Racism in the Decorative Arts

Blackamoor with clock

This is the First part of two part Post. Before I get to my second post I need to lay some history first.

Let me take you to the wealthy and powerful city state of Venice. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries there was no Italy as we know of it today. Instead Venice was its own entity, the queen of the Adriatic. In her ports the goods and wealth of the world bottleneck in their travels from the east to west. It was in Venice, like a handful of other European cities, that the fruits of the world's labor and toil accumulated. The marvelous architecture, cathedrals, and gaudy gilt could have never been reached with out cunning merchants class, stockpiling the riches of lands near and far. Venice was truly the crossroads of the world. In the city's architecture can attest to the stockpiling of culture. For one city to contain the greatest examples of Euopean Gothic ,Byzantie Architecture, Islamic architecture,one my conclude that this is the evidence of some economic hegemony.
Like any city worth it's salt I has a fabulous theater. Appropriately named the phoenix, It burned to the ground in 1996, but has since been renovated and re-opened last year.
Like any wealthy people, the Venicians needed servants. And I was here in a shallow lagoon so close to northern Africa, the likely choice were the Blackamoores, (Black Muslims).
In my research, I'm unsure of the extent of slavery in Venice. It may have been slightly greater then indentured servitude. I don't think it was on the scale of the American South. At any rate, it was suggested that a black servant, dressed in his traditional clothing was a sign of conspicuous consumption in Ventican society.
By the end of the seventeenth and the early eithteenth centuries, Venice had lost it's strangle hold of shipping as Spain and England began going around Africa and jaunting into the new world. Venice society lost it's appetites for human slaves, but in an act of nostalgia to there once wealthy and hegemonic past, the artisans began to produce sculptures of the black house servants in various posse of servitude and Burden.

as a table


With Tray

Unlike sculpture of white people, who are almost always shown in acts of leisure. Blackamoor sculptures always includes acts of servants and utility. The Black people in these sculptures are always shown holding trays, lighting devises, acting as the support of tabletops, or holding clock faces.

After about 1730, the production of Blackamoore sculpture decline in Italy.

Suprisingly, Blackamoore sculpture was revived in another culture, perhaps nostalgic of it's own slave owning past. In the 1860s Victorian America, one may again see Blackamoors in upper middle class homes.
It was quite fashionable on a Sunday afternoon, to call upon your friends, neighbor's, and aspiration's social connection. Alas, Sunday afternoon, everyone of leisure was running around calling on each other, so now one was home. The Blackamoor was set out and people would set upon their silver their calling card (the precursor to the modern business card). One may see Blackamoors in the Molly Brown House Museum in Denver, CO; just past the vestibule, waiting in the entry hall.

An interesting note, The fisrt cigar store indians were not Indians at all, but rather wooden depictions of slaves,which later evolved to become the cigar store indian we know of today. Decorative Art Historians agree that the Blackamoor and it's revival into Victorian society is the provenance of the Western American cultural icon.