Taking A Magnifying Glass To The Brown Faces In Medieval Art

By Gene Demby

The Tumblr sounds a bit like a college course: People of Color in European Art History.

And its goal is pretty ambitious. The blog's author, Malisha Dewalt, says that her goal is to challenge the common perception that pre-Enlightenment Europe was all white, which she argues is a much more recent and deliberate invention.

"All too often, these works go unseen in museums, Art History classes, online galleries, and other venues because of retroactive whitewashing of Medieval Europe, Scandinavia, and Asia," she writes. "[T]his blog is here to emphasize the modern racism that retroactively erases gigantic swaths of truth and beauty."

And she means erased literally: While it was once the convention to depict one of the Magi — the fabled "three wise men" of the Christian folklore — as a dark-skinned black man, many dark-skinned people who appear in portraits of European royals were later painted white or simply cropped out when they were reproduced in textbooks.

Pamela Patton, a professor of art history who focuses on Iberia, says that artists from the Middle Ages "seem clearly interested in representing a diversity of ethnic variations, including different skin colors, hair textures, and facial features."

She goes on. "It's tempting to ask whether they were primed for this by the actual ethnic diversity of the medieval Iberian world, where there were Africans, Arabs, Jews, and other non-European groups in some numbers," she says.

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