relegates the black Venus of Arcadia to a footnote in the history of Venus statues, a cultural curiosity, comparable to a winged goddess or one wielding a spike. He makes this position clear when he claims that “there are 100 other statues” he could mention, “but suffice it to say that each one represents the region it comes from.”29
There is scant evidence from surviving texts to suggest that Rubens actively harbored a disdain for black women. Rather, he was working during a period of profound cultural change, a shift in the way Europeans saw Africans. Artists in the Dutch and English Golden Ages were less likely to gush about the beauty of Africans and more likely to note their social—and now also embodied—distinctions from whites.30 Importantly, Rubens’s work throws into relief the historical moment in which distinctions between African and European women came to increasingly rely on the physical body. For Rubens, and a growing number of artists and philosophers, white skin was necessary to elevate a woman to the height of bodily beauty.
It is not for nothing that the Netherlands would have been one of the earliest places to witness this evolution in the relationship between skin color and beauty. In the early seventeenth century, Dutch provinces were still embroiled in a costly war with Spain. What they desired, in addition to their independence, was a viable presence in the lucrative market of international trade. To that end the enslavement of Africans, while inhumane, was to prove intensely profitable. In 1602 the Dutch government decided to throw its support behind homegrown merchants determined to enter the trade. Established in Amsterdam, a mere hundred miles from Antwerp, the Dutch East India Company (also known as the VOC) was made up of local merchants and investors.31 It was backed by the States General of the Netherlands, which offered the chartered company a trade monopoly in trade routes between parts of Asia, South America, and South Africa. It became, by many accounts, the world’s first multinational corporation.32 Gaining a foothold in the spice industry after Antwerp had been cut off may have been one of the VOC’s key directives, but it did more than dabble in the slave trade. Scholars have shown that by the 1650s, envoys with the VOC set down roots in the Cape of Good Hope, enslaving innumerable members of the indigenous Khoikhoi, or as they became known to the Dutch, the “Hottentot.”33
If the VOC made slavery only one of the tools in its trading arsenal, the Dutch West India Company (WIC) made the traffic in human commodities its main directive. Founded only a few years after the VOC, the WIC had as one of its primary objectives what has been euphemistically described as establishing “direct relations with indigenous people in African coastal regions.”34 While the VOC operated largely on the Indian Ocean, the States General granted the WIC a trade monopoly on the Atlantic between Africa and the Americas. Between the 1630s and the 1650s, the WIC became the dominant force in the African slave trade.35
While these developments may seem tangential to the question of aesthetics, they were, in fact, integral to the issue. As Simon Gikandi has noted, the slave trade was fundamental to the development of the bourgeoning “culture of taste.”36 Within this culture, the objectification of black bodies and labor through the slave trade turned black people themselves into the shadow figures of modernity, appearing to exist outside of and in opposition to it.37 Black people thus increasingly came to represent différance, or a perverse primitivity and backwardness, a “polemical otherness.”38 Black people became, in other words, aesthetic counterpoints within the budding culture of taste. This had a visible impact on the representations of black women, given the centrality of appearance to the assessment of a woman’s worth.39 Once accorded a measure of dignity and desirability, black women were progressively represented as small, low, and foul. White women dominated the landscape of statuesque beauties.
* * *
England had been a relative latecomer to the traffic in Africans in both art and commerce. The country had not participated in the slave trade during its entire first century. But in the late sixteenth century, England was transformed from underdog to dominant global power. As a nation, England appeared to have skipped the honeymoon phase of infatuation with African slaves witnessed elsewhere on the Continent during the early years of the slave trade. The first slaves had appeared in England in 1555.40 That same year, damning representations of Africans cropped up. In one book from 1555, the authors described Africans as “animals … [who] would fall upon their women.” Moreover, Africans were described as “utterly free from care because they are always sure to have plenty of food.”41
The stereotype that black people were sexually and orally indulgent quickly gained traction.42 By the early seventeenth century, the perception that Africans freely gratified their animal appetites was expressed by some of the most elite members of English high society.43 The celebrated statesman and author Francis Bacon issued a two-part condemnation of African appearance and character that incorporated these two stereotypes, among others. In it, Bacon parroted the view, also popular in the Low Countries, that “Ethiopians,” as he called them, were “little, foul, and ugly.” He added to this the now familiar English view that black people were libidinous, writing that they embodied the very “Spirit of Fornication.”44
Perhaps it will come as no surprise, then, that in seventeenth-century England, as in the Low Countries, as blackness was linked to unattractiveness so was whiteness increasingly linked to beauty. Turn-of-the-century England, known as the Golden Age of English art, philosophy, and culture, was distinct in the tenacity of these color-based associations. For starters, while whiteness had long been associated with purity, goodness, and beauty in the country, the reign of the virgin queen, praised for her glowing alabaster skin, codified the association for the citizenry.45 Poets produced song and verse in homage to their Christian ruler, such as the following:
Her hand as white as whale’s bone
Her finger tipt with Cassidone
Her bosom, sleek as Paris plaster
Held up two bowls of Alabaster.46
If the queen’s skin was indeed “white as whale’s bone,” it wasn’t attributable so much to God as to the milk-colored lead paint she was known to be fond of applying to her face and arms.47 Nevertheless, the whiteness of her skin, even if owing to cosmetics, elicited positive feelings among her countrymen. The praise surrounding her eventually reached cult status. Historians have shown that her whiteness was a focus for her subjects’ sentiments.48
There was a second reason that the fetish for whiteness reached a fever pitch in seventeenth-century England. Artistic representations had been severely restricted in the country as a result of the Protestant Reformation a century earlier. As a result, images that did not appear to accurately reproduce biblical lore, including those featuring black people, were forbidden and in some instances destroyed.49 The pigeonholing of visual imagery effectively stunted the growth of British painting until the Restoration of Charles II in 1660.50 For this reason, representations of black people by domestic painters were nearly nonexistent for the country’s first century of involvement in the slave trade. When they did make appearances prior to 1660, it was less in the visual arts than in official court records, poetry, literature, and court masques.51 The first black women in the court record, for example, arrived as maids in the retinue of Catherine of Aragon in 1501. Catherine appeared on official business, an arranged marriage to the English Prince Arthur. Very little information survives about her cortege, but we do know that her black female servants were ridiculed by Sir Thomas More, key counselor to Elizabeth’s father, King Henry VIII, as “hunchbacked, undersized, and barefoot Pygmies of Ethiopia.”52
Sir Thomas More’s evaluation of black women as small and deformed was a prelude to the linking of black femininity and the grotesque in Elizabethan art and literature. William Shakespeare often featured tortured black characters in his plays. In Othello, the title character despaired over being treated as a “lascivious Moor.”53 Less frequently, however, have scholars commented on Shakespeare’s dismissal of black femininity, as appears in his famed Midsummer Night’s Dream.54 In the play, Hermia is spurned by her suitor, Lysander, who rejects her in favor of the fair
