Lot n° 58
Estimation :
8000 - 12000
EUR
Rare capital in limestone carved on all sides.... - Lot 58 - Coutau-Bégarie
Rare capital in limestone carved on all sides. Between the angles with crooked ends are sculpted expressive heads emerging from foliage. These heads want to represent the ethnic variety of humanity by African and European features; the hair is curly and delimited by a row of small holes, but also wavy, the eyes are almond-shaped pierced in their center, nose with wrinkles on each side, half-open mouth, the lips are fleshy.
Southern Italy, Puglia, end of the 12th century H. 36 cm - W. 39 cm - D. 39 cm (visible accidents and missing parts)
Standing in front of this Romanesque capital to observe it does not leave one indifferent and raises multiple questions. Indeed, the motif of heads emerging from foliage may seem very archaic, but it follows a late Roman tradition still found in the Puglia region in the 12th century.
But perhaps even more surprising is the representation of a character with African features, which is surprising in this world where the Western man is omnipresent; the African man in Romanesque art is rare.
However, there is a capital preserved by the Metropolitan Museum of Art (inv 55.66), probably from Troia, which illustrates the ethnic variety of mankind (fig a) with a head whose features are unquestionably those of the African man.
Another capital from the end of the twelfth century, from the Sam Fogg collection (fig b), also from southern Italy, takes up this theme of ethnic plurality and shows a man's head with a curly hair motif in the form of small juxtaposed squares to signify the African origin of the character.
Why do these representations appear in European art? They emanate from a very particular cultural and political background, in the cosmopolitan atmosphere of southern Italy at the end of the 12th century.
The Norman conquest of Sicily at the end of the 10th century was the first confrontation between the white-skinned Christian world and the dark-skinned Islamic world. Moreover, the crusades were to be a vector of encounter between the African peoples who fought in the Islamic armies and the European chivalry from 1097 onwards.
Moreover, the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, having married a Norman heiress of Sicily and Naples, as well as their son Henry IV, who set out to conquer their rightful kingdom, employed African servants in their suite. The Liber ad Honorem Augusti, abundantly illustrated, written by Pietro da Eboli between 1195 and 1197, shows in three miniatures the triumphal entry into Palermo of the Swabian king surrounded by dark-skinned trumpeters. This representation is part of a continuity of practices of the Norman rulers who employed servants from Africa, just as in the Islamic courts that extended from Spain to Syria at that time.
Politically, Henry IV's son, Frederick II, wished to appear as a cosmopolitan Mediterranean ruler. He ruled his empire composed of Italian and German subjects but also Middle Eastern ones and thus claimed the imperial throne. With the help of the Pope, Frederick thus collaborated to show the secular sovereignty of the Church over all the peoples of the world.
The depiction of African figures on a capital thus marks first and foremost the desire of the Hohenstaufen rulers to legitimize their power by signs of continuity with the princes they had fought.
But more than that, for the Roman Church, with the help of the Emperor, it is a question of showing a hegemony and an extended power over the people. This capital thus has the ambition, by representing the races of the earth, to symbolize both human diversity but also to signify the hold of the spiritual power of the Church over the world.
Works consulted:
- David Abulafia, Frederick II: A Medieval Emperor, Oxford University Press, 1988.
- Henri Bresc, Frédéric II et l'Islam, in Anne-Marie Flambard Héricher (dir.), Frédéric II (1194-1250) et l'héritage normand de Sicile, Caen: Presses universitaires de Caen, 2001
- Sam Fogg, architecture & ornament, 22 October - 19 November 2020, London
- Sylvain Gouguenheim, Frédéric II, un empereur de légende, Paris, Perrin, 2015
- Paul H. D. Kaplan, Black Africans in Hohenstaufen Iconography. Gesta, vol. 26, no. 1, University of Chicago Press, International Center of Medieval Art, 1987, pp. 29-36
- Ostoia Vera K., To Represent What Is as It Is, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, vol. 23, no. 10, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1965, pp. 367-72
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