Ethiopian Christians on the margins: Symbolic blackness in Filippino Lippi's Adoration of the Magi and Miracle of St Philip

Abstract

AbstractNew identifications of prominent but overlooked black figures in two major works by Filippino Lippi enrich our understanding of how Africans were seen in late Quattrocento Florence. The African in the Adoration of the Magi, neither king nor attendant, represents the first gentiles who accepted Christ, as discussed in St Augustine’s Epiphany sermons. The black man in the Miracle of St Philip fresco, in the Strozzi Chapel of Santa Maria Novella, represents (or alludes to) the Ethiopian eunuch baptised by St Philip. These and other Florentine paintings from the 1490s, by various artists, shows black Africans as recent or future Christian converts. This hitherto unnoticed phenomenon reflects an increased awareness of Ethiopian Christians, who visited Italy repeatedly in the Quattrocento. Many Italians saw these African coreligionists as different from themselves: both insiders and outsiders. Filippino used various visual strategies to express both inclusion and alterity. Specifically, he depicts both black figures on the margins, both literally and symbolically: they stand at the edge of the miracle scenes.