Bulletin of the Comediantes

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...