14th Annual Conference of the Early Modern

Painted figures who gesture and stare out at the viewer play a communicative role in early modern European art. According to Leon Battista Alberti, the interlocutor figure “tells the spectator what is going on” while also pointing out secrets that the picture does not fully disclose. In this way, the commentator indicates how art both conveys and withholds information. Starting from European depictions of the Three Magi and moving to seventeenth-century Dutch portraits and domestic scenes, my paper considers imagery that racializes the commentator figure. Surveying the pictorial conventions used to depict the faces of Black characters, I assess what type of information was being publicized and what type of information was being suppressed.

Angela Vanhaelen is Professor of Art History at McGill University. She is the author of Opacity: Blackness and the Art of the Dutch Republic; The Moving Statues of Seventeenth-Century Amsterdam: Automata, Waxworks, Fountains, and Labyrinths; and The Wake of Iconoclasm: Painting the Church in the Dutch Republic, all published by Penn State University Press.