Dark Skin and Metal: The Juxtaposition of Africans and Armor in Early Modern German and Italian ArtPresentation by Prof. Paul Kaplan, Purchase College, USA (in Englischer Sprache)

Knobelsdorff’s 1735 portrait of the young Frederick the Great in armor attended by a Black African page who stands by the prince’s helmet opens a window into the long and complex association of dark skin with polished metal in European painting. The dark skin of Africans was compared to metal, as Renaissance depictions of the soldier Saint Maurice attest. African retainers often are shown as holding helmets (a pun in Italian), but they also sometimes wore another kind of metal, the slave collar.

Paul H. D. Kaplan is Professor of Art History at Purchase College, SUNY.  He is the author of “The Rise of the Black Magus in Western Art” (1985) and of numerous essays on European images of black Africans and Jews. He served as Project Scholar for the artist Fred Wilson’s “Speak of Me as I Am,” an installation in the American Pavilion at the 2003 Venice Biennale. He is a major contributor to volumes 2, 3 and 4 of Harvard University Press’s “The Image of the Black in Western Art” (new ed., 2010-2012), and a more recent publication, “Contraband Guides: Race, Transatlantic Culture and the Arts in the Civil War Era” (Penn State Press, 2020), extends his research into nineteenth-century American art and literature.