Does it count as a link roundup, exactly, if all the links come from the same website? Let us be gentle with ourselves and say that it does.
The Root has been working with Harvard’s The Image of the Black Archive on a weekly series about black iconography in art history (mostly Western art, but also featuring ancient Mediterranean/Near Eastern/North African history), and it’s full of fantastic rabbit holes. Look at these headlines and tell me you can resist even a single one of them:
Laura, the Black Model Who Graced the Art of 19th-Century France
Artemis of Ephesus: A Goddess Who Represented an Ideal View of Blackness
Why Image of a Black Swordsman in King Solomon’s Court Was a Watershed Moment in European Art
The Vibrancy of the Black Church on Display in Colonial America
A Black King Faces Death as an Equal Among the European Elite
The Story of a Nubian King Etched in Stone
Why This Image of a Black Demon Leading St. Francis Was Sort of a Good Thing
The Complexities of Race Hidden Within a Simple Display of Everyday Life
In Goya’s Adoration of the Magi, a Black King Plays an Exalted Role
The Meaning Behind a Black Spaniard’s Hopeful Gaze Upon Our Lady of Mercy
It’s the perfect kind of art history project, too: just comprehensive enough to make you feel smarter for reading it, but not so academic that your eyes glaze over. As the most common of laymen, I have a hard time getting really into brushwork, but I could read about symbolism in art all day (the dog means marital fidelity! Someone holding a letter means they’re going to die! It’s like a neverending word puzzle). You were probably mostly done with whatever you were doing at work anyway.
