Invisibility Speaks: Servants and Portraits in Early Modern Visual Culture

Abstract

This essay examines the relation between the genre of portraiture and the emergence of black identity from the vantage point of a cross-historical perspective. The range of artists extends from Hans Holbein, Anthony Van Dyck, Frans Hals, Rembrandt, Jacob Jordaens and Karel van Mander III through Joshua Reynolds, Thomas Gainsborough, and Tiepolo to Derek Walcott and Glenn Ligon. Rather than imagining a series of increasingly positive steps organized as an upward linear trajectory toward freedom, the approach here envisions a jagged line of mixed outcomes and concentrates on testing the limits of portraiture as a mode of representation at each moment across multiple contexts. Instead of giving access to a fully satisfactory image of black identity, the portrait medium can be seen as developing an internal process of consciously questioning, exposing, and resisting its own limits.