Volume 28, Number 17 · November 5, 1981
Out of the Shadows
By David Brion Davis
The Image of the Black in Western Art, Volume One: From the Pharaohs to the Fall of the Roman Empire
general editor Ladislas Bugner, by Jean Vercoutter, by Jean Leclant, by Frank M. Snowden Jr., by Jehan Desanges, translated by William Granger Ryan
Morrow, 352, 385 illustrations pp., $65.00
The Image of the Black in Western Art, Volume Two: From the Early Christian Era to the "Age of Discovery" Part 1, From the Demonic Threat to the Incarnation of Sainthood
general editor Ladislas Bugner, by Jean Devisse, with a preliminary essay by Jean Marie Courtès, translated by William Granger Ryan
Morrow, 288, 168 illustrations pp., $70.00
The Image of the Black in Western Art, Volume Two: From the Early Christian Era to the "Age of Discovery" Part 2, Africans in the Christian Ordinance of the World (Fourteenth to the Sixteenth Centuries)
general editor Ladislas Bugner, by Jean Devisse, by Michel Mollat, translated by William Granger Ryan
Morrow, 336, 264 illustrations pp., $80.00
During the fifteenth century BC, the Theban pharaohs of the Eighteenth Dynasty established an empire extending from the Euphrates to the Fourth Cataract of the Upper Nile. The southern conquests brought Egyptians into direct contact with black populations who continued to resist and counterattack. In the previous millennium black warriors and captives had occasionally appeared in the art of Egypt, Crete, and Cyprus—their precise racial origins are a matter of debate among scholars still attuned to dolichocephalous and mesaticephalous physical types. But as the first volume of The Image of the Black in Western Art shows us, from the mid-fifteenth century to Tutankhamun's painted box depicting the slaughter of black tribesmen (ca. 1342-1333 BC), Egyptian art increasingly portrayed realistic and unmistakable Negroes, often as warriors, dancers, or captive slaves. The almost caricatured head of a Negro captive, his neck constricted by three tight ropes, carved in limestone in the late Eighteenth Dynasty, would have struck any European slave trader over more than three thousand years later as a contemporary illustration. (See Volume I, figure 59.)
Review, 3466 words
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