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The Renaissance revisited is really about the importance

of going back to history in general, and understanding all the things

that we haven't been paying attention to.

The idea of centralising figures in history

is really a lot about point of view.

Because for me, black African figures in Renaissance painting

have always been central. I was looking for them.

I was interested in why Africans were obviously present

but they were never spoken of by our historians today.

Most art historians are white people.

Very few, if any, are black.

So they tend to follow the prejudices of their own societies.

History responds always to fashion.

I say that from the centre, from the heart,

of the historical profession.

Now people are interested, but 50 years ago they weren't.

I decided to look not only at black enslaved people

but also to look at Africans who had been successful in some sense,

who had a skill, an occupation,

and had a life here.

My research on black figures

in Renaissance art is a response

to the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States.

I wanted to find a topic that ideally

could speak to students of colour.

That could have meaning for their lives

and the lives that they wanted to create.

(SPEAKS ITALIAN)

(SPEAKS ITALIAN)

Visual and material culture are absolutely central

to tell a richer and a more nuanced and complex story

about European history as well as African history,

and the ways in which they were entangled and shaped each other.

(SPEAKS ITALIAN)

(UPLIFTING MUSIC)

The reason one starts with Florence

as the place to look for things like this,

is that Florence is reputed to have the best

15th century archives in the world.

Not only were the Africans

in many of the most famous Renaissance paintings,

of course I'd seen them all my life and I just also, like other people,

hadn't paid attention to it,

but there was the most enormous documentary trail

of the lives of these people in the archives.

They were enslaved figures.

They were free men or free women,

who were able to have lives of their own.

Black pilgrims,

there were black priests, there were ambassadors.

There was even an example of a ruler in Florence,

who almost certainly was a black origin.

He was a member of the Medici family.

It's really quite extraordinary, but in Florence...

the first duke,

was almost certainly the son of a black woman.

Probably a servant.

He was an illegitimate child.

His name was Alessandro.

There were a number of surprises

of Africans in different social positions.

Of course, very few at the top,

like Alessandro de' Medici,

who was unique.

I've worked on Renaissance for 40 years, more than 40 years,

and one thing I have learned... (LAUGHS)

is that status matters.

It is status that trumps almost everything else.

This person was a Medici, the family were protecting him,

the family were giving him patronage,

therefore, the rest of it mattered much less.

Alessandro was born in 1510 or 1511,

and his father died eight or nine years later,

so leaving a young child behind.

He received a humanistic education,

he was frequently in the papal palace.

There's controversy over who his father was,

whether it was Giulio de' Medici,

who became Pope Clement VII,

or whether it was Lorenzo de' Medici,

who became duke of Urbino.

I believe that Lorenzo was his father

because Lorenzo stayed in the palace of his mother,

Alfonsina Orsini,

and Alessandro's mother, Simonetta da Collevecchio,

was a servant in Alfonsina's palace.

I think she was brought as a slave to the palace.

And so, Lorenzo, he would have had easy access to her.

It's a practice of the aristocracy

to engage in sexual relations with servants.

We have a lot of different images

of Alessandro Medici

and those are interpreted in different ways.

And it's interesting simultaneously to think about the ways in which

we might be able to perceive his blackness through art.

How do we know that Alessandro was black?

We have a small image of Alessandro.

It's the size of half a sheet of paper.

And it shows Alessandro looking a little bit stern,

and there's a freshness to the image.

This is a work which is probably the very first portrait

of Alessandro done by Pontormo.

It's important to keep in mind that these artists,

Giorgio Vasari, Jacopo Pontormo, Benvenuto Cellini,

the artists saw Alessandro,

they knew what he looked like, and they captured his appearances

in paintings and in coins.

(SPEAKS ITALIAN)

Art can serve, in part, as a document.

An artist had to keep a delicate balance.

On the one hand the painting had to represent a certain ideal,

on the other hand the portrait had to be accurate enough

to be recognised.

When I look at images of Alessandro, I noticed,

'this looks rather different from other pictures of the time'.

These are clues to how Alessandro actually looked.

This allowed viewers who look at this work,

and Alessandro himself to look at this and say,

"Yes, that's me!" or "Yes, that's our duke."

Jacopo Pontormo was considered

one of the finest painters of his day in Florence.

Pontormo made this larger work that shows Alessandro,

full length, he's making a drawing.

The ruler of the city is shown as an artist.

That'd be surprising today,

it's absolutely unprecedented for the Renaissance.

And this portrait was given by Alessandro

to a woman named Taddea Malaspina,

she was his lover.

(METALLIC SCRAPE)

Vasari's portrait is in keeping with the ways in which

the ruling class wanted to be portrayed,

in armour,

and it has to do with the ways in which portraiture,

but also sculptural history

had this connection to a certain military dominance.

This is a public portrayal of him.

Depicted seated on a, kind of a throne or a chair,

looking out over the city to show his role as guardian of Florence.

You can see in it that his hair is still depicted as

kind of frizzy and dark, his skin is still beige,

his nose is more aquiline.

And this might have been the artist's choice

to give him a more acceptable appearance

in his role as Florence's leader.

So, by looking at these two portraits

we could see a more public image and a more private one.

Alessandro as the ruler,

with the baton of power.

Alessandro as the lover,

as the cultured man holding the silver point stylus

and making a drawing.

My favourite portrait of Alessandro is of course

the one by Bronzino, or by a student of Bronzino.

It was painted in 1553,

when long after Alessandro was dead.

Bronzino was a painter of the court

and was personally familiar with Alessandro

and that's why you also have this certain intimacy and access.

The veil is down in the Bronzino work.

I think it's probably the most true to life

of what Alessandro's appearance was.

The curly hair, or the frizzy hair, it's a little bit of both,

the broad nose, the broad lips

and the beige colour of his skin. I think it's a private portrait.

There would have been very little reason on his part

to have exaggerated his appearance or to have covered it up.

The reason that we don't have much documentation on Alessandro's reign

is because after Alessandro was assassinated,

Cosimo became duke

and in order to enhance their reputations,

he destroyed Alessandro's reputation

by commissioning histories of Alessandro that were negative.

Descriptions of his personality and his actions,

which cast him as a tyrant,

as a generally morally degraded person.

Alessandro was a Medici,

so he was the famous illegitimate child

and he managed to hold his position in life

without being knocked off it, as it were,

because of his supposed background.

The Medici, like most of the patrician families,

had illegitimate children.

In Florence, at the time, of course there are large numbers

of illegitimate children, most of these people were not orphans.

They had parents, but the parents

either couldn't or wouldn't look after them.

Reasons we know that is because of the existence of the

Ospedale degli Innocenti.

The Ospedale degli Innocenti took in unwanted babies.

It's striking how many of these

had been fathered by Florentine patricians.

We have the record books of the entry of these babies

from the 1450s, I think.

It just coincides with the arrival

of some of our enslaved African women

to work as domestic slaves.

In 1470, we have a small black baby

and in the records it says that the mother was a black slave

called Lisabeta... (BABY CRIES)

..and the father, Galeotto, was black too.

The first black couple in Florence.

The father asked for the child to be given the name Lucia,

but her second name was Negra

so, she inscribed into her name,

so inscribed on to her body as it were forever.

One good reason possibly,

for why the father, Galeotto,

might have taken Lucia to the Ospedale degli Innocenti

is that every child at the Innocenti was free...

(BABY CRIES)

..and a child born to two slaves

in Florence would be enslaved.

So, the Istituto degli innocenti is this really incredible institution,

that has an incredibly long history.

I think that for me, there is something fascinating

thinking about the possibility of black Africans

born on the Italian territory

going all the way back as far as recorded history exists.

Alessandro's life would prove to be very different

from that of the children of the orphanage, the Ospedale.

On the other hand, the life of his mother, Simonetta diCollevecchio,

an enslaved black woman, was much harder.

Like many other enslaved black women, she ended up in an oblivion.

Since we have no representations

of what Alessandro's mother, Simonetta, looked like,

perhaps one of the ways in which we can understand

what her condition was, is by examining portraits

of other Africans who were enslaved.

One by Albrecht Durer is of a woman, a slave,

definitely African.

The thing which strikes me most about this portrait is,

she's depicted as a normal person.

There's not a caricature.

She's wearing the kind of treatment that many African women today

will give their hair.

She's depicted in her personality.

She's very conscious of being painted

and the artist is very conscious of wanting to give her

an accurate representation

which maintains her dignity and individuality as a person.

Durer, is one of the most canonical painters of the period.

He is a German based,

but he works in Europe broadly

and some of the most iconic images of that period

were created by his pen and his brush.

(SPEAKS ITALIAN)

(SPEAKS ITALIAN)

(SPEAKS ITALIAN)

In most of Italy, enslaved Africans

would have been enslaved in urban situations,

in cities, in households.

Typically, it had been the practice of aristocratic women,

after they gave birth, to put out their infants

for wet nurses who were peasant women.

After the Black Death, there were many fewer

and so we see many African women being imported into Italy

to serve that role.

(BABY BABBLES)

What I found when I tried to map

where the enslaved Africans were living in Florence,

there were clusters of them.

And there were, you know, four or five on one small street,

you know, but owned by completely different families.

In English we have this expression, keeping up with the Joneses,

so it became clear to me that somebody got one over there

and you looked out of the window and "Mmm, look what they've just got."

And you knew that this kind of behaviour was in operation, I think.

When we see the representation of black figures

in works of art,

we need to read it at two levels.

On the one hand, sometimes these figures represent

figures that were actually visible in the city.

But also, and more importantly,

works of art served to create reality.

By placing black figures in a certain location

by having them in the foreground,

or more often in the background.

By having them at the margins,

the artist and the society as a whole

is projecting an image of how they thought blacks should be seen.

Paintings are active.

They construct the world that they want you, the viewer, to see.

You, the viewer, in the 1400s,

but also you, the viewer, today.

One example is by Domenico Ghirlandaio.

Ghirlandaio was one of the most important

and respected painters in the late 1400s.

He even worked for the Pope in the Sistine Chapel,

but most of his paintings are in Florence,

he did fresco cycles.

One scene in particular, we see what appears to be

the four daughters of the Sassetti family.

But if you look very carefully

at the very far left,

literally on the margins,

there's a black figure. Who is she?

Wearing more simple clothes,

she seems to have a linen head covering,

as opposed to the woman wearing silk in the Sassetti family,

she's must be a servant.

This black figure, until very recently,

has been completely overlooked.

I looked at the painting over and over again,

and she was never seen, never noticed, never mentioned.

All the famous art historians who have discussed these frescoes

from the 16th century, almost not a single person,

has mentioned this slave on the left hand side.

For them, she must have been considered

unimportant, uninteresting.

Of course for us it's absolutely gripping.

Because in the 15th century they chose to include her,

so she was important and interesting.

Because there would have been many servants and probably slaves,

in the households of those daughters and of the Sassetti.

It's possible, and this is an exciting possibility,

that we even have a clue as to her identity.

We know that Francesco Sassetti, about 10 earlier,

had purchased a slave, she came from Portugal,

so she was probably black, because the Portuguese

were the merchants of black servants and slaves.

Maybe this figure, who we know from the documents,

actually appears in his painting.

We don't know her African name

but we know who we think is

because we've got in the records of the Cambini bank,

that had a big presence in Lisbon

in the 15th and 16th century.

Unfortunately, a Florentine called Bartolomeo Marchionni,

was really, the first slave trader in Renaissance Europe, we could say.

So, a rather a grim title.

He was connected to the Cambini bank.

Because there was a sizable Italian merchant community

in Lisbon, operating out of there,

where the boats come into Lisbon, with enslaved people,

and then from Lisbon, people are sent on to Tuscany.

It's not possible to understand what's going on in Renaissance Italy

in terms of bringing in enslaved Africans,

if one doesn't look first at Renaissance Lisbon or Portugal.

And one can see that in this painting of the King's Fountain,

the Chafariz d'El Rey.

You can see how many black people

that are on the streets.

So, we are on the docks near the fountain of Chafariz d'El Rey

which is a place where servants,

enslaved or not,

would come to fill water for the house in which they would work.

And boats are coming back and forth, musicians are playing,

there is this delightful detail of a poor servant

who was carrying a chamber pot

and the bottom broke and he becomes soiled with the content.

But what is interesting beyond the delightful anecdotes there

is to see a city bursting with activity

and people of many different backgrounds.

Undoubtedly, a lot of them went to Lisbon and stayed there,

probably as urban slaves, as servants,

in various occupations, manual occupations

and enjoyed a considerable degree of freedom.

I don't think there were stereotypical representations

of Africans at this time.

We can see a variety of representations.

And we have a very interesting example of a Knight,

a black knight of the order of Santiago.

And that's a military order, so he was made by the king.

He was this famous Joao de sa' Panasco,

who was a black court jester

and he spent his whole life at the court,

he got given one of the highest honours in Portugal

for his work at the court.

And one of the wonderful things is that we've got books of his jokes.

We also have jokes told against him.

We know that many people, you know, made jokes against him

on the basis of his skin colour

and of his ethnicity.

You can understand some of what it must have been like

to be a successful black person

at that level in the court,

surrounded entirely otherwise by white courtiers.

He ended his life by drinking too much,

and could have been driven to drink,

but many people in unhappy circumstances

take to the bottle, and it probably did happen to him.

If we look at the Cantino map

which is basically a representation of the world

from the perspective of Portugal,

we can see the ways in which Africa

is very much at the centre of that world.

It's made clear for Europeans

that their world was really one among many

and they were confronted with these sophisticated civilisations,

that had existed for millennia

and that were really giving them

a mirror against which constructing their own identity.

Africa could be the source of servants sometimes enslaved,

but also the source of marvels

and a wondrous object of sophisticated craftsmanship.

Ivories that were made in the Congo,

in Benin, Sierra Leon,

and had arrived in Europe in the 16th century,

and that were considered as the most precious object

fit for royal collections.

So, it is in the encounter with Africa,

with the Americas also

that Europe finds its own identity and its own contours.

The presence of the Pope in Italy

was one of the main reasons

why African travellers,

pilgrims in some cases

and ambassadors in others,

would come to the Italian peninsula.

A movement that was parallel and also different in important ways

from the movement of people that came through

the networks of the slave trade, for example.

(SPEAKS ITALIAN)

The Coronation of the Virgin...

could be the first example that we know of,

of a painting commissioned by a black man.

The work was done by Davide Ghirlandaio,

Domenico's brother.

He was not quite as good, but he was more accessible.

You see God crowning the Virgin Mary.

In the lower part, you see a figure in profile

just from the upper part of his body,

looking up, but what's remarkable

is that this is a black man.

We see that not only in the skin tone

but also in his physiognomic features.

We see an African in Italian Renaissance painting.

Why is he there?

In Italian Renaissance paintings,

it was absolutely standard for the person who paid for it,

to have himself or herself depicted in the lower corner

usually kneeling,

looking up in prayer.

This is definitely, definitely, definitely, a black donor,

and therefore, really exciting.

What we don't know is who he is.

So, he's got a little bit of white linen shirt

peeping out of the top of his black garments.

And that makes it far more likely

that he's wearing secular dress,

that he's actually not a priest.

He realised what you did in Christian society

if you were at a certain level, is that you commissioned a painting

with yourself in it, and that gave you added status.

So, he got it. He'd understood the society

that he'd come to join, as it were.

However, because he's black,

various people tried to deny that he could be a donor.

It's still absolutely fabulous, that we have this...

Italian Renaissance painting with a black donor in it.

One of the most popular subject in Renaissance Italy

was The Adoration of the Magi

or The Three Kings.

And there was a long tradition that these kings were of different ages

and they came from different parts of the world.

More often, you'd see all three kings as being white,

but they would include some black people

in the entourage, in the background.

For example, there's an important painting

by Domenico Ghirlandaio that shows the Adoration of the Magi.

The kings are white, but one of the attendants

is very clearly black.

He's dressed as if he was a page in a Florentine household.

He probably was. I suspect Ghirlandaio saw this black servant

and decided to include him in the painting.

In northern Europe, sometimes one of the kings is shown as being black,

but it took a long while for that tradition

to work its way into Italy.

And perhaps, the very first painting

to show the Adoration the Magi with the black king in Florence

is a work which is only recently discovered.

It was done by a member of Ghirlandaio's workshop.

Certainly, there was a black man who commissioned an altar piece

from Ghirlandaio's workshop,

The Coronation of the Virgin.

We have this absolutely unprecedented

Adoration of the Magi, where one of the kings is black

and this king's in the foreground.

I'd like to think that it's the same patron.

There's a before and after. And so, there's a way in which

one of those kings starts showing up as a black African,

mainly in the tradition that's coming from the north of Europe.

And that picks up and it starts to pick up also in Italy

through figures like Mantegna and others.

So, this is the case where we are seeing social changes

influencing art, just as much as art influences the social environment.

The more African people on the Italian streets and in the courts,

the more prominent and central they become in paintings.

And Andrea Mantegna is the perfect example of this.

He places the black king in the centre of the composition

and this is very likely about the increased African presence

in his environment.

Andrea Mantegna was the most famous artist in the late 1400s.

The most respected, more so than say Leonardo.

This is an artist who looked at black figures,

he understood the facial type,

and we see it in the skin tone, yes,

but also the hair and the physiognomic features.

So finally, with Mantegna's Adoration of the Magi

the black king is entered into Italian Renaissance art.

In the painting of Filippino Lippi,

painted in the very late 1400s,

there's a black figure who struck my attention.

Filippino Lippi shows this man large in the foreground,

he has a golden earring in his left ear,

he has a pearl...

hanging on his neck,

so he's a man of some wealth.

And yet there's a white man in front of him,

who is literally showing him the way.

So, in an Adoration of the Magi painting

the crowds of people represent the first Christians.

So, a black figure evidently represents

the idea that one of the first Christians was black.

The fact that Christianity arrives in Africa.

But also that, according to this Eurocentric world view,

you need a white man in order to show the black man the way.

Artistically, this period is very interesting

because we can see the challenge

of representing difference of African characters

in a way that is readable by a viewership.

Earrings and a nudity

are becoming markers of figures

from the African continent.

And that process is exactly what we call exoticism.

We see the beginning of a visual discourse

that continues to be so present

in many aspects of our own visual environment.

So, we can think of the ways in which

every spring collection of haute couture

will be ethnic, and will have some of these markers,

the feathers, the nudity,

their prominent jewellery that would mark in the European imaginary

a certain outfit or a certain figure

as coming from Africa or from the Americas.

There is another very interesting painting by Lippi

that helps us take stock

of the paradoxical views of Africa

that Europeans had at the time.

This is the most important work that Filippino did

for Filippo Strozzi,

the Church of Santa Maria Novella in Florence.

On the right-hand side, you see a scene from the life of Saint Philip.

But on the painting, on the right-hand side,

you see there's a very prominent figure.

He is standing tall,

in his bearing he looks extremely dignified,

he has a handsome face, he has more jewels on him

than anyone else in the scene or in the entire chapel.

He has this very large headgear.

The white robe he is wearing, a shamma,

is the traditional robe worn by Ethiopian Christians,

that was worn in the Renaissance and to the present day.

On the one hand, Africa could be a place of dispossession

and nudity and savagery,

but on the other hand it's a place of great riches

of sophistication and of mythical characters

with amounts of regalia that make them greater than life.

I was trying to understand who this figure could be

and why Filippino would include him.

He was the treasurer of Queen Candace,

the Queen of Ethiopia.

The Ethiopian is seen as being the first African to be converted.

In fact, there was a community

of Ethiopians living in Italy, living in Rome.

Finally in the late 1400s,

Italians started actually seeing Africans live in the flesh.

These legendary...

black African Christians.

What was happening in Rome in this period?

Why were there Ethiopians in Rome?

Florence was a relatively small commercial city,

filled with successful merchants.

But Rome, Rome was a seat of the Pope.

There was a much more international community there,

people from different parts of Europe and from Africa.

(SPEAKS ITALIAN)

This painting was done in 1481,

and the same year,

four ambassadors from Ethiopia came to Rome.

The Pope welcomed them.

He celebrated mass with them.

(SPEAKS ITALIAN)

All of Rome was fascinated.

One of these fascinated viewers was Sandro Botticelli.

(SPEAKS ITALIAN)

(MENACING MUSIC)

(METALIC SCRAPE)

Prester John was a central figure

for understanding blacks in Renaissance Europe.

Today he's considered a legend,

but in the middle ages, in the Renaissance,

no one doubted that he really existed.

Prester John was thought to be a descendant

of the black Wise Man

who came to adore the Christ child, and he had become,

according to this legend, the Emperor of Ethiopia.

In the history of Renaissance art, all across Europe,

there are very, very, few portraits

of individual black people.

But one of the first examples,

is a portrait of a man who the label lists

as the Emperor of Ethiopia.

And according to the inscription, it says he's known as Prester John.

(SPEAKS ITALIAN)

(SPEAKS ITALIAN)

The Pope decided that this ephemeral event

should be made permanent.

So, the Pope ordered that a death mask be made

of the African ambassador

and that was the basis for a marble statue.

(SPEAKS ITALIAN)

This is an extraordinary event.

First of all, that we have

a portrait of a specific identifiable African.

Secondly, that it was made in a very expensive material.

And third, that is commissioned by the Pope himself.

And fourth, that it is placed on very public view.

(SPEAKS ITALIAN)

Interest in black Africans

was found not only in Florence and in Rome,

but also throughout Italy and indeed throughout Europe.

And specifically in the city-state of Mantua

there was great interest among the ruling family

in black Africans.

Who was calling the shots in Mantua in the late 1400s?

A noblewoman named Isabella d'Este.

Isabella d'Este was well-known as being one of the most

important art patrons of the day.

She had money, she had power,

and she had taste.

She also had a great interest in black Africans.

Isabella d'Este is very important, I think,

for an understanding of Africans in Renaissance Italy,

not only because she tried

to have in her entourage,

as many enslaved Africans as she can,

but also because she came from

the Este court in Ferrara,

which always had an interest in the overseas exploration.

We have an extraordinary letter by Isabella d'Este

in which she asks her agent

to go to Venice and find her

an enslaved girl "as black as possible."

That's the quote.

She embarks on acquiring small African children.

There's always this discussion about if enslaved Africans

are lighter skinned, do they have more value,

if they're darker skinned, do they have less value?

Well, Isabella shows that in her court, at least,

darker skin meant they were worth more.

That's what she really wants.

What's difficult is to work out precisely

what she wanted these children for.

Except she thought they were entertaining in some way.

She wanted them young,

that's another thing that's alarming for us,

18 months to 24 months,

but it's probable that it's more likely she wanted them at that age

because then they'd learn perfect Italian,

they weren't coming with preconceived views on things.

They were objectified, there's absolutely no doubt about it.

Isabella d'Este was not the only person interested

in having enslaved black people in her court.

The ruling couple in the city-state of nearby Ferrara,

wanted to obtain black Africans for their court

so they went to Venice. And why Venice?

Because there's a very large population of black figures there.

This rather disturbing story serves as the background

to help us understand a very beautiful painting by Titian.

If we take a look at the portrait of Laura Dianti,

we see a work of great beauty

by one of the most important painters of all time.

Together with the protagonist, the woman Laura,

we see a young black page.

This painting started a fashion, if you will,

for noblemen and noblewomen across Europe.

Titian was so famous and this work was so appreciated

that people wanted to be depicted with a black page.

In the case of the female figure,

there is already a play in the skin colour,

the depiction of her hand that is pale,

in juxtaposition to the darker face of this small figure

that is representing a racial difference.

In the case of the male figure

it is a feature that really marks domination,

in the same way that you could have a sceptre

or you could have the hand on a globe

or on a map to talk about possession,

and it is something that will carry over

in the history of European portraiture for centuries to come.

(SPEAKS ITALIAN)

Isabella's also has an interest

in representations of African women

in some of the paintings she commissioned.

The artist in Isabella's court was Andrea Mantegna.

Shortly after Isabella came to Mantua,

Mantegna made a very finished drawing

showing the old testament story of Judith

with the head of Holofernes.

And you see the beautiful young widow, Judith,

together with her maid,

who is holding the head of the evil Holofernes,

who Judith had just decapitated.

But Mantegna was the first artist ever to show the maid as black.

So, I think this reflects not the biblical story,

but the reality of the court life in Mantua.

And so, when you see Mantegna introducing black African figures

as assistants or servants in the case of Holofernes and Judith,

you have this sort of relationship that gets developed

where it's also speaking to who's commissioning that work.

And so, it's not only influenced by the actual presence

of black Africans in the court that Mantegna sees.

But it's also influenced by this desire to actually make sure

that that's being seen as a gesture of wealth, of power.

There is also the development of visual discourse,

that is gendered in this case,

that sees the juxtaposition

based on a contrast between the female figure,

that is a princely figure,

and that becomes marked as white and virtuous,

and a servant that is coming from Africa,

that has darker features,

that serves as an aesthetic foil

but also, in some cases, as a moral foil

to highlight, literally, the qualities

of the main European female figure.

And at that moment we can see a real turn

towards ideological use

of the African figure.

Is a very much the early moment

of the story of racialisation.

What roles did black Africans have in Italian Renaissance courts?

They served as pages, as attendants,

pilgrims, they were priests,

they were soldiers.

But they were also musicians.

We have a number of documented examples of African musicians

in Italian cities

and one of them appears in a painting by Mantegna.

In one of the Triumphs, we see an African musician.

But the original viewer, they have must be reminded of the fact that,

yes, they have actually seen in some procession

or some court event, a black musicians.

The presence of black African musicians,

black African entertainers,

and in many different courts is well documented.

We have in the painting Piero di Cosimo,

Perseus freeing Andromeda.

There's this incredible figure in the foreground of a musician,

and it's an instrument that's as inventive as the dragon

that's in the picture.

It's it has this stringed part and it has this reeded part,

and it brings together in a certain sense

something that's unimaginable.

I think that the fantasy of that is being carried forth

and exaggerated through the hands of the imaginary then

of the black African performer.

But I think that mainly when it becomes fashionable

to have enslaved individuals that are recognisably

connected to distant lands...

This is about power, it's about access

to all these distant reaches of the Earth.

And it's about being able to dominate or control those things.

It's so crucial to recognise

that many of the same cultural aspirations

in demonstration of worldly knowledge existed

also within powerful African Kingdoms.

(SPEAKS ITALIAN)

(SPEAKS ITALIAN)

(SPEAKS ITALIAN)

Venice had a large slave market, it was perhaps the greatest

that had existed since the Middle Ages,

when slavery was not focused

on people of any particular skin colour.

But undoubtedly, a lot of Africans were captured,

were swept up in this net

and were sold on slave markets into... into Italy.

If we think about the presence of representations of black Africans,

Venice is definitely this place where we find

a really massive number of them.

And the ways in which it's documented in paintings

is really intriguing,

because it gives us insight to some of the roles

and positions that black Africans had in society.

In the paintings of Carpaccio,

who's a master at showing scenes of everyday life...

we see a number of these black gondolier rowers.

So, on the one hand these figures looked exotic

because they came from a foreign land.

On the other hand, they look familiar because

it's what people would see as they would ride on the boats

around this... the canals of Venice.

There was somebody who asked me,

"Kate, why are there black gondoliers in the Carpaccio,

what's going on there?"

Who made me think that I should go and check this out.

And yet nobody, again, nobody had bothered to look,

to see whether they corresponded to reality.

I started doing more work on Venetian wills.

Some African men, who'd worked in the households of patricians,

when they were freed, were bought a position

in one of these gondoliers associations.

There are lists of gondoliers associations.

These books are called Mariegole.

They're not allowed to be released,

even to people like me, but in fact I got them!

So, there are 28 of them or something,

and if you look you can normally distinguish in each case,

a couple are a few Africans.

These gondoliers associations are also very important

because they were hierarchical structures.

This was a democratic organisation

that elected by secret ballot

the head of the organisation.

And one of the most wonderful things we found was that

one of these Africans became head

of one of the gondoliers associations.

He was called, Zuan Saracino.

We've got quite a lot of examples where we're absolutely certain

that somebody described as Saraceno is actually African.

And he seems to have been elected at least twice.

One can see that there was already a germ of possibility

of being inserted properly into Renaissance society.

So, the people in them were involved at every level

in real participation in Italian life.

(SPEAKS ITALIAN)

We also read that Africans were famed for the skill as swimmers.

And in fact, there are paintings from the period where you see

an African standing on the side ready to jump into the water

to help save a relic.

(SPEAKS ITALIAN)

The imaginary that's created

through the language of painting and art in Venice

of black African servants that are super exoticised

is carried out also later through a furniture style

that in English a lot of times is termed 'blackamoores.'

In Italian it's a little bit more slippery, it's called 'mori'

which is not really so specific.

We have simultaneously a representation of servitude

and we have objects that actually physically serve.

So, they will hold the candle, they will hold the light,

they will hold the table.

(EXPRESSIVE DRUMMING)

These are objects that get reproduced

over and over again in Venice,

and they become a part of the glass tradition,

they become part of the wood tradition.

In some cases, like at Ca' Rezzonico,

we have images by Andrea Brustolon

that are sort of like shamefully beautiful.

Black Africans that are nude

and that have rusted chains on them

and it's phenomenal the ways in which there is a seeking out

of fragments of black history in this context...

..so under discovered,

unknown to many of the Italians

that have been living in this environment.

In the late 1500s, there was an extraordinary artist

who was able to capture the feasts, the ceremonies in Venice

and that's an artist known to us as Veronese.

He was a follower,

a younger contemporary of Titian.

One of his most magnificent works

is the Feast in the House of Levi.

But that wasn't the original name.

This was commissioned as The Last Supper

and then something rather remarkable happened.

Veronese includes such a range of character

that are brought together,

regardless of their differences, into a single scene

and a scene that is considered as almost insolent

to its original topic,

which was the Last Supper.

We are at the time of the inquisition in Italy.

Veronese was called in front of the inquisition.

He was asked why he included certain details

which were considered disrespectful.

The presence of buffoons and black figures

who included, they thought, for a comic effect in the work.

The representation that Veronese comes up with

in his Last Supper,

perhaps more similar to everyday moments in life,

is so scandalous that he has to change the title of the painting

from The Last Supper to The Dinner in the House of Levi

in a way of making it more acceptable.

Veronese had a specialisation in large canvases.

And one of the best examples of this

is a scene showing the first miracle of Christ,

The Wedding at Cana.

And here we included dozens of figures, almost a hundred,

and among these, six of them are black.

Some of them are waiters, some of them are servants,

but most surprisingly, in the painting you could see

that a guest at the table is black.

He's wearing green silk,

he's obviously a person of great importance,

because he is seated next to all the nobles at the table.

So finally, in the late 1500,

a black African was allowed a place at the table.

It's one thing if you have an African represented as a patron

or biblical king,

but for viewers in 16th century Venice,

it was quite another to see a painting with guests at the table,

dressed just like them,

but with a black African seated in their midst.

Not many years after this work was made,

we have the story of an Ethiopian nobleman

who came to Venice.

His name was Sagga Krestos.

(SPEAKS ITALIAN)

So, amongst the range of figures that we find in Venice,

we have everything from pilgrims to servants

and amongst those we have this figure of Sagga Krestos

who finds himself in the context of Venice

and who brings with him this extraordinary story

that I think is amplified to the more extraordinary through fantasy.

Prof. Matteo Salvadore, the biographer of Sagga Krestos,

tells us that Krestos arrives at the Venetian embassy in Cairo

in 1632. He was about 16 years old,

and said he was the son of the deceased Emperor Jacob.

In reality, he could not have been the son of Jacob

because Jacob had died around 12 years before the boy was even born.

Nonetheless, given his tellings of noble origins,

Krestos was chosen by the Franciscans to facilitate

the spread of Catholicism in Ethiopia.

Salvadore describes him as being sent to Rome to meet the Pope

and everywhere he went he was welcomed like a great celebrity.

He was hosted by the Barberini family,

he was sponsored not only by the pontiff, by Urban VIII,

but by the entire family.

Sagga Krestos travels to Venice

and the four Franciscans who accompanied him

waited to board the ship for Ethiopia.

They soon realised that he in actuality

had no intention of returning to Ethiopia.

From there, he continued his journey and arrived in Turin

where he stayed for a longer period as a guest of the Savoy family

as he had fallen ill.

And in Turin, we have a portrait made of him

dated 1635.

The key to the story is the artist.

And here's a surprise, it's a woman artist.

There were not many in the Renaissance,

and one of them was Giovanna Garzoni.

And she worked for the house of Savoy.

The painting shows Sagga Krestos

as if he was a European nobleman,

by which I mean his attire, his clothing,

his turn of his head.

But the artist also showed her respect for the sitter

in another way, perhaps a more private way.

On the back of this miniature,

she included her name,

that's not unusual,

and she also included her name written once again

in Ethiopian.

She must have asked him, "How could I say my name in your language?"

And with rather uncertain lettering,

she tried to reproduce that on the back.

(SPEAKS ITALIAN)

Who decides what we remember of history?

Who decides what's commemorated and who's commemorated?

This is a turning point in the European perception of African men.

After Sagga's death, as is typical,

common opinion changes radically. He is seen as an imposter,

not because he didn't have the documentation to prove his identity,

but simply because he was an African visitor.

He was assigned a series of negative stereotypes

which emerged in the 17th century,

which would become increasingly popular

in relation to the African continent and above all to African men.

It focuses on uncontrollable sexuality,

a lack of reliability,

and these are just some of the indications the times were changing.

(SPEAKS ITALIAN)

There was a time when people could recognise their differences

and work around them, they did not assume

that there were negative characteristics

that were assigned to a particular person

on the basis of race.

So, I think that racism has not always existed,

then we can get rid of it.

It can be gotten rid of and we needn't live with it in perpetuity.

That's a hope.

Slavery's always been a topic that one could write about in history,

but that sees enslaved people as objects,

that's really concerned with objectification.

And instead, what we're trying to look at now

is look at enslaved people as subjects, as people.

And that's probably the difference too.

We're trying to do something different.

More work! More work! We need more work.

(SPEAKS ITALIAN)

Renaissance art doesn't just reflect the world,

but it helps create the world.

The way black figures are represented in art

formed a prototype, a model,

which continued for centuries, even to the present day.

The way black figures appear today

in movies, in commercials,

in society,

in some ways can be traced right back to the Renaissance.

When we focus on these characters,

who have been present but overlooked to a large extent

for almost 500 years,

we give ourselves an opportunity

to learn from their presence

and to learn from their absence a better understanding of their time

and a better understanding of our own societies.

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