Reviewed by:

• ‘Black but Human’: Slavery and Visual Art in Hapsburg Spain, 1480–1700 by Carmen Fracchia
• Tanya J. Tiffany

THE ROLES of enslaved peoples and freed Black men and women as both the subjects and producers of images in early modern Spain have garnered increasing attention in recent decades thanks to the work of scholars such as Victor I. Stoichita, Luis Méndez Rodríguez, and Carmen Fracchia, the author of the book under review. At once drawing upon and going beyond previous, more specialized studies, Fracchia’s monograph is the first to analyze slavery and depictions of Blackness in visual culture across imperial Spain.

As she states at the outset, Fracchia aims to explore both “hegemonic visions” of Black subjects and to uncover “critical and emancipatory practices by Afro-Hispanic slaves and ex-slaves,” but she does not always make clear how she is engaging these opposing perspectives and the tensions between them (1). (Although she never explicitly defines the term, Fracchia uses “Afro-Hispanic” mainly to refer to people of sub-Saharan African heritage, and she occasionally also employs it to discuss Muslim North Africans and their descendants.) In assessing questions of representation, readers will therefore want to consider Fracchia’s book alongside contributions—too recent for her to have taken into account—by Nicholas R. Jones, who argues that Black agency can be uncovered even in apparently derogatory portrayals by white Spanish writers (Staging Habla de Negros: Radical Performances of the African Diaspora in Early Modern Spain, Pennsylvania State UP, 2019), and Erin Kathleen Rowe, who has examined “how Afro-Iberians participated in the co-creation of devotional life” across the Catholic world (Black Saints in Early Modern Global Catholicism, Cambridge UP, 2019, 2).

Like the book as a whole, Fracchia’s chapter 1, “Black but Human,” is named for the topos used by Afro-Hispanics to proclaim their humanity when facing a system that treated them as material goods. The author explores emerging theological as well as literary discourses on skin color as mobilized in Iberia and elsewhere, including the equation of whiteness with purity and the idea that pious Christian souls, whether housed in European or African bodies, were white and thus beloved by God. Chapter 2, “What Is Human about Slavery?,” considers how the institution was justified by royal and ecclesiastical officials in Spain and Portugal, where hundreds of thousands [End Page 103] of enslaved people from various ethnic backgrounds lived and worked. Many churchmen defended the enslavement of sub-Saharan Africans as a means of introducing them to the faith. Within this framework of conversion, Fracchia discusses images of baptized Black men, in particular a Baptism of the Ethiopian Eunuch by Saint Philip from The Book of Hours of Charles V (ca. 1519) and an eighteenth-century Allegory of Baptism in the Mosque-Cathedral in Córdoba: paintings whose iconography pictures the supposed whitening powers of the sacrament.

Chapter 3, “Visual Culture and Slavery,” turns more fully to visual images, considering tensions surrounding the depiction of Blacks in Spanish sacred art, especially the figure of the Black Magus. Fracchia emphasizes that northern European artists routinely represented one of the Magi as Black beginning in the mid-fifteenth century, but this iconography became standard in Spain only in the 1520s. She sees this delay as part of a pattern in which images of Blacks were unusual in regions where slavery was widespread. The causal, chronological argument for this seeming paradox merits more detailed investigation. As Fracchia herself demonstrates, the Black Magus was central to the religious imaginary of Seville’s late fourteenth-century “Our Lady of the Kings” (the “kings” here refer to the Magi), which was founded as “the very first black confraternity in Western Europe” at a moment when enslaved Africans were beginning to arrive in the city (48). Fracchia also highlights the broader importance of Black saints to the Afro-Iberian communities that emerged with the rise of the transatlantic slave trade, noting that various later Black confraternities likewise dedicated themselves to the Virgin of the Kings and Saint Benedict of...

审核人：

• “黑人但人性”：西班牙哈布斯堡的奴隶制和视觉艺术，1480-1700 年，卡门·弗拉基亚 (Carmen Fracchia)
• 坦尼娅·J·蒂芙尼

近几十年来，由于维克多 I. Stoichita、Luis Méndez Rodríguez 和 Carmen Fracchia 等学者的工作，被奴役的人民和获得自由的黑人男性和女性作为早期现代西班牙图像的主体和生产者的角色越来越受到关注，正在审查的书的作者。Fracchia 的专着同时借鉴并超越了以前更专业的研究，是第一本分析西班牙帝国视觉文化中的奴隶制和对黑人的描绘的专着。

正如她一开始所说，Fracchia 旨在探索黑人主体的“霸权愿景”，并揭示“非洲裔西班牙裔奴隶和前奴隶的批判性和解放性实践”，但她并不总是明确说明她是如何参与这些活动的。对立的观点和他们之间的紧张关系（1）。（虽然她从未明确定义过这个词，但 Fracchia 主要使用“非洲裔西班牙人”来指代撒哈拉以南非洲血统的人，她偶尔也会用它来讨论穆斯林北非人及其后裔。）在评估代表性问题时，因此，读者会想把弗拉基亚的书与尼古拉斯·琼斯（Nicholas R. Jones）的贡献一起考虑——对她来说太新了，她没有考虑到——他认为，即使在西班牙白人作家明显贬损的描写中，黑人机构也可以被发现（Staging Habla de Negros : 非洲散居在早期现代西班牙的激进表演，宾夕法尼亚州立大学，2019 年）和 Erin Kathleen Rowe，他研究了“非洲裔伊比利亚人如何参与共同创造虔诚的生活”在整个天主教世界（早期现代全球天主教中的黑人圣徒，剑桥大学，2019 年，2）。

与整本书一样，Fracchia 的第 1 章“黑人但人类”以非裔西班牙裔在面对将他们视为物质商品的系统时用来宣扬他们的人性的主题命名。作者探讨了在伊比利亚和其他地方动员起来的关于肤色的新兴神学和文学论述，包括白人与纯洁的等式，以及虔诚的基督徒灵魂，无论是居住在欧洲还是非洲的身体中，都是白人，因此受到上帝的爱戴。 . 第 2 章，“什么是人类对奴隶制的看法？”考虑了西班牙和葡萄牙的皇室和教会官员如何证明该制度是正当的，那里有数十万[End Page 103]来自不同种族背景的奴隶生活和工作。许多教士为奴役撒哈拉以南非洲人辩护，以此作为向他们介绍信仰的一种手段。在这个皈依的框架内，Fracchia 讨论了受洗黑人的形象，特别是圣菲利普从查理五世的时间之书（约 1519 年）中对埃塞俄比亚太监的洗礼和 18 世纪清真寺洗礼的寓言——科尔多瓦大教堂：其肖像画描绘了圣礼的所谓美白能力。

第 3 章“视觉文化与奴隶制”更全面地转向视觉图像，考虑到围绕西班牙神圣艺术中描绘黑人的紧张局势，尤其是黑魔法师的形象。Fracchia 强调，从 15 世纪中叶开始，北欧艺术家通常将其中一位贤士描绘成黑人，但这种肖像直到 1520 年代才成为西班牙的标准。她认为这种延迟是一种模式的一部分，在这种模式中，黑人的形象在奴隶制普遍存在的地区是不寻常的。这个看似悖论的因果关系、时间顺序的论证值得进行更详细的调查。正如弗拉基亚本人所证明的那样，黑魔法师是 14 世纪晚期塞维利亚“我们的国王夫人”（这里的“国王”指的是贤士）的宗教想象的核心，在被奴役的非洲人开始抵达这座城市的那一刻，它成立为“西欧第一个黑人兄弟会”（48）。Fracchia 还强调了黑人圣徒对随着跨大西洋奴隶贸易的兴起而出现的非洲裔伊比利亚社区的更广泛重要性，并指出后来的各种黑人兄弟会同样献身于国王的圣母和圣本尼迪克特...