The Image of Freedom

Abstract

I discuss the shift from an hegemonic view of Afro-Hispanic slaves and ex-slaves to the articulation of the emergence of the slave ‘subject’ and the ‘emancipatory subject’ by concentrating on both; the only extant seventeenth-century portrait of an Afro-Hispanic slave subject, Juan de Pareja (1649) by his master, Diego Velázquez, made before Velázquez emancipated Pareja in Rome (1650), and on the articulation of the freed subject in Pareja’s self-portrait, in his painting The Calling of St Matthew (1661). I deal with how Velázquez’s portrait provides the form by which Pareja fashions his Europeanized self-portrait to signify his freedom and I explore the ways its iconography embodies extant discourses on diversity and slavery: Pareja’s attachment both to the collective Christian African past, and to his present with the experience of black communities, where the ‘Black but Human’ topos emerged. I also provide an account of Pareja’s career as an independent artist.