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.
Tags: art history, artwork, black iconography in western art, link roundup, the root
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ephesian artemis has to be one of the best goddesses of antiquity. tho my ultimate loyalties will always lie with the great mountain mother goddess of phrygia.
ephesian artemis has to be one of the best goddesses of antiquity. tho my ultimate loyalties will always lie with the great mountain mother goddess of phrygia.
Brilliant roundup! Here’s my favorite title that I just discovered: “What a Black Man’s Cool, Detached Gaze Says About Race in the Early Days of Italy”
YAY! Just YAY– that is all 🙂
I'm a big fan of the Waving Snakes Around Goddess of Knossos, personally. But Boob Artemis is pretty neat too.
These are so fascinating, thanks!
Eeesh, that illumination of Death scything everyone’s heads off is GRUESOME. But this is a really cool and interesting project – thanks for linking!
For those who have a bunch of money to burn and an empty coffee table or two, there’s also a (really beautiful) book series: http://www.hup.harvard.edu/results-list.php?colle…
And that led to another rabbit hole of HUP books, including “Dairy Queens: The Politics of Pastoral Architecture from Catherine de’ Medici to Marie-Antoinette.”
Am I the only one who didn’t know about the existence of “pleasure dairies” which “French queens and noblewomen used pleasure dairies to naturalize their status, display their cultivated tastes, and proclaim their virtue as nurturing mothers and capable estate managers”?
Speaking of black men in art history, great novel: http://www.amazon.com/Lenoir-Ken-Greenhall/dp/094…