Ethiopians in European Painting from the Renaissance to the Baroque

News File The Anglo-Ethiopian Society

Summer 2015

The Anglo-Ethiopian Society News File - Summer 2015

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Ethiopians in European Art from the Renaissance to the

Baroque: Part 1

Jacopo Gnisci In recent years there has been a growing interest in the portrayal of individuals of African ancestry in European art of the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries, as testified by the organisation of the exhibition Revealing the African Presence in Renaissance Europe at the Walters Art Museum in 2013 or the republication of the multi-volume series The Image of the Black in Western Art between 2010 and 2014. In this brief article I would like to talk about a different way of looking at the history of Ethio-European relations – namely through the lens of Western imagery. However, before beginning this discussion two points must be made clear. The first, is that this is not my field of expertise. The second, is that the following considerations are of a preliminary nature and require further investigation. In an article published in Aethiopica (2011) and titled Four Sistine Ethiopians? The 1481 Ethiopian Embassy and the Frescoes of the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican, Roman-based researcher Marco Bonechi convincingly argued that two fresco paintings in the Sistine Chapel portray a group of Ethiopian dignitaries who were received in Rome by Pope Sixtus IV (1471-1484) in the winter of 1481. The embassy in question consisted of a group of Ethiopian clergymen who were sent from Ethiopia to Cairo to request a new Metropolitan and who decided, having fulfilled their mission, to undertake a pilgrimage to the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. There they met a Franciscan monk who encouraged them to continue their journey and go to Rome to meet the Pope. Thus, a small group of Ethiopians set sail for Italy accompanied by Giovanni Battista Brocchi from Imola in the role of translator and guide. The two Sistine frescoes in question, executed between 1481 and 1482, are the Trials of Moses by Sandro Botticelli, and the Crossing of the Red Sea (Fig. 4), whose authorship has been disputed even though Bonechi seems confident about the attribution to the hand of Biagio d’Antonio Tucci. These two paintings belong to a cycle of frescoes, commissio-ned by Pope Sixtus IV and executed by different artists, decorating the central tier of the the southern wall of the chapel and illustrating the life of Moses. The story of the life of Moses runs parallel to a cycle of frescoes of the life of Christ on the opposite wall of the chapel. The two cycles meet on the eastern wall, where the juxtaposition of the Resurrection of Christ and the Disputation over Moses' Body illustrates the fulfillment of the Old Testament in the New. The presence of dark-skinned figures in the Sistine frescoes stands out because most individuals portrayed in the Sistine Chapel are light-skinned. In The Trials of Moses two


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dark-skinned figures – both wearing a blue turban and a shamma-like cloth draped around their shoulders in a manner which is still customary today among some members of the Ethiopian clergy – are included in a procession coming down from Mt. Sinai. The other two dark-skinned figures identified as Ethiopians by Bonechi appear in the left-centre of The Crossing of the Red Sea, behind Moses, who is shown standing before the drowning Egyptians. The first figure, with a dark beard, is shown kneeling with his hands placed together in a praying gesture which is not orthodox for Christian Ethiopians. The second figure is depicted in a three-quarter pose behind a group of armed guards to the left of Moses. In between these two figures, at the far back of the group of the characters encircling Moses, stands a third dark-skinned figure that Bonechi does not mention in his article. This third bystander, who gazes towards the viewer, has a white beard and, like the other two figures, wears a blue turban. Thus, the total number of possible portraits of Ethiopian dignitaries in the Sistine Chapel are at least five rather than four. There are no inscriptions to help us identify the five figures. Nevertheless, the evidence presented by Bonechi, who rests his hypothesis on three main observations, is compelling enough to accept his suggestion that they are indeed portraits of Ethiopian dignitaries. Bonechi’s first observation is that the paintings were commissioned and executed between the winter of 1481 and the spring of 1482, that is to say shortly after the arrival of the abovementioned Ethiopian delegation in Rome in November 1481. The second is that the dark-skinned figures, who certainly look like Ethiopians, have portrait-like features and a series of distinctive attributes like the turban. The third is that the cycle of frescoes com-missioned by Pope Sixtus IV includes a number of contemporary figures, among whom are probably a number of other diplomatic envoys from the period, such as the Portuguese Ambassador Fernando de Almeida and members of a Florentine delegation sent to Rome by Lorenzo the Magnificent. There are two further, slightly more subtle, observations which have not been considered so far but add weight to Bonechi’s hypothesis. The first is that the supposed Ethiopians are shown respectively standing next to the Red Sea and descending from Mount Sinai, that is to say next to two geographical places that were probably associated with Ethiopia already during the fifteenth century. The connection between Ethiopia and the Red Sea is too obvious to require comment. As for the connection with Mount Sinai, there are a number of historical documents showing that the few Western pilgrims to the Holy Land who were brave enough to venture also to St. Catherine's Monastery on Mount Sinai met with, and were intrigued by, the Ethiopians present in this monastery. For instance, between 1441 and 1442 a Florentine called Marco di Bartolommeo Rustici became acquainted with an Ethiopian monk on Mount Sinai, whom he met again later in Florence. The second observation in support of Bonechi’s identification concerns the decision to include the five dark-skinned figures in two scenes from the Old Testament. It is well-known that, starting from the fifteenth century, the Latin Church hoped to bring the Ethiopian Church under papal authority. The arrival of an Ethiopian delegation at the Council of Florence in 1441 had already sparked the Pope’s interest in Ethiopia, and this earlier event was recorded in two panels on the bronze doors of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, which were completed by Filarete towards 1455 (Figs. 5-6). Like Filarete’s doors, the portrayal of contemporary diplomatic figures in the 1481 Sistine frescoes functioned as a visual record of the events of the time and as a testament to the growing influence of


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Fig. 5. Filarete, the Arrival of the Copts and Ethiopians in Rome, 1455. (© Jacopo Gnisci).

Fig. 6. Filarete, Pope Eugenius IV giving the Bull of Union to the Ethiopians in Florence, 1455. (© Jacopo Gnisci).


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the papal court. However, when the 1481 Ethiopian delegation reached Rome the Ethiopian Church had not shown signs of an intention to recognise the Pope’s authority. In this respect, it is an unlikely coincidence that the Ethiopian dignitaries are included in two Old Testament stories, while the Spanish and Florentine delegates, who were Catholic, are inserted in the cycle of the life of Christ. Indeed, it seems likely that the ex-clusion of the Ethiopians from the New Testament cycle was a means of emphasising the fact that they did not belong to the true Church since they had not yet recognized the Pope's ecclesiastical supremacy. When, half a century later, the Jesuits began their mission in Ethiopia, they frequently criticised the Ethiopian Church for observing Old Testament customs, and one cannot help but wonder whether the Sistine frescoes represent an early manifestation of this criticism. The next painting in this short history of Ethiopians in Western art is a portrait of Emperor Lebne Dengel (r. 1508-40) executed in 1532. The painting was acquired by Paolo Giovio for his collection of portraits of illustrious personages, which he kept in his villa in Como. We do not know who made the painting, nor where it was executed. Some believe it was painted in Portugal by an artist who was acquainted with returning members of the Portuguese expedition to Ethiopia led by Dom Rodrigo da Lima between 1520 and 1526. This suggestion is corroborated by the fact that Paolo Giovio knew Francisco Alvares, author of A True Relation of the Lands of Prester John of the Indies, whom he met in Bologna in 1533. Giovio translated Lebne Dengel’s letters to the kings of Portugal and Pope Clement VII into Latin, and, apparently, was also entrusted with the task of transla-ting a large five volume work on the history and customs of Ethiopia – authored by Alvares and now lost – which he never accomplished. In this work Emperor Lebne Dengel is shown three-quarter length, he rests his left hand on his hip and holds a hand cross in his right hand. At the bottom of the hand cross is a small loop, through which a white cloth is inserted. In Ethiopia this use of a cloth is symbolic of the shrouding of the body of Jesus before the Burial. This detail suggests that the artist must have been familiar with Ethiopian customs or with someone who had been there. The Emperor’s garments, on the other hand, have little in common with Ethiopian clothing. The most likely conclusion is that the author of the painting had little knowledge of Ethiopian clothing and decided to dress Lebne Dengel with clothes fit for a Western ruler. An alternative, albeit less likely, explanation is that the Portuguese embassy had given some clothes as a gift to Lebne Dengel and that a member of that embassy had done a sketch or portrait of him wearing them, and this could have then been later used as a model by the author of Giovio’s painting. A number of copies of Lebne Dengel’s portrait were made during the sixteenth century, each slightly different from the original. In 1552 Cristofano dell’Altissimo spent several months copying the portraits in Giovio’s collection, including that of Lebne Dengel which is now in the collection of the Uffizi in Florence, for Cosimo de’ Medici. The Uffizi painting probably served as a model for another copy painted for the portrait collection of the Archduke Ferdinand of Austria and currently in the collection of the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. Finally, a print, based on Giovio’s painting, was included in the 1575 edition of Giovio’s Elogia virorum bellica virtute illustrium, at the beginning of a section containing a short biography of Lebne Dengel (see front cover). The reproduction of Leb-ne Dengel’s portrait and its publication in Giovio’s book reflect the increasing European interest in, and knowledge of, Africa, including Ethiopia, during the sixteenth century.


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More generally, numerous works concerning or mentioning Ethiopia were published in Europe during this century, and a small number of these, such as Giovio’s Elogia, actually contained illustrations of Ethiopians. Another such example is Cesare Vecellio’s De gli habiti antichi et moderni di diversi parti del mondo libri due (Of Ancient and Modern Costumes of the whole World in two books) published in 1590 with illustrations by Chri-stoph Krieger. Vecellio’s work features a few pictures of Ethiopians wearing costumes. However, as shown by the depiction of an Ethiopian warrior who is dressed like a moor (Fig. 7), it seems that the artist had little or no knowledge of Ethiopian clothing. (To be continued…).

Fig. 7. Ethiopian Soldier from Cesare Vecellio’s De gli habiti antichi et mo-derni di diversi parti del mondo, 1590. (© Jacopo Gnisci).

Ethiopians in European Painting from the Renaissance to the Baroque

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