Balthazar: A Black African King in Medieval and Renaissance Art ed. by Kristen Collins and Bryan C. Keene (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Balthazar: A Black African King in Medieval and Renaissance Art ed. by Kristen Collins and Bryan C. Keene Caitlin Irene Dimartino Kristen Collins and Bryan C. Keene, eds., Balthazar: A Black African King in Medieval and Renaissance Art (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2023), xiii + 152 pp., 121 ills. In his introduction to Balthazar: A Black African King in Medieval and Renaissance Art, Henry Louis Gates Jr. aptly acknowledges the “enormous symbolic weight” that Black subjects have borne in the history of European art (xii). His observation is particularly applicable to representations of the biblical figure Balthazar, one of three kings present at the birth of Christ who, beginning in the late fifteenth century and continuing over the course of the early modern period, was increasingly understood in European visual culture, theological texts, and popular imagination as a Black king from the African continent. Building from a 2019 exhibition at the Getty Center in Los Angeles, Balthazar: A Black African King in Renaissance Art does more than simply chart racialization of a Christian holy figure across time. This text brings together manuscripts, paintings, sculptures, textiles, and portable objects to illustrate the interconnectedness of Africa and Europe and the dramatic impact of African diplomats, pilgrims, and missionaries on European audiences before and up through the onset of the slave trade. As the fulcrum around which the objects are organized, artistic interpretations of Balthazar reflect the absolute multiculturalism and plethora of exchange and [End Page 218] interchange between Africa and other parts of the world, while the shifting representation of Balthazar’s ethnicity, accoutrements, dress, or entourage registered fluctuating and multitudinous reactions to African sovereignty, piety, diplomacy, and subjection from a European perspective. As such, the text offers an alternative to the more common narratives of Blackness and Christianity through a binary model, where Black skin is relegated either to sinfulness, ethnography, and paganism or to purely positive representations of holy figures. The book’s three sections each begin with thematic overviews by the editors followed by focused essays from specialists on African art of Ethiopia, Nubia, West Africa, as well as of Europe and the African diaspora. This range of expertise speaks to the expansiveness of the theme of the Black Magus in premodern visual culture, as well as to the interconnectedness of Africa and Europe long before the “discovery” by the Portuguese on the Gold Coast in the sixteenth century. Sections are punctuated by “in focus” texts on language, memory, diaspora, and contemporary art, and the book closes with an essay by Tyree Boyd-Pates, a consultant to the project, who addresses the importance of telling a broader history of the early modern world that includes agency for people of African descent and that elevates Black subjects, especially in such public-facing projects as exhibitions and texts geared toward multiple audiences. The first section sets the groundwork for the development of race in the cultural imaginary of Latin Christendom. Beginning in the 1000s, artists often portrayed the perceived Blackness of biblical characters through proxy, whereby an African attendant or servant would accompany a light-skinned Balthazar or Queen of Sheba. Depictions of the Magus with dark skin began in earnest in the late 1400s. Paul Kaplan charts the spread of iconography from Germanic regions through Italy and the rest of Europe, which coincided with a general increase in the popularity of the three Magi and the devotion to their cult. Geraldine Heng’s essay likewise traces the fluctuating meanings of black color from a symbolic referent to sin to a more literal descriptor of epidermal race. Heng proposes that black pigment used on Balthazar, like the Black St. Maurice, could symbolically externalized the internal sinfulness of white Christian audiences who stood before their likenesses. While black color could thus signify the starting point toward redemption or conversion, artists also used skin color to articulate religious difference or the negative qualities associated with Muslims or Jews, as Hussein Fancy demonstrates in his chapter on the multiconfessional landscape of the Iberian Peninsula and artwork produced at the court of Alfonso X of Castille. The following section shifts focus to the networks of commerce, trade, pilgrimage, and diplomacy that connected...