This sumptuous and profusely illustrated catalogue, Balthazar: A Black African King in Medieval and Renaissance Art, “builds upon the 2019 museum exhibition of the same name” which was displayed at the J. Paul Getty Center from November 19, 2019 to February 16, 2020 (vii). On view at that time and now assembled in this catalogue are materials concerning the Black magus ranging from illuminations in manuscripts, paintings, sculptures, and prints to some twenty-first-century interpretations such as that by Peter Braithwaite (b. 1983) who in 2020 “re-created dozens of works of art to highlight historical depictions of Black people.” Among his depictions was an image of himself in a tableau vivant as Balthazar based on a miniature of the Adoration by Georges Trubert found on folio 59 of a Book of Hours from Provence, c. 1480-1490 that belongs to the Getty (2, 110). Indeed, many art works in this volume are drawn from the rich holdings of the Getty, but items from other collections are also included.
The editors, Kristen Collins, curator of manuscripts at the Getty, and Brian C. Keene, a former curator at the Getty, have framed the book by interlacing portions of their own continual narrative: “An African King in Art and Legend” (2-32), “Connecting Continents Through Trade and Diplomacy” (48-63), “Black Africans and the Paradox of the Renaissance” (78-94), and “Epilogue” (110-111) with short essays by eight other scholars. Three of the essays are from the pen of Paul H. D. Kaplan. These are “Geographies of the Black Magus Tradition,” “The Black Magus in the Public Sphere,” and “The Black Magus in ‘We Three Kings of Orient Are.’” The rest are single essays by seven other scholars: Geraldine Heng, “Why Black? The Meanings of Epidermal Race in the European Middle Ages,” Hussein Fancy, “Color, Race, and Religion in Spain: Cantigas de Santa Maria,” Gus Casely-Hayford, “African Kingship: Real and Imagined,” Andrea Myers Achi, “Connective Threads: Nubian Trade, Dignitaries and Display,” Samantha Kelly, “Ethiopian Monks in Europe,” Cécile Fromont, “A Black Magus Comes to Rome from Kongo,” and Tyree Boyd Pates, “Afterward: Curating Black History with Black Audiences in Mind.” The foreword, “Balthazar’s Blackness: Equally Noble, Equally Foreign,” by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., gives Balthazar “pride of place as the first Black man to see the baby Jesus” and provides a valuable précis of the contribution of philanthropists, John and Dominique De Menil, who began in the 1960s to search for representations “of phenotypically Black figures in the body of Western art” in the hope of fighting racism (x; xi). Their findings, vast and rich, have been published sequentially since 2010 by Harvard University Press in five volumes under the collective title, The Image of the Black in Western Art.
The catalogue gives us a clear lens with both telescopic and microscopic powers by which to see that--in addition to questions of religion--the three wise men are, as Casely-Hayford wrote, “a powerful analogue of the political geography of the medieval world and the personification of a triplex, interconnected economy--with Europe, Asia and Africa as three equal territories that profoundly shaped the economic and intellectual advancement of the entire world” (67). For Pates, whose afterword concludes the volume, the exhibit proves that the African “presence was known, respected, and acknowledged even by colonial powers” (113).
What the catalogue does not do well, however, is treat the written sources and the languages in which they were written with the consideration they deserve. From a philological viewpoint, the brief section titled “The Magi in Written Sources” is insufficient (13). While the passages in question are mostly in Latin (3, 14, 16, 10, 25, 29, 32, 33, 34, 82, and 94), some are in Ge’ez (56, 60, 74, and 75), Spanish (43, 44, 45, 49, and 88), and Arabic (27, 52, and 53). Some of the images are embedded in lines of text and the reader wonders what the words surrounding the images might reveal. In these cases, surelypictura et scriptura inform each other. One example of this aphilological approach stems from the brief account in Matthew 2:1 which does not give the name, number, color or race of the Wise Men but later became a bottomless source of inspiration seen today as an “extraordinary process of legend making, imagination...the mind’s power to form concepts about things which the conceivers never witnessed, but believe to have taken place,” in Geoffrey Grigson’s words, the “[c]omplex, fantastic, full of marvel, treasure, orientalism glitter, colour, perfume impossibility, symbolically full of meaning disseminated through Christendom, responsible for churches and cathedrals, for minor and major works of painting, sculpture and poetry” [1]. But this was not always so. Jerome (d. 420) viewed such accretions as apocryphal and derided them as deliramenta et fabulae (ravings and myths). The brief Latin inscription on the medal made by Pope Paul V to mark the death of the Congolese ambassador to the Holy See, António Manuel Ne Vunda, who died a few days after arriving in Rome on January 5, 1608, deserves some attention, but is not mentioned though one can see it in the photo on page 104. And yet the Latin provides meaning with its reference to the vocabulary of the Catholic Church, particularly the interpretations of the noun pastor, pastoris as in Psalms 23, 78, 95, 100, and 119. Here both image and text underscore the remarkable parallel seen by Seicento Italians between Balthazar’s journey, the timing of António Manuel Ne Vunda’s arrival, and the feast day of the Magi on January 6.
A few other important artists and ideas deserved mention. These include “The African King Caspar” (1654) in Berlin’s Staatliche Museen by the Amsterdammer, Hendrik Heerschop. The gleaming yellow garb worn by Caspar calls to mind the golden dress of António Manuel Ne Vunda seen in the photo on page 105. Another painter from more recent times meriting attention is the son of the African Methodist Episcopal Church Bishop Benjamin Tanner, the renowned painter Henry Ossawa Tanner. Steeped in religious traditions of his family, he portrayed events from the New Testament in many of his works. His painting, “Three Wise Men,” depicts three robed men atop towering camels who together are moving like three small pyramids through a velvet, twilight blue landscape. On a technical point, the discussion on ways to indicate skin color found on page 31 would have been strengthened by mentioning Elmer Kolfrin’s look at the use of crosshatching by printers to depict dark skin. [2]
One also wonders why scholarly references have been restricted almost entirely to works in English and from the twenty-first century. If this was a conscious choice by the editors, they should have said so. Arnoldo Pinto Cardosa’s 1991 essay is a case in point. [3] Although it is nowhere mentioned, it is well worth a look, but it is in Portuguese and from 1991 and perhaps that is why it was left out. But with these points raised, the catalogue is packed with more than one would expect from a slim volume of 138 pages. Opening up new avenues of thought about intercultural transmissions, it is a noteworthy achievement as we continue to bring the continent of Africa and the people of African descent back into the “picture.” For those of us who follow the history of the Getty dynasty, one must wonder what J. Paul Getty would have made of this exhibition. After all, the actor and musician Balthazar Getty is one of his great-grandsons.
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Notes:
1. See Geoffrey Grigson, “The Three Kings of Cologne,” History Today 4 (1954): 793-801.
2. See Elmer Kolfrin, “When Africa Became Black: Dürer, Rubens and the Changing Image of Africans in Northern Europe,” Print Quarterly 34 (2017): 379-392.
3. Arnoldo Pinto Cardosa, “António Manuel Negrita Embaixador do Congo junto da Santa Sé,” Humanistica e Teologia 12 (1991): 389-399.