Overview
Outside reading
I have pasted in the quotations I used in the lecture below. I am also attaching the entire original article, but it is quite long and dense.
- If one of Alessandro’s parents was of African ancestry, we must recognize that this may not have been scandalous or entirely anomalous. We must be prepared to go back to a period before the hegemony of race, when differences were perceived but not invariably conceived of as signs of natural hierarchy among varying groups.
- This period has been almost lost to history, beneath the crushing weight of the Atlantic slave trade and European colonialism, which in certain respects destroyed a horizontal multicultural world and established instead a fatal culture of racism, in which mixing or blending became the monstrous exception.
- What has been lost in the debate about Alessandro’s racialized looks is the human reality of the Mediterranean as a thriving world of cultural traffic and familial exchange, where differences were not always reduced to matters of race or skin color. The multicultural Mediterranean world is evident in the literature of Italy, which features many accounts of economic, political, and romantic contacts between Italian cities and those of Africa and the Levant.
Questoin
In the first half of our lecture we discuss two portraits of Alessandro de'Medici. (1) How is Alessandro's background described on the Uffizi website (USE A DIRECT QUOTE)? (2) The scholar Mari Gallucci suggests that we should approach these portraits with caution because our modern categories of race are difficult to apply to the early modern period. Select a portion of one of her quotes from lecture and explain how it applies to the situation of Alessandro. Next, let's turn our attention to the Americas, where Spanish authorities institute a very rigid hierarchy for considering racial mixing. (3) Broadly describe what "Casta" paintings consist of--what is the idea behind these works of art? How do they attempt to address the "anxiety" over racial mixing? According to the video, what is the purpose of these works of art? Setting aside the issue of racial categorization, what other representations of life in the Americas are included in these images? (4) Compare and contrast the strategies for representing race in the Alessandro Portraits and Casta paintings? How do they represent a shift as the world moves towards the modern era? |