Couwenbergh’s The Rape of the Negress

Abstract

This essay analyzes Christiaen van Couwenbergh’s The Rape of the Negress (1632). The author argues the image as theological artifact, capturing the emergence of a white colonial gaze and the Dutch state concern of Christian piety as an emerging colonial power. The article reviews the context of the image and the art reception history that resisted naming it an image of rape. The author juxtaposes the painting with a Marian statue hidden and thus saved from the Dutch iconoclasm—now one of the most famous Black Madonnas in Europe—to locate theologically the process of colonial unseeing and the refusal to name Black female flesh as sacred. She rereads these visual artifacts through the question of iconicity, and claim these images as sites of Black feminist fugitivity and resistance.