22. Is This Unique –16 People of Colour In One 15th Century Painting?
Many of the people are individuated with different characters and characteristics – plus one or two regrettable men.
First, caveats, pre-apologies, and preparation of wriggle-room. The author of this series is British. His sensitivities to questions of race are less developed than those of his American friends. He rushes in where angels fear to tread. He – that is, I – bring all sorts of baggage and oppressive notions of class and sex, lacking the energy and expertise to conduct the moral surgery to excise them.
On the other hand, such defects may be helpful, considering the hierarchies of class, sex and oppression in the 15th century.
All the People of Colour seem from sub-Saharan Africa rather than from the more Arabic north. Of the four figures in the foreground, none is noticed by any of the surrounding characters (but then, there is an atmosphere of alienation and distance between the foreground characters anyway).
There is the – possibly – pregnant woman with the man on the mallard’s back.
Above her, in the central pond, the Bath of Venus, there are six women – or possibly five, with one masculine-looking person embracing a white head in the water. There is a friendly atmosphere, Black and White mixing pleasantly. The woman on the left of the pond has a peacock on her head.
In the tributaries above, in the top third of the panel, a cockleshell craft is being boarded by an ill-favoured man up to no good. His paramour in the water holds up her arms pleading, or in protest.
To their right, a couple toy with a giant berry – one towing it, another throwing a blue berry like a beachball.
There are no Black people in Eden or in Hell.
THE ARISTOCRAT
In my reading of this women, with her contained pose, her angled feet and pointed toes, her elegant arm across her midriff and her delicate features are marks of position, class.
She also dressed in an invisible veil of sex. She is what we used to call a minx. See the curling frond around her upper thigh. That is coming from close to her sex. Is it subtly reaching towards the bending rear of the man at right? It has potential to do so. Her sly hand holds a fruit of temptation behind her back. The man to her right is abstracted (he is looking at a bluebird close to his raised hand). She is looking at the bird, as he is. But her thoughts are not innocent. Her intentions are mischievous – so the little smile says to those of us whose thoughts bend that way.
TWO OTHERS ARE STARERS
The two other individuated characters in the foreground perhaps lack the courtliness of the first woman but both have distinct features. Whether male or female is harder to say, it could go either way. Above looks more like a she and below looks more like a he. Then again, they might be children.
Both, in their separate ways are looking in the same direction, somewhat above the horizontal, but probably not – as I had first assumed – at the same thing.1 The character with the open mouth can plausibly be said to be fixed on the woman in an embrace with her White lover. The character on the right is caught by something else, some manifestation of the thing that others in the 'staring community' are taken with.
There is another head, with one eye that we can see. From the little we are shown, there is a slightly wild look about him – the flaring white of his staring eye. Is it astonishment? Is it shock? What is he looking at?
He might be looking at the scandalous Flower Pot Game. That’s enough to shock anyone. It certain shocked the critic Erwin Panofsky 500 years later – he referred to it as an ‘unheard-of perversion’.
THE PREGNANT LOVER
Here we have the enigmatic couple on the Mallard’s back. Her hand is on her swelling tummy, suggesting she is pregnant. She is fixed on his face, but his attention is elsewhere. She is beautiful, high-cheek-boned, with long black hair. He looks worried. He is probably looking at the same thing many of the giant birds are looking at – the ‘cosmic egg’ in the dead centre of the panel. Whatever has taken his attention it is not the woman he is with.
There is a story of passion and pathos here. And by the look of it, things won’t end well.
We have ten more People of Colour above the hedgeline – six in the Bath of Venus and four in the waters above. Eight are clearly women but there are two questionable men. We shall come to them next time.
These sightlines are imperfect. The vertical lines go from the middle of the head to the chin and the sightline go off at right angles to that. With a bit of adjustment you can get the lines to point at different things, within quite an arc. However, for the left hand character, I drew the line without predicting where it would end up.