first drawing of this biblical narrative, circa 1490, shows Judith grasping the general’s heavy and lolling decapitated head by the hair as an older, wizened black woman stoops down with an empty sack to collect the head. In a second portrayal of this scene, the maidservant is young, perhaps younger than Judith. In this portrait the servant’s facial features are presumptively African, and yet like Katharina, also attractive. In both paintings, the servant is as voluptuous and well-built as Judith.
Mantegna’s use of a black woman as a handmaiden in an iconic Christian story was telling. At once evocative and firmly rooted in the late fifteenth-century cultural scene in which it was drawn, Mantegna’s work reconstituted aristocratic white women’s servants as having always been black.55 But black women’s subjectivity and subordination did not diminish their bodily beauty.
After Mantegna, many other artists reproduced the scene of Judith and Holofernes featuring a winsome black handmaiden. Paolo Veronese produced late sixteenth-century paintings of Judith that evoked Mantegna. One, painted between 1582 and 1585, shows a young, contemplative, and buxom Judith being assisted by her seemingly black servant. The servant’s face is careworn, which may be an indication of her age, or alternatively an attempt to illustrate African physiognomy in a way that bespoke a harshness or unattractiveness. The servant in Veronese’s portrait is nevertheless sexually alluring in build. Her toned, largely bare upper torso extends toward the viewer. Her cleavage, like Judith’s, sits on display in the center of the frame, commanding an erotic attention. The viewer’s gaze is drawn more to the sensuality of the women than the triumphant act of decapitation, which, in the biblical tale, saves Judith’s city from enemy plunder.
Figure 1.10. Paolo Veronese, Judith with the Head of Holofernes, 1580. Image courtesy of Art Resource, New York.
Veronese’s version of Judith was composed only a few years before his death in 1588. By this time, he had lived in Venice for thirty-five years. And if Titian was in the estimation of many the unrivaled master of Venetian art, Veronese was esteemed for his beautiful, if often controversial, renditions of biblical tales and classical myths. In these works he was fond of including Africans in scenes in which they had previously been absent. No painter, in fact, during the two-hundred-year span between the late fifteenth and late seventeenth centuries that marked the simultaneous rise of both the slave trade and the Renaissance throughout Europe, painted more scenes featuring black figures.56 His frequent incorporation of black people into his work did more than raise a few eyebrows; he was at one point subject to a trial for what was described as his “misrepresentations” of the good book. His sentence? To correct the offending piece so that it accurately reflected the scripture.57
Figure 1.11. School of Paolo Veronese, Portrait of a Moorish Woman, 1550s. Image courtesy of Bridgeman Images.
Most of Veronese’s figures were of black men and children. But an unidentified student of his style and purported member of the school of Paolo Veronese presented a portrait of a young black woman that remains a significant contribution to the collection of black women in Renaissance art. The painting, Portrait of a Moorish Woman, is a bust of a bejeweled African woman in simple garb that recalls Dürer’s Katharina. This painting, which was completed around 1550, shows none of the melancholy that was evident in Dürer’s portrait. The unidentified “Moorish woman” is marked through her skin color, facial features, and dazzling jewels as “African.”58 Her plain vestments are arranged in a bit of peekaboo pageantry that conveys the influence of Veronese. They also remind viewers of her Otherness and her social station, even as her womanly charms are on full display.
Each of the three major centers of sixteenth-century Renaissance artistic production had a distinctive identity. Despite differences in method and execution, when it came to considerations of feminine attractiveness, Dürer’s mathematical calculations, the Florentine Academy’s neoclassicism, and the Venetian voluptuousness were all united by the notion that beauty was found in proportionality and that fleshiness was pleasing to the eye.
Such similarities are not surprising. The artists did not live in creative silos. Surviving reports reveal that artists like Dürer traveled throughout Italy, Belgium, and the Netherlands to finish commissioned pieces. They also uncover the creative love affair between artists in the various regions. Raphael and Dürer apparently exchanged prints of their works; each was known to admire the work of the other. In Venice, Titian’s crush on Dürer bordered on infatuation, and Dürer noted his concern that the artist was simply copying his work. This concern, it seems, was not unfounded.59 But it was also not without a hint of irony, given his own dogged attempt to pinch the secrets of execution of the Venetian artist Barbari.
It is perhaps because of the shared influences and similarities across regions that for centuries no one knew who sculpted the first African Venus. The statue was originally ascribed to Danese Cattaneo, an Italian sculptor who produced much of his work in Venice.60 This view was later discredited, and the sculpture was attributed to other artists in Florence, northern Italy, and even France. In recent years, a Netherlander named Johan Gregor van der Schardt, who studied in Italy before being employed by the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian II, has been credited with its creation.
The African Venus has many of the same attributes as the classical and neoclassical paintings and statues of Venus, including the famed Venus de Medici statue that was known to be part of the Medici family collection by the late sixteenth century.61 Like the Venus de Medici, the African Venus was of a similarly proportionate, medium build, and fleshy. The blackness of the African Venus is marked by more than just her bronze coloring. The features of the face are also paradigmatically African. Her curly hair is covered by a nondecorative headdress, a detail unique to African Venus statues. Also unique to these statues, in one hand she holds a cloth presumably used to polish the mirror held in the other, into which she gazes longingly.
Figure 1.12. African Venus, 1581 or later. Attributed to Johan Gregor van der Schardt.
The African Venus represents a curious play on the Venus iconography. On the one hand, the sculpture fits within the prevailing idiom of beauty, representing the “refined tastes of the ruling elite of Europe” circulating during the Renaissance.62 Her rounded, elongated limbs speak to the influence of the Mannerist period, which extended approximately from the 1520s to the 1580s. But because she is black, the sculptor also used some markers to indicate her low social status. The African Venus carries a cloth rag and wears a headdress that may signify that she is a domestic servant. Black female servants were often fitted with simple headdresses, as was the case in Dürer’s Katharina, Titian’s Diana, and Veronese’s Judith. The African Venus is, moreover, immodest. In a prelude to ideas about Africans that would be developed over the next several centuries, the African Venus is lacking in shame; whereas the Europeanized Venus Pudica covers her pubis and breasts, the African Venus is mesmerized by her own beauty as she gazes wistfully at her own reflection.63
There are thirteen known African Venus statues, each of a similar design as that purportedly crafted by van der Schardt in the 1580s. It is possible that van der Schardt’s African Venus is one manifestation of a “profane” or lowly Venus, neither exalted nor heavenly. Her earthly beauty and its wholly physical manifestation would inspire lust, but not, as with the Venus Pudica, love.64
But a change was coming. In sixteenth-century Italian masterworks, low-status black women had been prized for their figures. But by the turn of the seventeenth century, black women were shifting from the aesthetic counterparts of European women to their aesthetic counterpoints. Their novelty having worn off in areas where the slave trade had been going on the longest, black women’s figures too were being described as inferior. In the new “proto-racist” order,65 black
