Th e

Image of
the Black in
Western Art
FROM THE “AGE OF DISCOVERY”
TO THE AGE OF ABOLITION

Artists of the Renaissance and Baroque

 -

Tv’cr

CONTENTS

Preface to The Image of the Black in Western Art DAVID SINDMAN AND HENRY LOUIS GATES, JR.
vii
Acknow!edqments xxi

Introduction DAVID 5IDMAN

1 The Epiphany of the Black Magus Circa 1500 JoSEPH LED KDERNER 7

2 Italy, 190-1700 PAUL H. D. KAPLAM 93

3 The Image of the Black in Spanish Art: Sixteenth and Seventeenth

Centuries VICTOR STOICHIYA ‘9?

4 The Black Presence in British Art: Sixteenth and Seventeenth

Centuries DAVID BINDMAN 235

5 Rembrandt’s Africans ELMER KOLFIN 27?

6 Heliodorus’s An Ethiopian Story in Seventeenth-Century European

Art JOANEATH SPICER 307

Notes 339

Illustrations 39?

Index 399
 wise styled himself as a universal sovereign b- reference to the
Magi. While preparing for a new crusade. Philip received from
Pope Pius It laudatory texts comparing him to Cli rist, around
whom all people gather in peace. just as the Magi had done at
Christ’s birth: “look you, the Magi came from the East to the star
they saw in the \\‘est”’’
The fantasy of Prester John made this idea of Western ascen
dancy seem that much more irn ni anent, not only because an alli
ance with Africa voold illearl a double tront for Islam but also
be
cause, as both Christian and black, the African is lagus evidenced
the convertibility of the Other to the same. Added to this s’as a
grab bag of fantasies: the appropriation of riches from distanr po
tentates in the voluntary form of gifts; the as if voluntary transfo
r
niation of blacks, known to he slaves to the Muslims, illto servan
ts
ot the Europeans; conversion imagined as a movement from dark
ness to light. All these and inure rendered a Christianized Africa
n vice. Rontine incit:sion and structural purpose bracket off, as ana
uniquely palatable to the Eliropeall inlagillation. By the last quar—
ter of the fifteenth century and through the first quarter of the nexi,
the black is lagus “as not merely ubiquitous in scenes of the Adora
tion. These scenes had themselves beconle one of the most con
mon and representative suhiects of art, Literally thousands of pic
tures of the Epiphany siere produced in northern Eu rope front
around 1180 until l530. Some stood in churches as altarpieces;
some tullctioned in domestic settlngs as private devotionai rn
ages; sonic circulated as precious coliectibies, as well-crafted
trea
sures, such as the ones that tile Magi theolsehes bore. The veritab
le
craze for images of the Epiphany pat the black Magus—as central
to that image—everywhere on display: in sixreenth—century ,-\nt
werp, where a maiority of these paintings were made, nearly every
household possessed at least one. It is to this moment ot greates
t dark skin and an ecceiltric placement. Darkness marks him off as
saturation that we niow return -
The Black isiagus as Device
We arc seeking to isolate the black Magos as an aesthetic device
, By
device. 1 mean a feature ofan art object designed to create particu
lar effects in the receiveri3 As a concept, the device stands in
a cer
tain contrast to the tootif Whereas tile motif seeks to be identified.
as this or that motif, usually earning its elaboration through fur-
-
and meaning, the device wants to be
tiler analyses of its reference
understood for how it works. l)issectiog it ilvoives above
all at
tending to structure. And whereas nlotifs are generally best inter
preted at their origin, when, freshly minted, the)’ stand closest to
- their motivating sense, devices anpear most devicehke when, row
tinized, they have become an effective ciichd.
It is precisely the stereotypical character of the black Magus dur
ing the period around 1500 that makes it most accessibie as de
a
i ticallv misplaced, excessive queries concerning the stereotYpe’s
relation to reality, which is to say to Africans empricahiv observed.
Observing the black \tag-a> at the end oi its rise and development.
-
at the point of its routinization as device, allows us to discero the
work it does, as well as the structuring ettects it achieves, for paint
I ng of tile time, is loreover, attent ion to the stereotype, to the im
age’s condition at its most fixed and prejudicial form, enables us
better to discern those instances within the arcllive in wilich an
apparent anomaly (for exanlpie, Boschs cryptic Epiphany triptych
arid Dürer’s portrait likenesses of blacks) seems to evidence a
changed routine, and perhaps even some rea exchange with the
images reference, the African -
As a device, the black ?slagus consists of two essential features:
the anomaly withi ii the figura group. it renders hi ill more visible
THE EPIPhANY OF THE BLACrS MAcus CIRCA 1500 35
than the others through his stand-out difference. But it also makes
him less visible, as darkness obscures the artist’s conventional in
scriptive means, the dark lines and modeling shadows rendered
upon a light ground that delineate the traits of, say, a face. We have
begun to see that this first feature, darkness, also has a powerful
symbolic charge within a scene that thematizes light and dark: the
Epiphany as the “coming to light” of God within the creaturely
condition of night. And this symbolic charge further inuiects the
technical conditions of the visible image. In northern Europe by
1500, art’s master device was chiaroscuro. Perfected by Jan van
Eyck and Rogier van der Weyden and developed further by later
masters such as Hugo van der Goes, the technique of oil painting—
that is, of working with pigments bound in a translucent, oil-based
medium—enabled a hitherto unimaginable replication of the visi
ble in terms of lights effects on objects. But regarded simply as a
constitutive feature of the device of the black Magus, darkness lo
cates the black. And it does this so that he can work his effects on
locality itself,
We have already explored the ways in which the black Magus
occupies—and by occupying, articulates—those frames that en
dow a picture with visible structure: boundaries, thresholds, arch-
ways, divisions within, and divisions between. Like his other fea
ture, darkness, the black Magus’s placement at or as the structuring
device of the frame carries a symbolic valence. Denizen of the
36 THE EPIPHANY OF THE BLACK MACUS CIRCA 1500
known worlds edge, and last, least, and most unlikely arrival to the
epiphanic scene, he occupies the place most appropriate to his
original locale. But in the larger scheme of things, in which Africa
remains precisely marginal to the European consciousness, the
black Magus’s pictorial function, his true force and motivation as
device, consists in his identifying and originating place per se. It
consists in his establishing a center, an inside, and thus the very
structure of a scene, by inhabiting its outside, As a framing device,
the black Magus has one distinct advantage. Rather than being an
inert boundary, such as a wall, he is a human agent, and a strongly
marked and visual one, who can anchor pictorial structure to nar
rative, to the unfnlding of both the picture’s story and the story of
the picture’s reception by a viewer.
The use of the black ivlagus as a device can be appreciated in a
large triptych by Hans Memling, probably painted in the first years
of the 1470s.r4 Born in Seligenstadt near Frankfurt and probably
trained in Cologne, Memling established his workshop in Bruges
during the final decades of that city’s heyday as the artistic capital
of northern Europe. His several images of the Adoration helped
to standardize the appearance of a black King while establishing
the expected format of Flemish Adorations generally. Their cool,
meticulous rendering of elegant veneration became exemplary for
all religious pictures made at this time and place. In the triptych
in question, Memling flanks the Adoration with earlier and later

I?
scenes of Christ’s infancy: to lhe left, the Nativity; to the right, the
presentation in the 1’ mple. Compositionally, everything attends to
the center. There the Virgin, seated before the central pillar of a
symmetrical ruin and embraced by a world organizing itself as if
it were her frame, presents Christ as the spatial and sacramental
middle. The event of the Epiphany gives a story of and model for
the form of attention that the triptych assists and orchestrates: ser
vice to Christ by powerful personages. Such worship would indeed
have taken place in the triptych’s earliest known location, the ora
tory of the future emperor Charles V in his Aceca residence in VII
iaseca de Ia Sagra (Toledo), ‘s-here Memling’s paneis hung from
around t500 until their transferral to the Prado in l847.
At the edge, then, of this centered and centering scene, a black
King dressed in a fabulous brocade and ermine tunic and bearing a
gold, crystal, and jeweled gift lifts his cap to signal his arrival and
I? obeisance to Christ. His gesture, along with his striding gait, gives
arrival itself visible form, as a temporal instant of entrance and rec
ognition occurring within a larger motion and space. And as many
artists before him had done, Memling locates this figure of ar
rival—shimmering foil for the eye’s own entrance to the painted
scene—in the crosshairs of pictorial focus. The n:id)ine of the
11 Hans Memling. Adoration of the Mag:. Ca. 1470. Madrid, Museo del
Prado.
12 Head of toe back Kn9. Detail of fiq. II.
black’s body occurs precisely at the inner edge of the ruined door
way to the scene- His forward, gift-bearing arm is fully inside the
scene, under a window through which an excluded voyeur peers,
while his other arm, animated by the ongoing gesture of arrival,
conceals the center of the crowded outer doorway Spanning the
elements of an architecture that separates inner from outer, the
black’s body is the hinge of the Adoration’s scenic closure.
Such placement seems at once absolute and accidental, as do in
deed the many coincidences in Mernling’s panel between, on the
one hand, elements internal to the painted world and, on the other
hand, the embracing order of the triptych’s material and cornposi
tional structure. Thus the second Magus occupies a zone at the left
that is structured from behind by the corner doorway, to the extent
that his gift stands before the background pier as if it might be part
of that architecture. A spatial fit like this recalls the isolation of holy
figures in separate niches that one finds in sculpted altarpieces and
that tndeed occurs in Meniling’s ensemble itself, which isolates dif
ferent episodes within the discrete panels of a triptych. The most
obvious coincidence of figure and structure occurs at the ensem
ble’s center, where the Virgin and Child simultaneously mark the
paneEs median and occupy the center of the background architec
THE EPIPHANY OF THL BLACK MAGUS CIRCA 1500 37
ture. Or, to be as precise as Klemling invites us to be, Christ’s ges
tu[e olbenediction, perfectly aligned with [he median of his moth
er’s face and constituting the goal of all arrivals in and to the
picture. takes place at a center both real and fictive, being both
paint at the middle of a symmetrical arrangement of three wood
panels and a staging of movement at the nucleus of an appropri
aiely rilualized event.
Yet these and all the picture’s other absolute coincidences occur
within a world everywhere just slightiy skewed. This can best be
seen in the disposition of the gable above the Virgin. lvlemling
places the viewer just left of center, relative to the surrounding ar
chitecture; the second Magus’s gift standsjust a fraction to the right
of the background door frame; and the black Magus’s hat just over
laps with the edge of the archway behind Such subtle displace
ments infuse all elements of this painting with a sense of contin
38 THE EPIPHANY 01 THE StAck MAGUS CIRCA 1500
gency, of the subtle but all-abiding entropy that we would es
find in the world observed from a human point of view- T1
tered structure of Memling’s images about and for the cult
erys’here infused by this condition of eccentricity, of bei
off-center, which is no less than the condition nf being in th
In the Adoration triptych, pictorial realism—painting that
and measures itself against the norm of lived visual exper
assembles symbols of its own condition: the perfect, circ
rangement of windows behind the Virgir, each of which gi
to a partial, discontinuous view; the helter-skelter locality c
even in the formalized action of a royal and ecclesiastical ru
structuring background in a destructuring state of ruin; tI
Magus, perfectly combining arrival and estrangement.
The black is not the onh or even the most dominant,
ment of an eccentric perspective in Memling’s triptych C

uous in his red coat and present in each of the three scenes, the
figure of Joseph tells in structural terms a complex story of the re-
atiori between belonging and distance. In the Nativity, he carries a
paltry flame to Christ’s radiance; in the Adoration, be loiters awk
wardly between the first and last Magus; and in the Presentation in
the Temple, he looks over his shoulder at a mystery that has ex
cluded him from the start.b Yet the black Magus is not merely a
second Other. He inflects the story figured by the first. Joseph’s op
posite, he represents the extremity that pierces through tu the cen
ter. the outsider converted to insider. That Memling worried about
access to the center and that he directed his pictorial intelligence
toward visualizing its conditions is evident from one peculiar fea
ture of the triptych. The Nativity and Adoration share the identical
architectural setting. In the one, we observe the holy family from
the side, through one of the arched windows of the ruin’s curved
13 Hans Memling. The Seven Joys of the Virgin.
480. Munich, Alte Pinakothek.
13
back wall. In the other, we stand in front of the ruin, facing the
family, which has moved outdoors to greet the Kings- Viewpoint
thus circumnavigates the setting. And along that circular route,
roughly at its midpoint, stands the black Magus, whose extrava
gant itinerary from the farthest “there” to the most emphatic “here”
hyperbolizes the viewer’s own movement as mapped by Memling’s
panel.
About ten years after completing the Prado triptych, Memling
painted another Adoration, this time drawing the figure of an itin
erary over a much larger map. This panel, almost two meters wide
and now in the Pinakothek in Munich, stands as one of the most
complex pictorial inventions of the fifteenth century.’7 Memling 13
weaves together two narratives plus subsidiary stories through a
continuous, panoramic landscape centered on )erusalem and em
bracitig the world. World circulates through the visible interiors of
THE EPIPHANY OF THE BLACK MAGUS CtRCA 1500 39
 even from the hilltop at the world’s end, the African’s blackne
buildings (houses, chapels, ruins), around the walled Holy City,
aids his visibility, blazoning the threesome like the flags they carr
and past fields, villages, mountains, and sea to a marvelous hor
d Sandwiched between undulating rocks, the departing trotipe
izon. Deposited across the oblong panels uncommonly nuirke
even shaped like one of the fluttering pennants. Memling ti in I
horizontal extent, world also stands pictured from its very midst;
sur through the real-world implications of this heraldic prorninenc
a horizontalitv that, observed from near its center, contpletelv
rounds. i-fe threads the ‘slagi’s path through the landscape so that the

That this is indeed “world” as a whole, and not just part of it, is progress, though apparent to tis, would lie concealed from Herr
and his men.
conveyed through the landscape’s condensed geography. On top of
Over this storyline is woven a plot with a qt[ite different shap
each of the three sugarloaf nottntains clustered about Jerusalens
the more crucial narrative of Christ’s arrival in and departure fro
central spire stands a Nlagtis observing a star, Figured first of all as
the world, t’hich Memling stages atso as episodes in the life oft
astrologers, the Magi label their territories as the three continents.
Virgin Mary. Where the Magi’s course is serpentine, like the pat
The star itself, that celestial messenger observed “in the east” (Nlatt.
that lead them here, Christ’s is straieht down, up, and across. A lo
2:2), hangs cohously in tfeir midst, so that the Wise N len of Asia
n the panel’s far lefi edge, the Annunciation to the Virgin lea’
aod Frirope, left and right, face imvard toward it, while the Africa
Nlagtis. on the central moo nt, is turned toward tis. Their journe y by way of the announcement to the shepherds, to the Nat ivit\
the base. Fron -i there. straight toward the right in perfect rca
from these distances to the foreground and hack igain will trace an
lug structtrre, we scan Christ’s Adoration by the N lagi. the
Rest
itinerary to and from a center marked by Christ. Even at the pe
rection, and Pentecost— the last structured with the apostles I
ripherv the center is ali’eady marked: the star’s longest ray, painted
holding the oescending Spirit rather as the .\lagi had glimpsed
with the help of a straight edge, points directly at the Christ Child,
guiding star. At the far right, now vertically ascending, Chri
around whom the Magi, at the climax of their journey, gather
.
Part of our visual pleasnre in beholding ?vlemling’s panel con post ho moos appearances culminate in his return to heaven

sists in following the NIagi’s travels from there to here and hack. foctis on Christ’s epiphanies at birth and after death Mcml
has overleaped the in-between of the Passion, providing, thou
This journey—also art armchair pilgrimage through the 1-loly
out
a visual ellipsis in the form of that dark river from which
Land—is pictured as the sequence of legendary events along the
s the foreground horses drinks. This ncr arid another to the
way.’ N lemling shows these occurring in the little dearing be
and town: also divide the panel in three, rather like a triptych. Another st
I ween hills, or within or before the ho lit spaces of house
is meanwhile twisted around this thread: that of Christs mot)
the meeting of the Magi at a crossroads, their con ference with King
hence the panel’s traditional appellation, The Seven Joys vJ
Scrod, their back-alley escape from lerusalem, the Adoration it
l stan Vfrgiui. Although it appears not seven hut eight times within
self, and the outbound passage by ship. With their colorfu
to spot in the land panel, the Virgin Nlarv\ blue-clad form punctuates the scene
dards and telltale entourage, the Magi are easy
Christ’s life, and these scenes (purged of the sorrowful event
scape, conspicuous proclamations of their exotic identity. Apparent

500
40 THE EPiPHANY OF THE BLACK MAGUS CiRCA
Chrisfs arrest) torment, and crucit]xioil ) are indeed associated with
her ioy. These ring the picture like the beads of a rosary, allowing
viewers sequentially to remember, to picture, and to give prayer to
each.
In the way he deposits the story’s episodes, Nlemling also es
tablishes, iii the foreground, in sepai—alely articulated settings, the
events that founded the principal Christ Ian feasts and with them
the entire liturgical year: from the left, Christmas, Epiphany, Eas
ter, and Pentecost. As in the Prado panel, the artist reiterates the
same ruined building in the Ch ristnias and Epiphany scenes, in
this case rotating the setting slightly to;s’a rd the viewer. On the one
hand, this meticulous variation announces that space perseveres.
that it is a fixed inventory within o hicli events occur On the other
hand, variation focuses the picture’s time and space on lie be
holder. In Nlemling’s totalizing chronotope. “here Bible stor} and
calendar inhabit an entire map of the world, events become like
piaces. And these paces. together with “hat occurs in them. are
beheld as things ooserved from a particular point of vie”, Though
spread out in its entiret\’, “every thing” has the focus in the one, m
sis that results from lining then up in the foregrotind of the picture
semantically appropriate. Such stasis is also practical, since Men
ling’s panel originally tunctioned as an altarpiece, and therefore as
the single prop for various liturgical festivities, Unlike the tortuous
itinerary of the N lagi, then, v,’ho must wea’e their vay across the
earth, the story of Christ appears in the figure of vertical interven
tions (down and tip) and of measured, reiterated events (across).
And this endows the peculiar temporality of sacred history with an
aptly necessary geometry.
Of course, the Nlagi’s itinerary is also guided by divine inter
vention in the firm of a vertical that remains with the travelers
throughout their route. The Magi follow a wandering star that,
hovering always before them, brings them finally to Christ And in
Nlemliag’s picture. ‘i-hen they depart, they do so in the direction of
a rising sun, Star and sun indicate, both symbolically and spatially.
Christ as !mix hjuu’ns, as the primal light that illuminates light itself.
This motivates the picture’s central scene of the Epiphany as the
festive historical and calendar event of the advent of light. In its
original setting .\lemling’s panel would also have interacted with
,

the eye that sees. ‘l’he subtle shift to frontality in the Epipliaiiy also
sets off that scene’s hieratic festiveness against the more intimate
address of the Nativity The Epiphany becomes that much more a
spatial center because Memling makes it a pictorial and experien
tAo! event of centering, of arrival at the rh iddle from the rim, ViewS
point, everything ordered around the beholder’s eye, thus finds its
in-the-world anchor in Christ, The N [agi. for their part, represent
all possible human v:eu’points. They converge on Christ ins! as,
ideally, the gaze looks upon the worid that Xlemling paints.
Although recording unique occurrences in history. which are in
turn celebrated on different calendar da’s, the principal scenes are
timeless because they are endlessly repeatable. This makes the sta
real light in a symbolically charged way. Donated by the tanner
Pieter Bultinc and his wife, Katelyne van Ryebeke, whose portraits
and arms are proudly displayed, it svas erected before Easter 1480
at the altar of the tanners’ guild’s chapel in the Chttrch of Our lady
in Bruges,a Located behind the high altar, the chapel of the tan
ners was the easterntnost chamber of the church. Quite literally
oriented— with the chapel and the church— toward the rising
(onens) s ui,,\ ending’s panel would has-c received a: its back, be
hind its painted sun, the real morning light. That light, more
over, would be seen to begin to “ax brighter on the Feast of the
Epiphan in the Latin Church on 6 January. after Christmas and
- the winter solstice. The painting therefore inscribed real space and

THE EPIPHANY OF THE BLACK 51AGS CIRCA 1500 41

14
14 Black Magus and atteniants. Detail 0! fig. 13.
time into the chronotope of the Christian cosmos, in which world
is hut the stage setting of salvation history. Facing east, toward
Men Ii ng’s picture, the pious viewer would observe natural light
converging with Christ’s historical coming to light, a celestial coin -
cidence comparable to what brought the \lagi to Christ in the first
place.
Where, then, does Metniing place the black .\lagus within this
chronotope of light? In the usual spot, of course. In extending his
gift towaro Christ—his right hand and the chalice it bears pass be
vond the inside edge of the dividing wall—the Magus’s body stands
arrested just before that wall’s outer edge. Given the ruinous state
of the setting, of course, everybody u-ill inevitably stand outside.
Still, the h:ack is made more outside than the others. Such hair
splitttng with regards to p]aceiiient clearl ‘-accords with Mending’s
intentions. The second Magus—glitiipsed on the hilltop farthest to
the right, which would make him hail from Europe seen frotii the
nort h— stands just one more step inward than the th i t-d, but his
back lines up exactly with the inner wall, so that his red cape seems
to flow forth from that line. Memling underlines this strict but sub
tle marginality by repeating it in the scene behind. In the scene of
the .‘slagi’s conference with 1-lerod, he paints the black King—who
again comes last of the three—precisely at the left edge of the pal
ace ttcade, in that same threshold locality that the black occupies
In the foreground Adoration.
It is also the case that these and all other positionalities are made
to fee! dependent on viewpoint .\Iemling insists that “e recog
nize this global contingency. While centered in space and frontally
viewed, the whole Adoration scene is shghtly off-center to the left.
This makes the second Magus appear to stand farther inward than
he actually does Facing the Virgin anc, Child within an architec
ture shifted toward the left, we feel ourselves to be aligned more
with the second Magus, which makes the black appear that much
more oblique.
Memling everywhere displa-s extraordinary skill in calibrating
objects and viewpoints: witness the ruin’s slight rotation between
tIle Nativit\ and Adoration scenes. The minute bandwidth within
which the black is located as “marginal” befits this subtlety. It indi
cates that, yes, people are appropriately bound up in the swirl of
events and do not stand in fixed niches of a purely symbolic space.
Yet the swirl also obeys boundaries, to the extent that, at the scene’s
represented moment, at that i tistant whet: we see the world gath
ered around the center, the black indeed remains on his continent.
for in composing his landscape. Memling in fact aligns the black’s
titarginal placement itt the Adoration scene with his originai place
at the periphery of the world. Run a line ttp the middle of the ruin’s
left wall and extend it up to the horizon: it will pass through the
black observing the star from the mountain of “Africa:’ Indeed, it
cuts through his body exactly where his figure is cut in the fore
ground, betweeti his torso and his outstretched hand. Note too that
whereas in the foreground the Magus, approaching Christ, turns a
shoulder to us, at the horizon, watching the star, he faces our way.
Thus is the center indicated at the periphery; thus does the fantasy
of conversion, that idea of a turn toward a truth, a center, and a dc
ity that hitherto lay elsewhere attd hidden, engender a whole cos
moogy.
It is one of the peculiarities of Christianity that, unlike all ear
lier Western reigions, it locates its cenler elsewhere, in the em
phatically exotic East. Of course, there existed local spots of sacred
power. During the first six centuries of its development, when the
immanence of Chrisfs establishment of a new, fully centered world
began to fade, Christianity shaped its piety around holy shrines
in which were housed tombs aud relics of hoiy men and women.
THE EPtPHAHY OF THE BLACK MACUS CIRCA 1500 43
Often called simply “the place:’ these were the proper sites of al
tars and of the churches built to serve them”’ The greatest of these
drew pilgrims from all over Europe, who traveled along roads
through a fluid geography punctuated here and there Lw other,
lesser sacred localities where heaven met earth. But already in the
early centuries of the Church there arose a more singular destina
tion: the Holy Land, site nt Christ’s entire epiphari his birth, mm—
istr\ death, and resurrect ion.
The hi-st accounts of pilgrims to Jerusalem were the first nar
ratives of travel generally produced by the Christian West. And
throughout the Middle Ages, charts of the ‘vorld—the so-called
T-O maps—had Jerusalem as their absolute center. In the tales
of the piigrint Egeria, dating to the tourth or fifth century, as in
Arcolf’s from the late seventh, the Holy Land was a magnetic cen
ter, at once drawing travelers i nelocttbly toward it and detlecti ng
them by its strangeness. The earl)’ pilgrims sought, through physi
cal contact with the place, if not quite an epiphany of Christ, at
least some enhanced imiisediacv. But “-hat they observed “ere
spectacles nf radical otherness—the center as paradoxically exo
tikos, outside, external.
l’he pilgrim Egeria, sometimes named St. Silvia, ‘vas variously
identified as an untutored young nun, an educated noble abbess,
and a pious prostitute from Spars or Italy or France. In the Pcogri
oath) that describes her travels, exoiicsm climaxes when the pil
grim witnesses the Feast of the Epiphany In Jerusalem. Ii is only
then that she breaks off from her otherwise oddh- abstracting nar
rative style, where whatever she observes in the landscape is im
mediately eclipsed by the biblical episode that took place there. In
its festive restaging at the place where it occurred, the Epiphany
allows lerusalens itself nsonsertaril to come to light in Egeria’s
prose. And what she describes is a dazzling spectacle, in which the
44 HE EPt°HANY OF THE 8LA< MAGtJS ciRca tSOO
city stands bedecked in “nothing else” hut “gold or gems or silk:’
and where all of these are lit by myriad lights: “Could the nunsber
or “eight of the candelabra and candles and lamps be esti
- - - -
...
nsated or sv ri t ten?” -
In late fourth-century Jerusalem, the Feast of the Epiphany oc
casioned spectacle. The wealth, splendoi, and exoticisns of the
Kings “ho traveled to see the infant Christ beca ni e the proper tie
coruns for comn:emora: ing Christ’s coming to light. This remauwd
true in Europe long afterward. Frons about the eleventh century
until Memling’s time, tlte Adoration staged in cira
matic productions its towns and cities of the l.atin West. Embroi
dered by anecdotes and descriptive detail that were culled iron the
Apocrs-pha or simply invented outright, these pla-s usually took
place its a church, which they u-ansformed into the image of the
world, Commonly the Kings cute i-ed front three different part5
of the building, as if arriving from separate continents, and fron’
theie made their “an to the front of the principal altar, when
Chris twas present in the Eucharist. Sonsetinies these pageants un
folded outdoors, traversing the spaces of both to wn and church, Ir
1336, the city of Miiau staged a spleudid procession in which thi
figures of the Kings and their retainers, followed by a train of cx
otic aninsals, converged at the Church of Sarst’Eustorgio.53 An en
tire landscape thus “as gathered to the center, mo:nentarilv trans
- forming thai nsidpoint into the exotic spectacle that European
imagined the Holy Land to be.
It is useful to reflect on the function of the menagerie and of th
whole inventory of marvels that the Epiphany feast called forth
In the late Middle Ages, menageries s”ere attributes of rtile, ne
only because they s’t’nsbolized s-ealth and power, but also becaus
they actuall indexed that connectedness with esewhere whic
was wealth and power. Affected first and most famously by Fredet
 ick [ [ in his 1234—1.233 march across Italy aad Germany, but soon
adopted by the courts of Spain, France, Burgundy, Anjou, Tyrol,
and elsewhere, these collections of exolica encompassed not only
wild animals but foreign peoples as well. So famous ‘vat Frederick’s
black chamberlain, Johannes ?slaurus, that in 1283, in the region of
Cologne, an impostor succeeded in passing as the emperor because
he was attended by blacks.’ In their exotic inventory and sheer os
tentation, pictu res of [he Adoration were heirs to such enacted
pageantry, to the extent that many of them feature, in addition to
blacks, an abbreviated menagerie in the form of camels, elephants,
and monkeys. As £miie Nlle observed long ago, the Eptphanv in
art took its details from sacred drama, and with Otto Plicht one
might extend this and say that in the work of Nhclielino da Be
sozzo, Ge:itile da Fabriano, and the Linahoarg brothers, painreriv
realism, as an attention to piecemeal particulars made by way of a
focus on the anomalous or rare, tlourished within the attempt to
picture the Adoration as an exotic congeries. \‘et there remains a
fundamental question: why paint the real, hyperbolized in the ar
rival of the true God, as literally an outlandish spectacle?
By the fifteenth ceniur, Latin Christendom’s sacred center not
merely stood elsewhere but was ph’sicalls’ occupied by a rival reli
gion. Islam’s conquest of the Holy Land, •ind, from 1317, the stabi
jizatiun of its hold through the Ottoman Turks, made the center
that much more foreign. It “as out of Europe’s intensified percep
tion of itself as existing on the rim that the legend of Prester John,
and of his supposed forefather, the black Magus. was horn. Set in
analogy to biblical Jerusalem, which to Christia: eves had also
been the locus of a hostile people (the Jews), Mamluk Jerusalem
seemed conquerable only by the combined forces of the peripher;-,
throttgh the unlikely alliance of the hyperborean and the antipo
dal. The siory of the Nlagi encouraged simultaneously a conjunc
tion of self tt ith other and an apperception of self as an other vis-à
vis a sought- for centei-, identity, or origin.
Access to thai occupied center could wine personally, by way
of an arduous pilgrimage, or else militaril;-, through a victorious
crusade. But it con] d occtir inwardly as well, at the end of a men -
tal journey to the [-{olv Land. P rontt ted in the fifteenth centttrv
by some adherents of the so—called Modern Devotion, mental pu
grinlage involved a methodical thin king—through of the path to Ic
rrisalein and of the steps that Christ took there, all in order to relive
tile Passion.’ This may well have been one of the spiritual func—
tions that Islemling’s Munich panel originally served. Through the
circtntous passage of the Magi from horizon to center and back, it
visualized an itinerary of snccesCve imaginings, by ;ay of which
viewers arrived at Christ and in both the place and time of Clii isr,
while their bodies staved put, in an always eccentric here and now.
Memling registers this eccentricity through the whole structure
cit represented space. Not only is the Adoration
off-center on the
oblong panel, but it and everything around it, from the foregrou nd
interiors through the walled city to the paths and watersva s he
vond, are all viewed obliquely. True, this owes partly to the picto
rial conventions wit hui which N iemlin g works, Perspectival repre
sentation constructs space aroti lid the viewer’s vantage point of tile
world (and around a corresponding vanisning point at tlte visible
world’s edge) rather than around a unique center in the ivorld. Per
spective’s center is therefore paradoxically peripheral: absolutely
indispensable to structure, is nonetheless contingently situated.
But within the wor!d-pic:ure that Nlemling develops in his N lunich
panel, this contingency of perspectival vietvpoint is magnified and
set in a narrative relation to a different kind of center and indeed to
a different kind of apparition. Guided by the itinerate Ntagi, viesv
cr5 are invited to circle toward the center of the new world-picture,
TnE EPIPHANY OF THE BLACK MAGLS CIRCA
500 45
 enabled by rational perspective that is itself itinerate: a poteniialiv
infinite series of cognate but alwa)-s oblique views.
in the scene of thei rarr ival at the center, when the Kings con
verge on Christ, the viewers particular representative—toe voun
ger of the two white Magi, whose rule, according to the logic of
the background landscape, was in the West, in Europe—bends his
knee inside one of a series of spatial demarcations, the outside of
which is occupied by the black Magus. This spatial demarcation is
aligned with objective structures of the world, the cues of which
are the end gables oi the ruined hut. But in fact the Magi occupy
mere unmarked ground before the hut and only viewpoint, plus
our capacity to extrapolate alignment forward from the hut, yields
their positions on a grid. One could say that in the absence of
structure, in the nebulous ar-a of bare earth before the rutn—taat
zone kept empty for the mental arrival of the viewer—it is only the
African and the European who, as system of difference, devise the
center as an inside against an outside.
This does not mean that the European ?slagus himself occupies
the ceuter. He, along with Joseph. the other \lagi. the ox, the ass,
and a host of additional onlookers assembled at the edge. even per
haps the Virgin, are all so many frames around Christ-as—center.
Even without these supplements, it is trite, Christ’s centrality would
alread he marked, lnMetrding, the Virgin seats herself precisely
below the apex of the ruined gabie. as if intentionally to endow
the event with the decorum appropriate to kings: dignified even
though of humble estate (the arrangement seems to say), the ‘sir-
gin can perfectly make do. Addittonali”, the artist arranges lerusa
1cm so that its central tower occurs directly above that gable, saying
in effect that the Virgin who seated herself thus, as well as the Nlagi
‘ho confirmed the decorum of her gesture, were in agreement
with the order of things, with the world as place and as history.
46 THE EPtPHANY OF THE SLACK SAGUS CIRCA 500
And finally the s”a nderi ng star, which in the story halts above
newborn Christ, points its ray—albeit obIiquelv—tot’ard the
fant But compared to the ceo tering that lemI i rig ni ight have
-
troduced, say, by lining up stat, tower, gable, and Christ along
panel’s median, these altgnments seem markedly contingent.
The Epiphany in Bethlehem has been a supremely concea
revelation. Born on a winter night to simple folk, laid swadd,ed
a manget’, and first recognized only by shepherds, Christ came
light in a manner radically different front that of the gods of I
Hellenistic milieu, who appeared in luminous spectacles of pow
This “as a difference engineered to distinguish the true apprn’ct
cio,,,vht from the plethora of other epiphanies that were everywh
being prociatmed and manutacrured at the time. “Is this a Goc
asks Jacob of ‘soragine of the Nlagi, in words borrowed from
Bernard of Clairvaux: “\\‘hat are you doing? Offering him gol
Then he is kingl But where is his royal hail, where is his tht’or
where his throng of courtiers? Is this tabe his palace, this ma
gee Ii is throne, his courtiers Joseph and Mar)’? Here tbe \vise m
give up their wisdom in order to become \vise’ More specifical
Chrtst’s epiphany is contrasted to those of the emperors of Ron’
who, following a practice inaugurated in the fourth century B.C. I
Ptolemy I of Egypt, styled themselves as manifestations of the
vine. The first-century an. emperor Dotnitian, for example,
a:
peat’ed in public on a haldachined throne, tndicating his dual a
pect as emperor and as Jupirer. The postbiblical designation
the three Magi s kings sharpened the Christian polemic again
the Roman imperiai cult by showing the infant Jesus royall r•
‘ered even in poverty. It belonged to a general strategy by which, i
Christianity, the truth of the true reveals itself in a condition
paradox, as majesty within humility, power within weakness. hg1
within dark. Motivating this tactic “as the Crucifixion. Christ’s i
nominious death raised the question, articulated even by his tor
mentors, as to how this abject thing, this ruined body of a mere
man, could be the true image of God, Christians answered this by
imagining the Passion as an inversion of values, in which the high
becomes lov and the low high. and in which truth arrives in the
world under conditions ot concealment.
In the upper left of his ilti n ich panel, and thus at the starting
point of the narrative thread of Christ’s life, Memling introduces
a motif that encapsulates this logic: the fall of the idols episode
within the stors’ of the flight into Egypt. Familiar in the Middle
Ages through apocryphal texts such as the Gospel of Pseudo
\ la:thew, the story of how the effigies of the ud, plural gods cruin
bled in the presence of the infant Christ expressed the idea that
schile God, true and singu!:-,:ighr seem concealed in the baby
Jesus, the false gods, or idols, betrayed their nothingness by expos
ing their empty visibility as mere matter, however preciouss) One
of the salient valences of the black Magus was that, hailing from
what “as believed to be the largely idolatrous land of Africa, he
proved by his obeisance the universal claim of Christ to be the oue
and true God.
The Festaictolo
Because it occurred under conditions of concealment, the Epiph
am- posed interesting challenges to artists aiming at spectacular—
if also self-conscious and paradoxical—pictorial display. During
the final decades of the fifteenth century, artists in the trade capital
of Antwerp devised new ways ot painting the Epiphany. These pic
tttres were so appealing that for some thirty years the Adoration
of the Magi became the signature stibject for Neiherlandish panel
painting. For Memlings 1480 panel we know the artist, his patron,
the pail) ti ng’s approximate date of product inn, and even the site
where it ‘s-as originally displaced, hut Antwerp Adorations conte to
largely as anonvntous artifacts. With hundreds stil extant, and
with many thousands originally produced, these paintings were
-irtually assembly—line productions’. images made in multiples
by means of new techniques of mechanical copying—and faster
modes of paint application—undertaken by numerous large, net
worked workshops. About half of the retables listed in the art his
torian Max J. Friedlander’s Early Nethicrlaiidishi Painting as Ant—
werp “mannerist have-as their principal suhiect the Adoration of
the Magi2° And counted indtvtduatlv, as extant isolated panels,
Adoratiuns make tip about a third of Antwerp mannerist “ors.
(By comparison. Memling’s accepted oem-re. currently- comprising
some n,netv-three works, contains but three Adoratioas. i Though
featuring modish costumes, architecture, and decor, the Antwerp
Adorations, as individual specimens, are rarely original. Perfectly
in tttne with consumer demands, these ruutinized valuables fed an
expanding Europe-wide market for quality art from the Nether
lands -
The first great ciassifier of these paintings, Friedlflnder. grouped
them as eKpressions of Anlsverp “mannerism’’ He meant that
scord in something like its eady peiorative sense, which denoted a
ainterlysts-le (ntatdera). and more specifically a stylishness (iiiiiii—
nato) that “-as to make works executed in this manner seem over—
stylish—ss’hat some seventeenth-century commentators, in rebel
lion against the recent past, also termed “mannered” (niauiemato).
Antwerp nan nerism has no direct historical relation to that essen —
tially Italian style—cultivated in the wake of Raphael and Michel -
angelo and affecting northern art mainly iii the second half of the
sixteenth century—that theorists from I odovico Dolce (1570)
through Giovanni Beliori (1672) deplored as artificial and stilted,
THE EPIPHANY OF THE BLAcK MAGUS CIRCA 1500 47