CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2024
| Author | Fukumoto, Kana |
|---|---|
| Title | Making Visible the Invisible. The Civic Life of Africans Visualized in the Sevillian Paintings from 1600 to 1750. |
| Summary | My thesis explores how the civic life of people of African descent was represented in early modern Seville, where various artworks featuring African figures were produced. An entry point for this research is Diego Velázquez’s Kitchen Maid with the Supper at Emmaus (ca. 1617-1618, National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin), a fascinating example in Western art because the artist endowed an African woman with a central position in the painting. Remarkably, the picture has been interpreted with the social conditions of early seventeenth-century Seville, marking an essential point of reference in the study of black representation in general. In this thesis, I attempt to analyze the visualization of Black Africans in Sevillian paintings of the early modern period. By extending the analytical framework of previous studies on Velázquez’s work to examine other Sevillian paintings with African figures, this study seeks to understand the multiple functions and meanings of black figures in Sevillian art. Since Seville was an international port city with connections both inside and outside the European continent, a close examination of Sevillian paintings would provide a more transcultural perspective to the study of black representation in the visual arts. |
| Supervisor | Giovanni, Tarantino; Junko, Kume |
| Department | History MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2024/fukumoto_kana.pdf |
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