The Ugly Renaissance (54 page)

But even those Italians who were neither travelers nor avid readers came into growing contact with the peoples of sub-Saharan Africa. It was in the decades after Alberto da Sarteano’s voyage that Italy saw “
the … trade in black slaves become big business”; and though it
undoubtedly constitutes the starting point of “one of the most heartrending and shameful episodes in world history,” it also provided the greatest opportunity yet for Renaissance Italians to encounter sub-Saharan Africans at close quarters. With ever-growing regularity, a stream of Portuguese ships bearing human cargoes began to reach the ports of Livorno, Venice, and Genoa, bringing those wealthy enough to own
slaves face-to-face with black Africans. Despite the Church’s reservations about slavery, Florentine banks—ever alert to the potential for profit—took a particularly keen interest in human merchandise and hurried to secure as many colored bondswomen (and sometimes bondsmen) as possible to meet the growing appetite for exotic domestics.
In July 1461, for example,
Giovanni Guidetti, a business agent for the Cambini bank, reported that the Portuguese ship
Santa Maria di Nazarette
had arrived in Livorno carrying a cargo that included three black female slaves who had been named Isabell, Barbera, and Marta. Valued at between 8,500 and 6,500 reals in proportion to their perceived “blackness” (“comparable to the annual salary of a qualified craftsman”), these girls were subsequently dispatched to perform domestic chores in the households of the
Cambini family,
Giovanni degli Albizzi, and
Ridolfo di ser Gabriello. Similarly, in September 1464, the Cambini account books reveal that Piero and Giuliano di Francesco Salviati paid the princely sum of 36.18
fiorini di suggello
“
for a black head they received from us … for their own domestic use.” Indeed, by the late fifteenth century, virtually every ambitious merchant family had at least one black slave, and none of
Italy’s great noble houses would have thought its court complete without a fair smattering of Africans.

T
HE
C
HILDREN OF
G
OD

As the veil of mystery began to fall from the face of sub-Saharan Africa, Italians were compelled to question how they perceived its peoples, and in this regard, too,
Alberto da Sarteano’s arrival at the Council of Florence with the Ethiopian delegates testifies not merely to the curiosity that the peoples of the African interior generated, but also to the extent to which Renaissance Italians were prepared to look on black Africans in a markedly positive fashion.

Both the reason for Alberto’s mission and the warmth with which Eugenius IV received the Ethiopians are revealing. In marked contrast
to views of Jews and Muslims, perceptions of black Africans were never tainted by religious prejudices. Indeed, quite the opposite. A deep sense of Christian friendship persuaded Renaissance Italians to view sub-Saharan Africans in a manner that was both welcoming and enthusiastic.

Although travelers such as
Alvise Ca’da Mosto remarked upon the prevalence of pagan animism in kingdoms such as Benin, for example, black Africans tended to be viewed from the very first
as children of God, regardless of whether they were known to adhere to the Christian faith or not. For churchmen of Filippo Lippi’s generation, their supposed origins revealed they were kindred spirits. Elaborating on the biblical story of Ham’s exile, Renaissance Italians imagined that Noah’s son had wandered from the Holy Land into Africa, where he ultimately settled, married, and had children. His descendants were, they believed, the ancestors of the fifteenth-century Ethiopians who arrived in Florence. Indeed, since few distinctions were drawn between different sub-Saharan peoples, all black Africans were thought to be
authentic children of Ham and were thus viewed as members of the broader Christian family.

If their supposed descent from Noah’s son was not enough, there was plenty of other evidence suggesting that black Africans should be regarded as authentic Christian brethren. The
Queen of Sheba, for example, was just one instance of a close scriptural link between Africa and Old Testament history, and the story of the journey of the Magi to Bethlehem stands out as being of particular importance. Although the biblical narrative contains no mention either of the Magi’s names or of their points of origin, early Christian writers swiftly filled the gap and began to associate the newly dubbed Caspar, Melchior, and Balthazar with the three corners of the known world.
While Caspar and Melchior were often linked with India and Persia, respectively, Balthazar came to be cast in the role of an African from a surprisingly early date. By the fourth century, for example,
Saint Hilary had postulated that Balthazar was from sub-Saharan Africa, and slowly but surely the idea of the “black Magus” gained ground, until it received wide acceptance in the fourteenth century. As Italians’ exposure to the peoples of the continent increased after Alberto da Sarteano’s arrival in Florence, the art of the period began to embrace the notion of a black Balthazar with tremendous enthusiasm. In Mantegna’s
Adoration of the Magi
(Uffizi, Florence) (
Fig. 39
)—which is most commonly dated to ca. 1489 but may be as early
as ca. 1462–70—the kneeling figure of Balthazar is a black African, and it is clear that both artist and viewer accepted him as an emblem of colored people’s integral role in the wider Christian drama.

It was an idea that only grew stronger as the years went by. From the mid-fifteenth century onward, the prevailing sense that black Africans were historically part of the Christian family persuaded some of the more adventurous artists and humanists to integrate them more firmly into biblical stories, even where supporting evidence was nonexistent. Perhaps as a consequence of
Isabella d’Este’s growing interest in having black servants at her court in Mantua, for example, Mantegna cut new ground in introducing a black African maid into the tale of Judith’s decapitation of Holofernes. In a pen-and-ink drawing dated to February 1492 (Uffizi, Florence), Judith’s maidservant is depicted with identifiably African features, a motif that Mantegna subsequently repeated in at least three other works and that was later imitated by artists such as Correggio. Since Judith was a paradigmatic example of self-sacrificing virtue thanks to her seduction and slaughter of the Assyrian general, the presence of a black African attendant in a representation of the scene indicates a willingness to attribute a reflected glory to colored peoples and to further emphasize their part in the scriptural tradition.

That sub-Saharan Africans were increasingly perceived as the
children of God provided the Church with a powerful reason to reach out positively to newly discovered nations, and to encourage a constructive, welcoming attitude toward black Africans in Africa and in Italy itself. Within sixty years of Alberto da Sarteano’s arrival in Florence, the Church was actively embracing the idea that the entrance of colored people into full communion with the Roman
Catholic faith was
one more proof that the Golden Age had arrived.

Building on Eugenius IV’s desire to unite Christendom and strengthen the integrity of Christianity worldwide, the Church began to explore any and all methods of propagating Catholicism among peoples who were either known to be believers in Christ or who were at least thought to be “instinctively” amenable to conversion. By the early sixteenth century,
Saint Ignatius of Loyola had expressed an interest in going on a mission to Ethiopia to strengthen the ties first glimpsed at the Council of Florence, and before long,
Jesuits were setting out to spread the word in West Africa. Some attempt was even made to adapt the Church’s message to local customs, and there is a sense in which tolerance
was recognized as an essential precondition of a Christian Africa. In 1518, for example,
Pope Leo X was petitioned by King Manuel of Portugal to consecrate the twenty-three-year-old Ndoadidiki Ne-Kinu a Mumemba—the illegitimate son of the native king of the Congo—as a bishop and to provide him with a staff of missionaries. Even though Ndoadidiki (better known as Henrique) was debarred from the episcopal office by virtue of his illegitimacy and his youth, Leo evidently thought this was a brilliant idea and not only had him appointed titular bishop of Utica but also sent a host of theologians to advise the young man until he reached the canonically acceptable age of twenty-seven. Africa, Leo seems to have believed, was better served by native-born prelates, an apparently clear sign of cross-cultural openness.

At home in Italy, too, the supposition of an inherent
religious kinship with black Africans led to a sensitive and broadly encouraging approach on the Church’s part.
Particularly from the early fifteenth century onward, serious attention was given to providing adequate pastoral care for sub-Saharan Africans, especially among the very large numbers of slaves and ex-slaves in Sicily and Naples.
Children were baptized, preachers made visits to fields, markets, and shipyards, and later black slaves were even encouraged to form their own confraternities, such as the one founded at the church of San Marco in Messina in 1584. Yet more strikingly, both slaves and former slaves were actively welcomed into the religious orders. Perhaps the most remarkable example is that of San
Benedetto il Moro (ca. 1524–89), who was born into a largely illiterate family of slaves or freed slaves in Sicily, and who entered the Franciscan Order at the age of twenty-one. So outstanding was his pious asceticism (accompanied by regular bouts of extreme self-flagellation) that after his death Benedetto was eventually venerated as a saint by the overwhelmingly white congregations of southern Italy.

The atmosphere of religious openness that surrounded black Africans in the Italian peninsula occasionally bled out into other spheres of existence and informed a wider acknowledgment of their shared humanity. Although their status
as slaves or freedmen necessarily restricted the range of occupations in which they were employed, black Africans were perceived to possess a multitude of skills that were not only integral to the courtly life of Renaissance cities but also closely related to ideals of martial virtue celebrated by authors such as Castiglione.
In addition to finding places as wrestlers and divers, they were
particularly admired for their prowess as horsemen and soldiers, sure marks of an admirable and “civilized” character. In 1553, for example,
the Medici employed a certain
Grazzico “il Moretto” of Africa as a horseman and page, while an African slave known as Bastiano was commanded to stand guard over the tomb of Cardinal Jaime of Portugal in San Miniato al Monte in Oltr’Arno because of his evident military acumen. Even more remarkable is a woodcut from ca. 1505 in which a black page is shown valiantly (but vainly) defending Galeazzo Maria Sforza from his assassins in 1476. So, too,
black Africans were widely thought to be unusually skilled at music and dancing, two activities that were highly prized in courtiers.

So closely were black Africans ingrained in the society of Renaissance Italy that suspicion of mixed parentage was not regarded as a serious issue, even among the upper echelons of the urban elite.
Created duke of Florence in 1532, Alessandro de’ Medici was widely (and perhaps not inaccurately) rumored to have been the natural child of
Pope Clement VII and a black African woman, and the frequency with which portraits openly showed him with identifiably “African” features seems to suggest that a certain level of social acceptance had grown out of the broader sense of religious familiarity that had begun with
Alberto da Sarteano’s arrival in Florence with the Ethiopian delegation in 1441.

H
UMAN, BUT
N
OT
T
OO
H
UMAN

Black Africans were in many senses greeted with a more positive attitude than either Jews or Muslims, but there was another, more insidious dimension to Renaissance Italy’s relationship with sub-Saharan Africa. That Alberto da Sarteano’s Ethiopian delegation was greeted with wide-eyed amazement and even a measure of bemusement by onlookers was itself a sign that previous points of contact had only gone a small way toward facilitating a proper acceptance of black Africans; but that the city’s cultured humanists persisted in viewing them with derision, almost as one might treat a scientific specimen, suggests that they remained “foreign” in a way that was not altogether heartwarming.

Lurking beneath the facade of Christian fellow feeling and Catholic ecumenicalism was a deep sense of disdain and condescension. Although the peoples of sub-Saharan Africa were widely regarded as kindred members of the wider Christian family, this did not mean Italians
viewed
black Africans as equals. They were, in fact, viewed as little more than oversized infants, and since Italian humanists refused to acknowledge any sub-Saharan culture worth speaking of, they tended to cast black Africans in the role of uncivilized barbarians.

The pattern was set by the earliest explorers. Despite the keenness with which they observed the social habits of the Wolof or the Songhay, for example, the first travelers looked on sub-Saharan Africa through the lens of crude prejudice rather than of objective interest.
In his account of his journey across the desert,
Antonio Malfante spitefully made much of the fact that the black Africans he encountered were “unlettered, and without books,” and drew a parallel between a perceived cultural primitivism and demonic witchcraft by observing that they were “great magicians, evoking by incense diabolical spirits.” For his part,
Alvise Ca’da Mosto was repulsed by what he saw as “lascivious” traits in the peoples of the region, and tempered his admiration of their Christian ancestry with contempt for their “barbaric” practices.

Such views found a willing audience
in Italy. Exposed to ever-growing numbers of black Africans, Renaissance Italians gladly ab- sorbed the assertion of base primitivism at the same time as they freely acknowledged a religious kinship. Every imaginable stereotype was deployed to cast colored peoples as uncivilized simpletons who could never hope to occupy a position of parity with the white majority. Quite apart from the Portuguese trope of the “happy black”—which equated unconstrained mirth with childishness or savagery—there was a widespread belief that all sub-Saharan Africans were lazy and thus incapable of accomplishing anything of lasting value.
In his 1480 tax return, for example, the heirs of the Florentine Matteo di Giovanni di Marcho Strozzi listed among their chattels a black female
slave “who works badly and is of little worth”; “she is lazy,” they claimed, “as are all black females.” More disturbingly, there was a widespread belief that all Africans were morally incontinent and simply incapable of restraining either their propensity for gluttony or their sexual appetite.
Drawing on Ca’da Mosto’s contention that incest was widespread south of the Sahara, humanists began to equate the physical strength and unlettered “savagery” of black Africans with an insatiable lust that sought relief at every available opportunity. It was even believed that
Africans’ supposed musicality could be explained away as a vain attempt to channel their libidinous urges into some form of rhythmical dance. Similarly,
the Africans’ native propensity for wearing gold earrings gave weight to the suspicion that they may have had something in common with the hated Jews, who were associated with the same form of jewelry in the popular imagination.