Conclusion

The institution of slavery is a crime against humanity. In Hapsburg Spain, slavery was inscribed on the skin of Afro-Hispanic slaves and ex-slaves. Blackness signified slavery but slavery did not entail blackness. This association was also well established during the Bourbon dynasty, when Afro-Hispanic people were still bought and sold as commodities. Slave trading was practiced on Spanish soil at least until the first quarter of the nineteenth century,...

Black but Human

I address the origins of the proverb ‘Black but Human’ that emerged from the Afro-Hispanic oral tradition and the ways in which colour and social status are compounded. There is documentary evidence that the word ‘black’ was used as a mark of the inferior social condition of slaves and that it designated a diversity of ethnic backgrounds that included people with contradictory colour classifications. I am concerned with the Afro-Hispanic beliefs that are embodied in this proverb and are conveyed in the recently discovered black carols, written by Afro-Hispanic slaves and ex-slaves in the Spanish black confraternities, later reappropriated by Hispanic white writers. These work songs centre on the assertion that Africans are human in spite of their legally enforced status as commodified objects with no rights. They focus on the association between being human and the possession of a soul that becomes white as the result of baptism.

Commodification

I explore the depiction of the Miracle of the Black Leg by Saints Cosmas and Damian. This narrates the miraculous cure of a white verger with a diseased leg after the grafting of a leg from a dead African man onto his amputated stump. I show how the Greek, Latin and Catalan legends of this miracle give rise to different conceptions of the black subject defined either as a ‘Moor’ or as an ‘Ethiopian’ and I look at the violent sixteenth-century image of the mutilated African man, worked up by Isidro de Villoldo in Valladolid (1547) and the ways in which it was interpreted by other sculptors in Castile, and show how it drastically departs from the original literary and visual sources examined. I believe that there is a reference to the mutilation of limbs or ears suffered by fugitive slaves and I construct an account of the treatment of slaves.

Props and Costume

I discuss the stereotypical sixteenth-century image of slaves in chains produced by Northern European artists in Spain. This traditional iconography has no resonance in topographic views and landscapes by Spanish artists. I focus on the ways that the View of Seville drawing (1573) by Joris Hoefnagel articulates the institutionalization of the local Spanish and transatlantic slave trades and I construct an account of the material culture of slavery based on archival sources and legal discussions. I also lay out Juan Fragoso’s set of recommendations for assessing the economic value of slaves at auction in his Universal Surgery. I address the ways in which the drawings of chained slaves (1529) by Christopher Weiditz represent the traditional iconography of Afro-Hispanic slave labourers and as symbolizing the black resistance forged in their confraternities against their subjugation. These forms of resistance are confirmed by Pedro de León’s experience at the royal prison of Seville.

Visual Culture and Slavery

I discuss the semiotic control imposed on the production of religious depictions after the Council of Trent (1563), achieved by the decree on sacred images and the monitoring of art production by a censor appointed by the Inquisition. I map out the visual discourses that offer representations of blackness, slavery and human diversity and I concentrate on ‘Black Sainthood’ promoted in black confraternities: Baltasar in the Adoration of the Magi, Benedict of Palermo from Sicily, Iphigenia, and Elesbaan from Ethiopia. I reveal the prohibition to members of the oldest black confraternity of participation in public processions and I provide the legal case against them. I consider the eighteenth-century legend of the miraculous blackening of the face of the sculpture of St Francis of Paula in La Habana, in Cuba, as a sign of support to the black brothers after the institution had been taken over by the white nobility.

Introduction

The African presence in imperial Spain, from the last quarter of the fifteenth century until the end of the eighteenth century, was due to institutionalization of the transatlantic slave trade that brought 700,000–800,000 Africans as slaves to the Crowns of Portugal, Aragon, and Castile. During the same period and in the same territories, the Mediterranean slave trade was responsible for the presence of 300,000–400,000 Moor, Berber, and Turk slaves. According to Alessandro Stella, if we add those born in these European territories, there were approximately two million slaves living in the Iberian Peninsula and islands during the early modern period. The black presence was ubiquitous in the south of these territories and in the main cities of the centre and the north, as we shall see in ...

The Image of Freedom

I discuss the shift from an hegemonic view of Afro-Hispanic slaves and ex-slaves to the articulation of the emergence of the slave ‘subject’ and the ‘emancipatory subject’ by concentrating on both; the only extant seventeenth-century portrait of an Afro-Hispanic slave subject, Juan de Pareja (1649) by his master, Diego Velázquez, made before Velázquez emancipated Pareja in Rome (1650), and on the articulation of the freed subject in Pareja’s self-portrait, in his painting The Calling of St Matthew (1661). I deal with how Velázquez’s portrait provides the form by which Pareja fashions his Europeanized self-portrait to signify his freedom and I explore the ways its iconography embodies extant discourses on diversity and slavery: Pareja’s attachment both to the collective Christian African past, and to his present with the experience of black communities, where the ‘Black but Human’ topos emerged. I also provide an account of Pareja’s career as an independent artist.

What Is Human about Slavery?

This chapter looks at Hispanic theologians to discern whether there is any discussion of the presence of souls in Africans that might parallel similar discussions about the Native Americans of the New World, and to see what conditions restricted Africans in their becoming Christian and what benefits might accrue to them in doing so. It discusses the belief that it was necessary to evangelize and baptize the Africans in Spain and the New World, and explores the visual representations of the Baptism of the African to show that the process of Christianization promoted in Seville follows longstanding traditions of evangelization of non-Europeans. The chapter focuses on the operation of the oldest black confraternity (founded in the fourteenth century in Seville) and shows how it becomes the template for all the black confraternities founded throughout the Spanish empire and how it was considered a ‘black nation’ by Afro-Hispanic slaves.