–9, 160f,
Numbers 186–7 180–2, 200
Psalms 40–2 Carlos IV of Spain 8–10, 173f, 180–2
Song of Songs 23, 84 dynasty 8–10, 40–2, 192, 195–8
Black (see negro, slave) Spain 158–9, 197–8
Artists/writers 1–2, 8–10, 150, 163–4, 166, Brazil (see Confraternities) 54–5
176–7, 180–2, 192–4, 200 Bueckelaer, Joachim 180–2
carols 3–4, 16–24, 32, 66, 78–9, 178–9, Burgos, Alonso de 145–7
192–3, 198–9
colour 1–3, 8–13, 15, 23, 30–2, 103–4, 128–9, 153, Cabinet of curiosities (see also relics) 64–5,
169, 174–5, 177, 180–2, 189, 194, 197–9 93–4, 125–6
colour classification 1–3, 15–16 Caciques (see Aztecs, Native Americans) 40–2,
confraternities (see Slave) 2–5, 48–55, 71–9, 116–18
81–2, 84, 95–7, 150, 177–8, 187, 189, 198–9 Cádiz 14, 20–1, 98–9, 110–14, 116–17, 163–4
identity 48, 66–7, 105–6, 120, 153, Nuestra Señora de la Salud y San Benito y Santa
177–8, 184–6 Ifigenia (Confraternity of Our Lady of
Immaculate Conception 22–3 Health (see freedmen/women) 52–3, 71–6
language 11–12, 19–20, 44–5, 83, 115, 192–3 Diario Mercantil de 195–7
Madonna 22n.56, 179–80 Candace, Queen of the Ethiopians
Music/instruments 16–18, 76–9, 195–7 (see Ethiopian) 3–4, 40–2, 76
nation 1–4, 24–5, 60–1, 76, 117–18, 128–9, 170, Capac, Huayna 117, 170–1
187, 189–92, 198–9 Carducho, Vicente 161–4
poems /poets (see also Juan Latino) 8–10, Carlisle, Earl of 172–3
16–21, 23, 27, 126–7 Carnicero, Antonio 8–10, 158–9, 173f
skin 12–13, 15–16, 18, 23, 61, 103, 106–9, 128–9, Carols (see Villancicos) 2–3, 20–1, 66
149–50, 169, 180–2, 188–9, 195–8 Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi da
slave 1–3, 13–16 Caravaggio) 8–10, 179–80
songs 8–10, 16–17, 19–20, 22–4, 76–8, 192–4 Carracci, Annibale 8–10, 154–6
soul 2–4, 7–13, 34–9, 56–60, 100–1, Carreño de Miranda, Juan 178–9
154–69, 198–9 Casa de Negros (House of Blacks) 200
speech (hablar negresco) 11–12, 16–20, 23–4, Castejón, Antonio 178–9
32, 192–3 Castillo, Juan de 48–9
stained 12–13, 27–8 Casa Real (Royal House) (see Alcázar palace) 106
steward (mayordomo) (see Valladolid, Casas, Bartolomé de las 7–8, 35–7, 45–6, 145–8
Juan de) 49–51, 76–8 Castas (see black, colour classification) 14, 198–9
work song 2–4, 16–21, 48 Castejón, Antonio 178–9
Black but Human, topos 1–5, 8–11, 34, 48, 55, Castro y Quiñones, Pedro de (see Vaca
66, 152 de Castro) 3–4, 22, 44–5, 84–6, 180–2
Black but Human 11–13, 70–1, 192 Catholic
Afro-Hispanic proverb 1–3, 8–14, 16–17, 21–5, Counter Reformation 54–5
27–8, 192 Holy League 179–80
Blackness: slavery 1–2 Ideology 189–92
Blood Reformation 37–8
Purity of 28, 45–7, 83, 124, 151–2, 170–1, society 47
187, 198–9 Catholic Monarchs 49
Body 2–3, 14, 27–32, 37–8, 56–7, 69–71, 103, Isabella I of Castile 76–8, 145–7
105–6, 109, 121–3, 125–6, 129–37, 142–3, Ferdinand 86, 132–7
145–50, 152–3, 186–7, 192, 194, 198–9 Ceán Bermúdez, Agustín 180–2
Boil, Bernardo, Franciscan Minim 86 Cervantes, Miguel de 18
Index 225
Chicaba (Teresa Juliana de Santo Domingo) (see Conversos (see Inquisition) 45–6

Paniagua) 30–2 Córdoba (see also slave auctions) 13, 28, 40–2,
Church 43f, 54–5, 116–17, 150
Canon Law 34–5, 100 Cornielis de Holanda, Nicolás 7–8, 143–5, 144f
Catholic 28, 169, 179–80 Corpus Christi (see also Processions) 16–20,
Christian doctrine 44–5, 186–7 50–1, 78–9, 81–2, 95–7
School of Salamanca 3–4, 35–7 Cortés, Hernán or Fernando 71–6, 115–16
Christ 11, 37–8, 45–6, 56–7, 67–9, 79–81, 106–8, Correas, Gonzalo (see Black but Human
121–3, 154–6, 168–9, 198–9 proverb) 2–3, 11–12, 26
Christianity (see also Conversion) 8–10, 30–5, Cortese, Bartolomeo (see Cortés Hernán or
37–40, 51, 55, 57, 71–6, 92–3, 100–1, 152, Fernando) 71–6
184–7, 198–9 Cosmas and Damian, Saints (see Miracle of the
Orthodox 35–7, 45–6, 170–1 Black Leg, relics) 7–8, 121–43
Unorthodox 46–7 ‘Goigs’ and ‘joys ’ 126–7
Christianization 3–4, 35–7, 39–40, 44–5, 187–8 Costume book (see Weiditz) 76–8, 92, 108–9,
Cincinnato, Romulo 57–8 115–16, 120
Cisneros, de Jiménez, Francisco 7–8, 35–7, Council of Indies (see also House
39–40, 143–5, 147–8, 187–8 of Trade) 91
Clothing (see also Costume book) 76–9, 109–15, slave licences (see Commodity)
117–18, 158–9 Council of Trent 3–5, 37–8, 45–6, 52–3, 56–7,
sword 177–8, 182–4 59–60, 66–7, 70, 76, 145–7, 184–6
collar 95–7, 158 aims of art 56–7
doublet 158, 180–2 Decrees 56, 66–7
Cobos, Diego de los 132–7 function of images 56, 59
Cock, Enrique 64–5 Sacraments 44–5
Códigos Negros (see Charles III) 200 Court (see Bourbon and Hapsburg)
Coello, Claudio 178–9 artists 57–8, 65, 159–61, 175, 200
Colonna, Marcantonio 179–80 dwarves 8–10, 115–16, 154–8
Columbus, Christopher 40–2, 86, 143–7 slaves 8–10, 99–100, 117–18, 154–6, 158
Comella, Luciano Francisco 195–7 Covarrubias Orozco, Sebastián de, (see Black but
Commodity 2–3, 24–5, 33, 109, 184–6 Human proverb) 2–3, 11, 25, 27, 100,
slave licences (see House of Trade, Council 104–6, 125–6, 128–9, 148–9, 161–2
of Indies) 91–2, 147–8, 150–1 Cruz, Sor Juana Inés de la 2–3, 23–4,
Confraternity 29–32, 188–9
aristocratic confraternities 46–7 Cuadra, Pedro de la 5, 88–9, 89f
prohibition of membership 5, 46–9, 81–2, 84 Cuba
black confraternities 2–10, 16–17, 23–4, 33, La Habana (see black confraternity) 5, 86,
44–5, 48–55, 60–1, 66–7, 71–9, 81–2, 84, 116–17, 168–9, 195–200
95–7, 150–1, 177–8, 187, 189, 198–9
medical confraternities 124, 138–9 Dantiscus, Johannes 108–9, 115–16
mixed-race confraternities 3–4, 16–17, 52–3, Daza, Antonio 70–1
66–7, 76–8 Descalzas Reales (see Poor Clares/Discalced
foundation 3–4, 47–9, 52–5 Carmelites) 23–4, 69–76, 125–6
structure 50–1, 53–4, 67 Devotional objects
steward (mayordomo) 49–51, 76–8 Jewellery 106–8, 107f
procession 5, 16–20, 50–1, 67, 71–87, 95–7, Paintings 169
106–8, 118–20, 198–9 Prayer books 40–2
work songs 3–4, 16–21, 48 Triptych 63, 65
ethnic tension 81–2, 95–7 Díaz de Vivar y Mendoza, Rodrigo 165–6
abolition 81–2 Dissection (see surgery) 125–6
legal case against 5 Drawing 6–10, 91–9, 109, 115–16, 120, 143–5,
insignia 81–2, 106–8 158–9, 177
jewellery 106–8, 107f sketch 109–14, 117–18, 120, 151–2, 200
Constantinople, Fall of 97 Duke of Alba 94–5, 179–80
Conversion (see Baptism) Duchess of Alba 200
226 Index
Empire 4–8, 17, 25, 28, 34–5, 37–8, 52–3, 57, Emancipatory discourses/practices 1–2, 8–10,
59–61, 64–5, 67, 76–8, 84, 87–8, 92–3, 189–92
98–9, 115–17, 120, 132–9, 152, 154–6, manumission 8–10, 14–15, 22, 30–2, 50,
159–61, 169, 187, 193, 195–7 99–100, 166–7, 174–5, 182
El Escorial 57–8, 170–1 song of a freedman 8–10, 193
El Greco(Domenikos Theotocopoulos) 57–8 Freedman/woman 8–10, 15, 95–9, 158–61, 165–6,
Emancipatory subject 1–2, 8–10, 40–2, 48, 71–6, 177–8, 186–7, 189–93, 200
89–90, 177–94, 198–9 classification 100, 117–18
Engraving 30, 31f, 189, 190f Frías, Damasio de 198–9
Print/printing 66–7, 91, 93–4, 163–4 Frías de Albornoz, Bartolomé (see slavery,
Enlightenment (see emancipatory subject), the condemnation of) 34–5, 37–8
40–2, 78–9, 200 Fugger family (see Mines) 108–9
Enrique III of Castile 48–9 Fugitive slave 7–8, 104–6, 118–20, 148–50
Equality 2–3, 21–3, 26, 33, 35–7, 62–3, 66,
194, 198–9 Ginés de Sepúlveda, Juan 35–7
Erasmus 57 Giraldo, Lucas 7–8, 143–5, 144f
Estofado (see Sculpture) 121–3 Godínez, Felipe 184–6
Ethiopians (Africans) Godoy, Manuel 158–9
apostle 40–2, 60–1, 177–9, 182, 184–6, Golden Fleece, Hapsburg Order of the 25
189–92, 198–9 Golden Legend, The (see Voragine,
baptism 40–2 Jacobus de) 71–6, 128–9, 177–8, 184–6
biblical 8–10, 187–8 Gómez, Sebastián (El mulato) 163–4
Eunuch and Prime Minister (see Candace, Góngora y Argote, Luis de 2–3, 18
Queen of the Ethiopians) 189, 190f, 197–8 González, Barlomé 8–10, 156–8
saint 5, 71–6, 74f, 184–6, 198–9 González de Mendoza, Pedro 76–8
Ethnic tension (see confraternity) 81–2, 95–7 Goya, Francisco de 200
European courts 57–8, 64–5, 154–6 Graft/grafting (see amputation)
Evangelization (see also christianization) 3–4, Granada 39–40, 88–9, 98–9, 105–6, 110–15,
37–8, 40–2, 54–5, 57 117–18, 128–9, 132–7, 150, 163–4
Confraternity of St Benedict
Faith (see Inquisition) 28, 40–2, 45–7, 57, 71–6, of Palermo 54
83, 87–8, 139–40, 151–2, 172–3, 184–6 Royal Chapel (Cathedral) 32, 39–40, 44–5
Farnese, Elizabeth (see Philip V) 180–2 Gricci, Giuseppe 197–8
Fernándes, Gaspar 20–1 Guatemala City, (see Confraternities) 54–5
Fernández de Castro, Abbot Diego 132–7 Guevara, Cardinal Fernando Niño de 81–4
Fernández de Oviedo, Gonzalo 40–2, 116–17 Guise, Cardinal Charles de 45–6
Fernández de la Cueva, Francisco 188–9 Guinea (see North Africa) 7–8, 22, 34, 44–5, 83,
Festivities 49, 76–8 85–6, 98–101, 128–9, 192, 195–7
Christmas 16–17, 20–1, 32, 66 Gutiérrez de Padilla, Juan 20–1, 23
Corpus Christi 16–20, 50–1, 78–9, 81–2, 95–7
Epiphany 19–20, 48–9, 60–1 Ham (see Bible) 12
Immaculate Conception 22, 81–2 Hapsburg
Processions 5, 16–17, 19–20, 50–1, 67, 76–84, Baltasar Carlos 154–6
86, 95–7, 118–20, 198–9 Catalina Micaela 76–8, 156–8
Purification of Our Lady 19–20 Charles V or Carlos V (see Holy Roman
Saint’s feast days 19–20, 67, 76, 78–9 Emperor) 15–16, 39–42, 63, 76–8, 92–3,
Tarasca 78–9 95–7, 108–9, 115–17, 143–7, 154–6,
Giants 78–9 179–80, 187–8
Fragoso, Juan (see Surgeon) Court 7–10, 52–3, 64–5, 76, 99–102, 106,
Freedom 8–10, 15, 34–5, 37–8, 62–3, 71–6, 100–1, 108–9, 117–18, 164
109–14, 151, 165–6, 174–8, 182, 184–7, 189, Isabel Clara Eugenia 76–8, 156–8, 159f
193–4, 198–200 John of Austria 179–80
Black but Free (expression) 8–10 Juana of Austria 23–4, 64–5, 125–6, 154–8
black carols 2–4, 16–24, 32, 66, 78–9, 178–9, Margaret of Austria 156–8
192–3, 198–9 Maria of Austria 125–6
Index 227
Maximilian II 125–6 censorship of the Arts 5, 58–9, 195–7

Philip II of Spain 23–4, 28, 45–6, 57–8, 64–5, confessor 118–20, 145–7
76–8, 95–7, 100–1, 106, 124, 150, 156–8 conversos 45–6
Philip III of Spain 69–70, 76–8, 85 faith 87–8, 151
Philip IV of Spain 8–10, 156–8, 165–9, heretic 28, 39, 45–6, 87–8, 170–1
176, 179–84 heresy 28
Philip V of Spain 47, 154–6 lineage 17, 27–8, 45–6, 49, 83, 192
Rudolph II 94–5 New Christian 28, 45–7, 59, 150–2, 170–1
Spain 1–2, 5–10, 13–14, 16–17, 25, 29, 34, Old Christian 3–4, 25–6, 28, 45–7, 53–4, 82–3,
40–2, 56, 58–9, 89–91, 93–7, 106, 118–20, 100–1, 128–9, 170–1, 187, 189–92
147–8, 154–6, 158, 163–4, 169, 177, Prostitute/prostitution 50–1, 110–14, 125
189–92, 194–9 Protestant (see heretic, Luther) 37–8, 56, 66–7
Hercules 92–3, 95–7 purity of blood (limpieza de sangre)
Hernández Portocarrero, Gonzalo 116–17 Royal Prison (see León, Pedro de) 79–81
(see Cortés, Hernán or Fernando) sodomy 118–20
Herrera Puga, Pedro (see also Inquisition) 6–7, sorcery/witchcraft 110–14, 118–20
118–20 Tribunal of the 46–7, 56–9, 78–81
Hidalgo (see purity of blood) 17, 117 Islamic 87–8
Hiepes, Tomás de (see sugar) 97–8
Hoefnagel, Joris (see Cabinet of curiosities) 6–7, Jaca, Francisco José de, (see slavery,
89–99, 94f, 106, 117, 158 condemnation of) 34–5
Holanda, Francisco de 161–2 Jaén 54–5, 78–9, 132–7
Holy Roman Emperor (see Charles V) 15–16, Confraternity of Our Lady of the Kings 52–4,
108–9 60–1, 78–9
Hospital v–vi, 48–50, 52–3, 99–100, 124–5, James I of Aragon and Catalonia 39
132–9, 145–8, 151 Jamete, Esteban (see auto da fé) 170–1
House of Trade 64–5, 91, 93–4, 116–17, 149–50 Jesuit (see Loyola, Ignatius of) 6–7, 12, 15, 38,
slave licences (see Council of Indies) 40–6, 57, 62, 65, 76, 118–20
Huelva (see slave auctions) 116–17 Jesus 18, 20–1, 26, 32, 37–8, 40–2, 57, 62, 65–6,
Huguet, Jaume 131–2 71–6, 106–8, 118–20, 139–40, 177–9, 184–6
Human diversity 1–2, 5, 45–6, 100, 117–18, 120, Jewellery 197–8
167–8, 189–92 collections 64–5
Humanism/Humanist 8–10, 35–7, 57, confraternity 106–8
63–5, 159–61 Jews 3–4, 14–16, 28, 35–7, 45–7, 51, 79–81, 83,
117–18, 128–9, 131–7, 151–2, 170–1, 187–92
Iconography (see Council of Trent) 4–5, 39–42, conversos 51
56, 58, 60–3, 66, 71–6, 87–90, 95, 110–14, Jiménez de Cisneros, Francisco 7–8, 35–7,
117–18, 120–3, 129–32, 145, 147–8, 152, 39–40, 143–5, 147–8, 187–8
189, 197–9 Judith 168–9
Immaculate Conception: Julius Caesar 95–7
black fervour 22, 85–6 Juní, Isaac de 88–9
black carol 19–20, 23–4, 29 Justinian, Emperor (see Elesbaan) 125
cult, Our Lady of the 5, 22–3
dogma (defence of) 84–5 Lasne, Michel 189, 190f
iconography 84–5 Latino, Juan de ‘Sesa’ 8–10, 150, 159–61,
poem (see Innocent X) 22, 84 179–80, 187–8
Infidel (see moor, heretic, barbarian, pagan) Legends 5, 7–8, 71–6, 86, 89–90, 121–3, 125–37,
3–4, 38–42, 52, 87–8, 91–2, 152, 189–92 139–45, 148, 152–3, 165–6, 177–8, 184–6
Inga, Melchor Carlos 117, 170–1 León, Pedro de, Jesuit (see Inquisition, Royal
Innocent X (Giovanni Battista Pamphili) prison) 6–7, 15, 118–20
(see Jubilee) 22, 84, 169–71, 175–6 Leonardo, José 186–7, 186f
Inquisition 5, 28, 46–7, 58–9, 78–81, 118–20, Leoni, Leone 170–1
170–1, 195–7 Leoni, Pompeo (see auto da fé and El
auto de fé 131–2, 170–1 Escorial) 170–1
blasphemy 50–1 Levi (see Matthew) 184–6
228 Index
Leyes Nuevas (see Slaves, occupation laws) 34–5, Mandragora (see surgery) 132–7

116–17 Manuel Paniagua, Juan Carlos
Leyva, Martín de 167–8 (see Chicaba) 30–2
limpieza de sangre (see Inquisition) 22, 47, 58–9 Manuela of Portugal 88–9
Lisbon 1–2, 14, 44–5, 54–5, 76–8, 97–9, 154–8, Márquez y Vega, Diego 71–6, 74f, 75f
199–200 Martínez, Domingo 76–8
López de Hoyos, Juan (see Descalzas Martínez Silíceo, Juan 28, 45–6
Reales) 69–70 Martínez del Mazo, Juan Bautista (see Velázquez,
Lope de Vega, Félix 2–3, 13, 35–7, 70–1 Diego) 8–10, 158, 173, 175
López Dávalos, Sebastián 147–8 Master de los Balbases (see Andrés Sánchez de
Lorenzana, Antonio 198–9 Oña, Alonso de Sédano) 132n.45
Loyola, Ignatius of (see Jesuits) 40–2, 70–1, 76 Master of the Rinuccini Chapel (Matteo de’
Lupi de Çandiu, Michael 39 Pacino) 129–32, 130f
Luther/Lutheranism (see auto da fe, Master of Rubió 129–37, 130f
heretic, Protestant) 170–1 Medici, Carlo de 165–6
Medici, Cosimo de 129–31
Madrid 8–10, 22–4, 52–3 Medina de Valbuena, Pedro de (see sugar) 97–8
Descalzas Reales (Poor Clares/Discalced Mena y Roelas, Gonzalo (see Confraternity of
Carmelites) 23–4, 69–76, 125–6 Our Lady of The Kings) 48–9
Diario de Avisos de 195–7 Mendoza, Juana de 156–8
Diario de 91–2, 195–7 Mendoza y Bobadilla, Francisco de 28, 132–7
Diario Noticioso Universal (Biblioteca Memling, Hans 63
Nacional) 195–7 Mercado, Tomás de 37–8
El Escorial 57–8, 63, 69–70 Mercedarian, Order of (see St Peter
Gaceta de 91–2, 195–7 Nolasco, Trinitarians) 87–9, 89f
Instituto de Valencia de Don Juan 197–8 Mercury 93
Monastery of La Victoria 87 Mestizo/mestizaje (see black, colour
Museo de la Real Academia de Bellas Artes de classification) 14, 23–4, 152–3, 164,
San Fernando 186–7, 186f 169, 177
Museo del Prado 8–10, 63, 65, 71–6, 97–8, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 158–61
158–9, 160f, 168–9, 182–4, 183f, 200 Mexía, Vicente 7–8, 150–2
Museo del Traje CIPE (see devotional Middle East 97
jewellery) 106–8 Minerva 92–3
Museo Lázaro Galdiano 106–8, 107f, 167–8 Mines
National Library of (see black carols) 17, 192 Spain 108–9
Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San mercury mines of Castilian Almadén
Fernando 197–8 (Ciudad Real) 108–9
Real Fábrica de Porcelana del Buen Retiro silver mines of Gaudalcanal (Seville)
(see porcelain) 197–8, 200 (see Fugger family) 108–9
Royal Chapel 29 New World 116–17
Royal Palace 29, 154–6 Miniatures (see Hoefnagel, Joris) 92–4
Theatre del Buen Retiro (see Borbón, Joseph Miracle
Carlos de) 200 Black Leg, of the 4–5, 7–8, 89–90, 121–43, 177
Madrid Pellicero, Miguel 125–6
Our Lady of Carmen in the Confraternity of Moirans, Epifanio de, (see slavery,
Gypsies 106–8 condemnation of) 34–5
Maghreb (see Moors) 97, 128–9 Molina, Luis de 38
Magi/Magus: Baltasar / Balthasar, Caspar/ Molinaretto, Il (Piane, Giovanne Maria
Melchior 5, 30, 60–3, 65–6, 66f, 76 delle) 8–10, 158–9, 160f
Maíno, Juan Bautista 63, 65 Moctezuma (see Cortés, Hernán or
Málaga 1–2, 14, 20–1, 67, 86, 97, 105–6, 110–14, Fernando) 116–17
124, 148–9, 158, 163–4, 167–8, 174, 187–8 Moor (see infidel, heretic) 39, 45–7, 62–3, 86–8,
Confraternity of the Virgin of the Mercy 54 98–9, 109, 125, 128–9, 132–7, 147–8, 151–2,
El Carmen Church (Antequera) 74f, 75f 187–8
Mancera, Marquis of 12 Mora Villalta, Alonso 167–8
Index 229
Morais, Cristovão de 8–10, 154–6 Palencia 7–8

Moreno, Pedro de 40–2, 43f Cathedral (see Miracle of the Black Leg) 127,
Moreno Villa, José 154–8 143–7, 146f
Moreto y Cabañas, Agustín 167–8, 188–9 Palomino, de Castro y Velasco, Antonio 8–10,
Morisco 3–4, 6–7, 39–40, 44–5, 53–4, 98–101, 154–69
103–4, 115, 117–23, 128–9, 177–8, 186–7 Paniaqua, Juan Carlos Manuel
Moses (see Zipporah) 40–2, 67, 176–8, 187–8 (see Chicaba) 30–2
Mota, Enrique de 19–20 Papal Bull (see slavery, condemnation of) 34–5
Mulatto/mulato/a (see black, colour Pardos (see black, colour classification) 51–2
classification) 13–14, 47, 49, 52–3, 167, Pareja, Juan de 4–5, 8–10, 22, 32, 71–6, 95–7,
177, 180–2 158–70, 173–84, 181f, 184f, 185–92,
Murillo, Bartolomé Esteban 95–7, 163–4 183f, 186f, 194
Muslims 14–16, 35–40, 48, 50–1, 88–9, 115, Pareja, Juan de, de Antequera (father of Juan
117–18, 128–9, 132–7, 151–2, 170–1, 187–92 de Pareja) 174–5
Paremiographer (see Correas, Gonzalo) 11
Nadal, Miquel 62–3, 140–2, 141f Paul IV 45–6
Naples (see Bourbón) 8–10, 158–9, 160f, 172–3, Paul V 44–5
179–80, 200 Pellicero, Miguel (see Miracle) 125–6
Native Americans (see Aztecs, caciques) 3–4, Pérez de Herrera, Cristóbal, (see Royal
7–8, 14–16, 23–4, 34–7, 44–5, 53–4, prison) 192–3
116–17, 120, 145–7, 153, 198–9 Pérez de Montoro, José 20–1
Negro (see black, slave) 11, 13, 15–16, 22, 44–5, Picardo, León (see pomegranate) 131–2, 147–8
64–5, 85–6, 104, 109, 118–23, 128–9, Piety (see Council of Trent) 57–9, 67, 70
154–6, 159–61, 195–7, 200 Pomegranate (see Miracle of the Black Leg)
New World 1–4, 6–8, 14, 19–20, 23–4, 31f, 34–8, 105–6, 132–7, 147–8
40–5, 52–5, 64–5, 71–8, 86, 91–4, 97–100, Poor Clares (see Descalzas Reales/Discalced
103–4, 110–18, 121–3, 126–7, 129–37, Carmelites) 23–4, 69–76, 125–6
147–8, 153, 170–1, 188–9, 195–9 Preciado de la Vega, Francisco 172–3
Niño de Guevara, Fernando 81–2, 81f Procession (see festivities)
Noah 12 Punishment 1–2, 149–50
Nobility 5, 25, 28, 45–6, 64–5, 86, 106–8, 117, amputation 121–3, 142–3, 148–9
154–6, 170–1, 180–2 appropriation (of body) 152–3
Noferi, Salvador 197–8 beating 81–2, 149–50
North Africa (see Guinea) 7–8, 14, 83, 103–4, branding 38–9, 105–6, 148–9
106, 124, 128–9, 187–8 chain(ed/ing) 93, 149–50
Nueva España (New Spain/Mexico) 7–8, 19–21, death/execution 150, 152
23–4, 29–32, 35–7, 54–5, 71–6, 93, 115–17, flogging 149–50
143–5, 147–8, 188–9, 198–9 hanging 15
Nueva Recopilación de las Leyes de mutilation (see fugitive slaves) 7–8, 106, 121–3,
España 100–1 132–7, 148–9
Núñez Elena 143–5 in vivo 7–8, 39–40, 121–3, 125–6, 129–31, 143,
Núñez Muley, Francisco 100–1 145–8, 153
Purity of blood/faith (see Inquisition) 22, 28,
Ocampo, Andrés de 67–9, 69f 45–7, 83, 124, 151–2, 170–1, 187, 198–9
Olivares (see Mazo) 158
Ortíz de Zúñiga, Diego 49 Quintana, Manuel José 200
Osorio, Alonso (see Cabinet of
Curiosities) 64–5 Ratés Dalmau, José 166
Raxis the Elder, Pedro de 132–7, 138f
Pacheco, Francisco 5, 58–9, 62–3, 65, 84–5, Rebellion (see resistance, Pedro de León) 13–14,
159–64, 175, 180–2 118–20
Pacheco, Juana 65, 159–61, 165–6 Morisco rebellion 39–40
Padilla, Pedro de 23 Reconquest 39, 92–3, 115, 132–7
Pagan (see infidel, barbarian) 33–4, 91–2, Reformation (see Catholic)
151–2, 184–6 Reinosa, Rodrigo de 19–20
230 Index
Relic/reliquary 56, 61–2, 64–5, 69–76, 78–9, Francis 143–5

93–4, 125–6 Francis Paula (see Franciscan Minims) 5,
Resistance 8–10, 86–7, 132–7, 147–8
Iconographic/visual 5, 61–2, 154–6, 189–92 Gregory 127–8, 145–7
slave 1–2, 6–8, 48, 108–20 Ildefonso 52, 81–2, 125, 180–2
Ribadeneira, Pedro de 57 Iphigenia (Princess) (see Ethiopia) 5, 75f,
Rincón de Figueroa, Fernando del 132–7, 136f 76, 184–6
Ríos, Francisco Alonso de los (see Tarasca) Isidore 92–3
79–81, 80f Isidore the Farmer 70–1
Rizzi, Francisco 178–9 James 176, 180–2
Rodríguez, Juan 7–8, 143–5 John of God 70–1
Rodríguez Juárez, Juan 198–9 John the Baptist 67–9, 145–7, 166–7
Roelas, Juan de 85 John the Evangelist 166–7, 186–7
Rojas y Sandoval, Cristóbal 51–2 Lady of Copacabana 188
Rome 7–10, 22, 28, 39–40, 64–5, 69–70, 123–8, Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico 188
158–61, 170–6, 180–2, 187, 197–8 Leander 92–3
Jubilee 8–10, 175–6 Luis Bertrán 70–1
Piazza Navona 176 Mary of Egypt 168–9
Royal Chapel (see Madrid) 29 Orentius 166–7
Royal prison 6–7, 15, 118–20, 149–50 Paul 35–7
Rubbiano, Giovanni Dominico 70–1 Pascual Bailón 70–1
Rubens, Peter Paul 159–61 Peter of Alcantara 70–1
Ruiz, Magdalena 76–8, 157f Peter Nolasco 23–4, 70–1, 88–9, 89f
Ruiz de Montoya, Diego 44–5 Philip 3–4, 40–2, 41f, 71–6, 190f
Raymond Nonato 70–1
Sainthood Raymond Pennafort 70–1
beatification 66–7, 70–6 Rose of Lima 67–9, 188–9
black saints/cults 5, 8–10, 22, 55, 66–9, 71–6, Salvador de Horta 70–1
78–9, 85, 184–6, 198–9 Sebastian 140–2
canonization 66–7, 70–1 Sennen (see Jaume Huguet) 131–2
Ethiopian saints 5, 8–10, 20–1, 32, 55, 66–9, Theresa of Ávila 70–1
71–6, 78–9, 86–7, 184–6, 198–9 Thomas of Aquinas (see Aquinas)
relic 56–7, 69–71, 76, 87, 125–6, 131–2 Thomas of Villanova 70–1
Saints: Sánchez Calderón, María 165–6
Abdon (see Jaume Huguet) 131–2 Sánchez Coello, Alonso 8–10, 156–8, 159f
Acisclo 140–2 Sánchez de Oña, Andrés 131–7, 133f
Ambrose 184–6 Sánchez de Vercial, Clemente 125–6
Antony Abbot 48–9 Sánchez Gordillo, Alonso 78–9
Augustine of Hippo 34–7 Sandoval, Alonso de 12, 30, 71–6, 176
Baltasar / Balthasar 5, 76 Sandoval, Prudencio de 15–16
Barbara 166–7 Santa Cruz, Melchor 98–9
Benedict/Benito of Palermo 5, 13, 52–4, 70–6 Santa Hermandad 148–9
Confraternities 54–5 Santiago, Juan de 40–2
Bernard / Bernardo 51, 62, 110–14 Santiago, Juana de 95–7
Bernardo Boil 86 Santiago, Order of 117, 166–8, 170–1, 182–4
Catherine 168–9 Santo Domingo Chicaba, Teresa Juliana de
Cosmas and Damian 7–8, 121–43 (see Chicaba) 30–2
Elesbaan, King of Ethiopia (see Ethiopia) 5, Saracen (see Muslim) 62–3
71–6, 184–6 S-clavo (see branding, devotional
Elizabeth, Queen of Portugal 70–1, 88–9 jewellery) 105–8
Felix (and Pope) 125–8 ‘second nature’ (see Pareja, Juan de) 8–10, 177–8,
Francis Xavier 70–1, 76 184–6, 189
Francis Borgia 70–1 Second Revolt of the Alpujarras
Ferdinand III of Castile 67–9, 92–3 (see Granada) 115
Index 231
Sédano, Alonso de 131–2 (as) gift 2–3, 100–1, 154–6

Self-portrait 8–10, 65, 145–7 Identity 120, 153, 177–8
Seville 1–8, 13–15, 22, 44–9, 51–5, 60–1, 64–7, Indian 7–8, 14, 34–5, 46–7, 115–17, 128–9, 153,
68f, 69f, 71–9, 81–2, 85–6, 91–9, 94f, 189–92, 195–7
101–6, 108–14, 118–20, 124, 128–9, 148–9, Insurrection 195–7
159–61, 163–7, 174–5, 180–2, 198–200 Ladino (see ladino) 3–4, 44–5, 91–2, 95–7,
Cofradía de Nazarenos del Santísimo Cristo de 118–20
la Hermandad de los Negritos 67 legal status 2–3, 14–15, 109, 151, 163, 174–5
Confraternity of Cristo de la Expiración y literature 4–5, 8–10, 19–20, 29
María Santísima del Patrocinio 46–7 market 6–7, 14, 88–9, 95, 97–9, 101–4, 151
Confraternity of Our Lady of Piety 48–9 merchandise 33, 100–1, 103–4
Confraternity of Our Lady of The Angels Muslim 14–16, 35–40, 48, 62–3, 88–9, 115, 118,
(see Freedmen) v–vi, 3–4, 48–53, 60–1, 128–9, 132–7, 151–2, 178–9, 189–92
67–9, 71–9, 81–2, 84–6 Object 2–3, 64–5
Confraternity of Our Lady of The Kings 3–5, occupation laws (see Siete Partidas –
48–9, 52–3, 60–1, 67–9 see Alfonxo X/Nueva Recopilación de las
Confraternity of Santa Caridad (Holy Leyes de España/see Leyes Nuevas)
Charity) 46–7 owner 8–10, 16–17, 48–9, 51–4, 99–101, 103,
Confraternity of Tres Caídas, de San 105–6, 110–15, 118–20, 150–2, 156–8,
Isidoro 47 163–4, 176, 193, 195–7, 200
La Hermandad de los Mulatos de Sevilla Population 1–2, 14, 40–2, 48, 50, 62–3, 98–9,
(see pardos) 52, 81–2 103–6, 148–9, 151, 199–200
Nazarenos del Santo Ecce Homo, Santo Cristo resistance (see Herrera Puga, Pedro) 1–2,
del Calvario y Nuestra Señora de la 5–10, 48, 118
Presentación (see pardos) 51–2 slave subject 1–2, 4–5, 8–10, 16–17, 25, 87–90,
Real Cofradía de Nuestra Señora de la Antigua, 121–3, 148, 152, 161–2, 169–77, 189–92
Siete Dolores y Compasión 81–2 slave portraiture 154–69, 177, 189–92
Correo literario y económico de 195–7 slave treatment 7–8, 117–20, 138–9, 150–2
Sculpture white Christian 5
altarpiece 39–42, 63, 69–76, 89f, 131–2, 140–8 slavery:
estofado 121–3 abolition (see Leyes Nuevas) 34–5, 116–17
plaster 197–8 auction 2–3, 13–14, 100–2, 105–6, 116–17
porcelain 197–8 condemnation of (see Frías de
polychromed wood 39–40, 79–81, Albornoz, Jaca, Moirans) 34–5
88–9, 121–3 legalization of 150–1, 153
Sheba (see Song of Songs, The) 22–3, 60–1 servitude 37–8, 174
Siete Partidas, Las (see Alfonso X) 100–1, subjugation 153
117, 150–1 Sobremonte, Matías de 143–5
Silveira, Fernão da 19–20 Soto, Domingo de
Siuri, Marcelino 40–2 De iustitia et iure libri decem (1553–4) 37–8
Sixtus IV, Pope 132–7 stained (see negro, black)
Slave: Subjectivity/subject 1–2, 6–10, 16–17, 25, 59,
amancebamiento 51–2 62–3, 65, 95–7, 106–8, 118, 152–3, 169, 174,
Arab 14, 128–9 177–8, 180–2, 184–6, 188–92, 194, 198–9
Berber 128–9 Sugar
black 67 Plantations 97
Bozal(es) 3–4, 38, 44–5, 91, 95 still-life 97–8
chained slaves 4–7, 87–8, 91, 93–4, 108–9, Surgery 124
117–20, 145, 149–50, 193 Surgeon:
commodity (see Commodity) examination of slaves 102–3
confraternity (see Black) Fragoso, Juan 6–7, 102–3
cortados 110–14
fugitive slaves 7–8, 104–6, Tasso, Torquato 197–8
118–20, 148–50 Taverners’ Law (1531) (see Málaga)
232 Index
Tertullian 60–1 engraving (see Engraving)

Tibaldi, Pellegrino 57–8 estofado (see Sculpture)
Tintoretto 178–9 Illuminated manuscript 39, 127
Titian 154–6, 157f, 178–9 Mannerism 57–8
Topos (see Black but Human) motif 148–9, 153
Torquemada, Tomás de 131–2 Portrait(ure) 4–5, 8–10, 22, 63, 65, 71–6, 95–7,
Transatlantic slavery 1–2, 6–7, 98–9, 103, 116–17, 108–9, 115–16, 132–7, 154–70, 172–4, 177,
147–8, 153, 188–9 180–4, 189–92, 198–9
Transplantation (see grafting, miracle, Self-portrait 8–10, 145–7, 177, 182–7, 189–92
leg) 121–3, 126–45, 147–8, 153 sculpture (see Sculpture)
Tridentine Visual Culture still-life 180–2
(see Iconography) 56–60 trompe d’oeil 40–2
aims 59 urban landscapes/city views 6–7, 91–2,
function 59, 62–3 95–7, 115
image 57–8, 84 Vitoria, Francisco de 35–7
theology 169 Voragine, Jacobus de (see Golden Legend,
Trigueño (see black, colour classification) 15–16 The) 128–31, 140–3, 145, 152–3,
Trinitarians (see Mercedarians) 87–9 177–8, 184–6
Turks (see Lepanto, Battle of) 76–8, 97–9, 128–9, Vouet, Aubin 189, 190f
179–80, 189–92
Weiditz, Christopher (see Costume book)
Vaca de Castro, Cristóbal 44–5 White:
Vaca de Castro y Quiñones, Pedro (see Castro y artist 18, 63
Quiñones) carols 21, 23–4
Valencia (see Black Confraternities) colour 5, 7–8, 11–12, 15, 29, 32, 40–2,
Confraternity of La Casa dels Negres 52–3 177–8, 198–9
Surgery (see autopsy) 6–7, 124, 143–5 colour classification 4–5, 11, 25–6, 30–2, 50–2,
Valladolid, Juan de (Conde Negro) see steward 71, 83, 86–7, 95–7, 115, 154–6, 164, 167–8,
(mayordomo) 49–51, 76–8 192–200
Valladolid 7–8, 14, 35–7, 52–3, 79–81, 87–8, 123, confraternity 52–3, 82, 86–7, 95–7
125–7, 129–31, 139, 143–5, 170–1, 200 human 11
Dominican College of San Gregorio 145–7 poems /poets/writers 2–3, 13, 19–20,
Hapsburg court 106, 108–9, 121–3 23–4, 28–9
Franciscan Monastery of San Diego skin 14, 132–7, 153, 169–70
71–6, 143–5 slaves 5, 14–15, 87–9, 98–9, 103–6, 109–14, 120,
Monastery of St Francis, Francisco 128–9, 193, 198–9
Arias Chapel songs 18
Museo Nacional de Escultura 88–9, 89f, 121–3 soul 2–3, 18, 25, 28–9, 32, 40–2, 70–1, 178–9,
Vargas, Francisco de 50–1 188–9, 198–9
Vega, Félix Lope de 3–4, 13, 70–1 speech 19–20
Velázquez, Diego Rodríguez de Silva y 4–5, Whitens/ing 2–5, 30–2, 40–2, 62–3, 70–1, 153,
8–10, 22, 62–3, 65, 95–7, 158–67, 169–77, 188–9, 197–9
180–4, 181f, 183f, 184f, 189–92, 197–8 Whiteness: 197–9
Veronese, Paolo 178–9 equality 194, 198–9
Vicente, Gil 13 freedom 8–10, 62–3, 189, 198–9
Vigarny, Felipe 7–8, 39–40, 143–8, 146f humanity 8–10, 30
Villancicos (see carols) 17 soul 29
Villandrando, Rodrigo 8–10, 156–8 Wise Men (see Magi/Magus) 3–5, 60–3, 66
Villoldo, Isidro de 144f
Visigoth kings 92–3 Zipporah (see Moses) 71–6
Visual Arts Zuccaro, Federico 57–8
Baroque 174–5 Zumárraga, Friar Juan de (see Nueva España and
bodegón 62–3, 180–2 Miracle of the Black Leg) 143–5, 147–8
drawing (see Drawing) Zurara, Gomes Eannes de 34
Plate 2.1. Michael Lupi de Çandiu (Initial S., Northeastern Spain. c.1290–1310),
The Baptism of a Moor: 00522101, The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, United
States of America.
Plate 3.1. Juan Bautista Maíno, Adoration of the Magi, 1612–1614. © Museo Nacional
del Prado.
Plate 3.2. Diego Velázquez, Adoration of the Magi, 1619. © Museo Nacional del Prado.
Plate 3.4. Juan de Roelas, Allegory of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin, 1616,
Museo Nacional de Escultura, Valladolid (Spain). © Photo: Javier Muñoz y Paz Pastor,
CE0930.
Plate 4.2. Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, Three Boys, c.1670, oil on canvas, 168.3 × 109.8
cm, DPG222. Dulwich Picture Gallery, London.
Plate 6.1. Cristovão de Morais, Juana de Austria with her Black Slave Girl, 1553,
© Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels/photo: J. Geleyns Y-Ro
scan—or © RMFAB, Brussels/photo: J. Geleyns—Art Photography.
Plate 6.3. Juan de Pareja, The Architect José Ratés Dalmau, c.1660–70, Museo de Bellas
Artes de Valencia, Spain.
Plate 6.4. Juan de Pareja, Spanish, 1604–70, The Flight into Egypt, 1658, Oil on canvas,
66 1/2 × 49 3/8 inches, SN339, Bequest of John Ringling, 1936, Collection of the John
and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, the State Art Museum of Florida, Florida State
University, Sarasota, Florida.
Plate 6.5. Juan de Pareja, The Baptism of Christ, 1667. © Museo Nacional del Prado.
Plate 6.7. Jacopo Bassano and workshop, The Purification of the Temple, 1580. © The
National Gallery, London. Presented by Philip L. Hinds, 1853.
Plate 6.8. Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, Madonna del Rosario, 1601, 364.5 × 249.5
cm, Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien, Gemäldegalerie. ©KHM-Museumsverband.
Reproduction.
Plate 6.9. Anonymous Spanish artist, Black Servant with Flowers, The Menil Collection, Houston. © Photo: Paul Hester.
CREDIT LINE: Follower of Bartolomeo Passarotti, Allegory of the Sense of Smell, early 17th century, Oil on canvas, 28 1/4 × 38 in. (71.8 × 96.5 cm),
CA 6804, the Menil Collection, Houston. Photo: Paul Hester.
Plate 3.3. Anonymous artist, St Benedict of Palermo, first quarter of the eighteenth
century, Museo Nacional de Escultura, Valladolid (Spain). © Photo: Javier Muñoz y
Paz Pastor, CE0570.
Plate 4.1. Joris Hoefnagel, View of Seville, 1573, Bibliothèque Royale Albert Ier Cabinet des Estampes, S.I 23045, Brussels.
Plate 5.1. Isidro de Villoldo, The Miracle of the Black Leg, 1547. © Museo Nacional de
Escultura, Valladolid (Spain). © Photo: Javier Muñoz y Paz Pastor, CE0362.
Plate 6.2. Diego Velázquez, Juan de Pareja, c.1650, New York, Metropolitan Museum
of Art. © 2018. The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Art Resource/Scala, Florence.
CREDIT LINE: Velazquez, Diego (1599–1660): Juan de Pareja (born about 1610, died 1670), 1650.
New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art. Oil on canvas, 32 × 27 1/2 in. (81.3 × 69.9 cm). Purchase,
Fletcher and Rogers Funds, and Bequest of Miss Adelaide Milton de Groot (1876 1967), by exchange,
supplemented by gifts from friends of the Museum, 1971. Inv. 1971.86 © 2018 the Metropolitan
Plate 6.6. Juan de Pareja, The Calling of St Matthew, 1661. © Museo Nacional del Prado.
Plate 6.10. Juan de Pareja, Detail: Self-portrait. Juan de Pareja, The Calling of St Matthew,
Plate 6.11. Juan de Pareja, Detail: Self-portrait with a piece of paper. Juan de Pareja,
The Calling of St Matthew, 1661. © Museo Nacional del Prado.
Plate 6.12. Juan de Pareja, Detail: St Matthew. Juan de Pareja, The Calling of St Matthew,

FRACCHIA Carmen Fracchia - 'Black But Human' - Slavery and Visual Arts in Hapsburg Spain, 1480-1700-OUP Oxford (2019)

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FRACCHIA Carmen Fracchia - 'Black But Human' - Slavery and Visual Arts in Hapsburg Spain, 1480-1700-OUP Oxford (2019)

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‘Black but Human’

‘Black but Human’

Arturo Morgado (Cádiz), Margarita García Barranco (Granada), Rocío Períañez

3.3. Anonymous artist, St Benedict of Palermo, first quarter of the eighteenth

(Los Negritos) (Brotherhood of the Little Blacks), Chapel of Our Lady of

3.9. Pedro de la Cuadra, St Peter Nolasco Ransoming Captives, 1599, Main

6.6. Diego Velázquez, Kitchen Maid with Supper at Emmaus, 1622–1623,

Adrián Sarmiento; Bibliothèque Royale Albert, Brussels; Courtesy of Calcografía

visibility in the contemporaneous Spanish and colonial literature, and in the

the Afro-Hispanic resistance forged in their confraternities against their

seventeenth century’.23 I also discuss how Velázquez’s portrait Juan de Pareja

Black but Human

1 Sebastián de Covarrubias Orozco, Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española (1611), edited by

According to Alonso de Sandoval (1576–1652) in his De instauranda Aethiopum

My joy is already infinite

‘slave’ was deeply embedded in the minds of a slave-owning society, which is

songs, written, perhaps collectively, at the beginning of the seventeenth century

A dark, graceful girl

According to Labrador Herraiz and Di Franco, white musicians and poets

Juana: Tomorrow is Corpus Christi.

Let’s go to Bethlehem, Jorge

Although snub nosed

According to Andrew Cashner, the Afro-Hispanic concept of ‘people’ implied

In this example it is evident, as Swiadon Martínez shows, that the Afro-Hispanic

Dark you are of mouth

the girl-child Maria,

Although we are a nation

In this poem, where it can be read as:

Although we are from the nation

Although we are by nation

65 Cashner, ‘Playing Cards at the Eucharistic Table’ p. 406.

I know about the little one

Don’t be stupid, then

Gasica, I’m happy in all of this

It is the child so clean

However, their firm opposition to this belief is expressed in Villancico guineo

Though black, we do not stain

72 Email correspondence from Andrew Cashner, 9 August 2017.

since finishing our dance

Wake up, brother Francisco:

Although, black, white

There is no doubt that humanity and whiteness go hand in hand, as we will

Fig. 1.1. Juan de Noort. Frontispiece, Alonso de Sandoval, De instauranda Aethiopum

We declare to all the blacks

The Soul of Africans in Imperial Spain

1 Liliana Crespi, ‘Cristianismo y esclavitud. Discusiones sobre la evangelización de los esclavos en

Statesman, and Grand Inquisitor Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros (1436–1518).9

Since blessed baptism

The Scholastic structure identified in Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae (1265–74) was

(1525–75), in his Suma de Tratos y contratos de mercaderes y tratantes descididos y

read at noon to focus on the evangelization of the Christian message throughout

36 Accessed 13 July 2016, https://www.theroot.com/an-image-of-inclusion-or-colonialism-

university-educated members of the nobility.51 The Jesuits firmly opposed this

to review testimonies on the qualifications of candidates’.58 Exclusion of members

58 Maureen Flynn, ‘Rituals of Solidarity in Castilian Confraternities’, Renaissance and Reform,

To avoid the threat of Muslim contamination and to ameliorate the paradoxical

63 Flynn, ‘Rituals of Solidarity in Castilian Confraternities’, p. 66.

universality of the Catholic Counter-Reformation Church and in its charitable

Tridentine Visual Culture

1 Ricardo García-Villoslada, Historia de la Iglesia en España (Madrid: Biblioteca de Autores

4 ‘The Council of Trent’, p. 235. 5 ‘The Council of Trent’, p. 234.

homoerotic language of Mannerism at the European courts.9 Instead, the Tridentine

9 John Shearman, Mannerism (London: Penguin, 1967).

Following Covarrubias’s definition of the word esclavo, he offers a range of possible

g eographical origins to work in artistic workshops. They were present at least