Early Modern Visual Culture Research Articles

Blasted, Bound, and Bald: the Abject Properties of Witch Hair

The witch’s blasted hair in Early Modern visual culture is moving and evolving. Her hair is untamable, animated by a wind and a force unknowable to the viewer. The artists who captured this “blasted” hair in the 16th century, including Hans Baldung Grien, Hans Sebald Beham, and Albrecht Dürer, found themselves working in opposition to what appears, at first glance, a formidable “other:” women’s agency and sexuality, frozen in bodily form as strands of hair. Little research has been dedicated to an earnest analysis of the witch’s amorphous hair so this paper consists primarily of original research and the application of philosophical and anthropological theory. Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection is a key tenet of this paper’s central argument. The witch is not an “other” directly opposed to a mainstream, she is a third intermediary thing: Kristeva’s “abject.” She is a personification of the skin on the surface of sour milk, instilling disgust in the potential consumer. She is the abject precisely because she is embedded in the object; her hair is the most explicit vehicle for this argument. Friedrich Speevon Langenfield’s accounts of forced hair removal and contemporary literature from Raymond Firth, Barbara Baert, and E.R. Leach inform this reading of witch hair as the abject. This paper concludes that the visual translation of blasted hair is an attempt to remove it and its female sexual connotation from the imagination to a more accessible visual medium. The artist’s renderings are meant to turn the abject into an easily digestible object, a complete “other.”

New Books across the Disciplines

New Books across the Disciplines

Online Scavenger Hunts as Gateways to Early Modern Visual Culture

Online Scavenger Hunts as Gateways to Early Modern Visual Culture

Visual and spatial hybridity in the early modern Iberian world

AbstractThe present Special Issue examines visual and spatial hybridity in order to explore how theories of encounter, hybridity and globalisation can be applied to the visual arts of the Iberian world in both European and extra‐European contexts. It examines hybridity through case studies from Spain and Portugal, as well as cultural, artistic and architectural production in other imperial centres in the Iberian world. The eight articles that comprise this themed issue discuss the circulation of works of art and ideas, continuity and change, and processes of acculturation in comparative perspectives. Articles engage critically with the limits of hybridity as a historiographical term, and what they pose for our understanding of early modern visual culture. While the proposed Special Issue does not include a case study of every city or region in the Iberian world, articles discuss how artistic and cultural production combined forms expressing local, regional and the transregional identities, thus creating a rich variety of cross‐cultural designs that are a reflection of the period, both within and beyond Iberian imperial boundaries.

Jutta Gisela Sperling. Roman Charity: Queer Lactations in Early Modern Visual Culture.

Jutta Gisela Sperling. Roman Charity: Queer Lactations in Early Modern Visual Culture.

Roman Charity: Queer Lactations in Early Modern Visual Culture. Jutta Gisela Sperling.

<i>Roman Charity: Queer Lactations in Early Modern Visual Culture</i>. Jutta Gisela Sperling.

Handling the Theme of Hands in early Modern Cross-over Contexts

The human hand is a complex phenomenon within the contexts of early modern visual and textual culture. Its frequent presence in early modern texts and illustrations - as well as the many different types of described and depicted hands - raises a number of questions as to its functions and significances. In this article, we examine the role of the hand and two of its familiar functions –pointing and touching – against diverse and diverging understandings of human perception and cognition in the period focussing particularly on relations between bodies and minds. Through comparative analyses of cross-over examples from both medicine, manuals and drama – primarily John Bulwer’sChirologia and Chironomia, William Harvey’s de Motu Cordis and extracts from Shakespeare’s plays – we explore the questions implied by hands and their contributions to the knowledge probed and proposed by these texts and illustrations.

Roman Charity: Queer Lactations in Early Modern Visual Culture by Jutta Gisela Sperling

Reviewed by: Roman Charity: Queer Lactations in Early Modern Visual Culture by Jutta Gisela Sperling Peter Carlson Jutta Gisela Sperling, Roman Charity: Queer Lactations in Early Modern Visual Culture (Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag 2016) 430 pp., ill. Around 31 ce, Valerius Maximus included two curious tales in his Memorable Doings and Sayings that would fascinate artists and writers alike for centuries. In both stories, an adult woman breastfeeds her parent (in one, her mother; in the other, her father) to save the parent from starvation in prison. Whilst the story lived on primarily in written formats in the Middle Ages, it became exceptionally popular as a subject for early modern artists. Sperling has written a book that both documents this popularity and provides provocative suggestions regarding its causes and effects. The subject is certainly transgressive, in particular because the guilt of the parents is uncertain, and so the justice of the daughter's milk offering is hazy, though the idea that the daughter represents filial piety was soon introduced to the accounts in their retellings. But in the early modern period, a uniquely religious spin is put on the Pero/Cimon story (the daughter/father story) as well as on the daughter/mother story, as they are depicted in various forms of visual culture: Pero becomes the model for the Christian Church's prime virtue, Charity. Sperling recognizes the problematic nature of this model for religious virtue, whether in the same-sex or opposite-sex versions. In both accounts, eroticism is lurking just below the surface, with the lactating breasts and suckling adults, as well as an uncomfortable inversion of the parent/child family structures of responsibility and authority. Moreover, in the daughter/mother account, a not-very-subtle expression of homoeroticism is obvious, while in the daughter/father account, the specter of incest cannot be ignored. It is this tension between Christian allegorization and visual shock and even titillation that primarily intrigues Sperling, and for which she seeks an explanation. Sperling addresses her subject by dividing the book into two sections. Part I (Chapters 1–3) is an account of the depictions of the story in early modern visual culture. Chapter 1 shows the first early modern interest in Pero and Cimon (1525–1550) expressed with relative fidelity to the stories (the depictions are clearly prison scenes, and Pero is inside the prison), but also in some cases (such as the prints of the Beham brothers) as intentionally eroticized, and in others (such as the painting by the Master with Griffin's Head) as comparable to strong, and emasculating, women of the Bible such as Judith, Delilah, and Salome. Caravaggio's depiction of Pero and Cimon, Sperling notes in Chapter 2, is a turning point, for the simple fact that he places the imagery in the context of his altarpiece, The Seven Works of Mercy, inserting the Roman story into a specifically Christian context. Sperling suggests, convincingly, that this work, when considered with Caravaggio's other religious paintings (in particular The Denial of Saint Peter, The Calling of Saint Matthew, and The Incredulity of Saint Thomas) "was meant as a figure of dissent vis-à-vis mainstream post-Tridentine Catholicism" (107), in great part because he "secularizes and politicizes Charity by couching Pero as the breastfeeding Madonna's successor… whose needy father, awaiting nurture, renewal, and redemption, is a Saint Peter look-alike" (180). Following this transformative "Caravaggesque moment," as Sperling calls it, the theme of [End Page 271] Pero and Cimon grows arguably even more popular, perhaps because it is picked up by Rubens, Manfredi, Reni, and others—but the scene loses the subversive elements that Caravaggio included. Poussin famously included a daughter/mother breastfeeding scene in The Gathering of the Manna, and Sperling identifies in Chapter 3 the "long shadows" of both Caravaggio and Poussin. Poussin's "aim was to produce a Roman Charity … purged of all irony" in contradistinction to Caravaggio's distinctly polemical version (182). This does not mean however that there was not an element of dissent in the later depictions. Rather, the French visual tradition of parental breastfeeding was, Sperling suggests, a response to the debates of "paternal power and the reform of the monarchy...

The Return of Seduction

The Return of Seduction Morgan Pitelka Shunga: Erotic Art in Japan by Rosina Buckland. New York: Overlook Press, 2010. Pp. 176. $45.00. Shunga: Sex and Pleasure in Japanese Art by Timothy Clark, C. Andrew Gerstle, Aki Ishigami, and Akiko Yano. Leiden: Hotei Publishing, 2013. Pp. 536. $99.00. Seduction: Japan’s Floating World: The John C. Weber Collection by Laura W. Allen, Julia Meech, Eric C. Rath, and Melinda Takeuchi. San Francisco: Asian Art Museum, 2015. Pp. xx + 260. $50.00. Hokusai by Sarah E. Thompson, Hokusai Katsushika, Joan Wright, and Philip Meredith. Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 2015. Pp. 176. $29.95. Hokusai’s Great Wave: Biography of a Global Icon by Christine M. E. Guth. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2015. Pp. xvi + 256. $57.00 cloth, $20.00 paper. The cover of Rosina Buckland’s book, Shunga: Erotic Art in Japan (here after cited as Erotic Art), depicts the rapturous heads of a couple, kissing with their mouths open, tongues engaged, and eyes closed in a visible display of pleasure. The image projects passion and intimacy, but it is also rather chaste as a representation of sex, showing us only the heads and necks of the lovers. The actual woodblock print from [End Page 437] which this cover detail is excerpted, the middle image of Torii Kiyonaga’s 鳥居清長 The Scroll for the Sleeve (Sode no maki 袖の巻, 1785), in fact shows the full explicit scene of the couple during coitus, with the right-hand side of the print detailing the woman’s vagina, which holds the man’s largely obscured penis as he embraces her from behind and she holds up her left leg to allow easy entry. The image on the cover seems to present a visual argument for the primacy of idealized intimacy, making it useful as a public-facing, “family-friendly” representation of Japan’s early modern visual culture. The full print contained within the book’s pages, on the other hand, conveys the messy and vivid encounter of two bodies having sex. The gap between the two hints at the challenge of displaying and indeed studying early modern Japanese erotic art or “spring pictures” (shunga 春画), a key genre in the well-known field of “pictures of the floating world” (ukiyo-e 浮世 絵). This essay examines several recent exhibition catalogs and monographs that illustrate the visual culture of early modern Japan, including but not limited to erotic art, to consider the history and ongoing allure of shunga and ukiyo-e inside and outside of Japan. Buckland’s Erotic Art is not, strictly speaking, an exhibition catalog, but rather a history of the production of shunga “illustrated with artworks in the British Museum’s collection, many previously unpublished” (p. 7). The book begins with an overview of Japan’s erotic imagery, touching on attitudes, usage and formats, social and cultural contexts, and censorship. This section, like most pages of the book, is amply illustrated with full-color reproductions of prints and paintings that depict everything from courtesans with their lovers to cheating wives and husbands, with plenty of attention paid to singing and dancing among other activities in the period’s houses of prostitution. The second section, “Features of shunga,” details the contents of these erotic images and focuses considerable attention on correcting mistaken assumptions and beliefs among modern and Western viewers. Buckland notes, for example, that the majority of people shown in shunga were not sex workers but ordinary men and women; even when courtesans did appear, it was usually in encounters with their private or secret lovers rather than with clients. Buckland also emphasizes that the majority of shunga highlight pleasure rather than dominance, and they frequently display individuals or couples in the throes of passion while rarely displaying violence. The point here is to counter the perception of shunga as pornography, with all of the negative perceptions that adhere to that term. By [End Page 438] analyzing the content of the prints to emphasize female agency, diverse but recognizable characters, and a culture of intimacy that feels recognizable, this book seems to make the argument that the genre of shunga possesses positive, universalistic qualities. This is a compelling argument. Yet the...

The Taste of the Eye and the Sight of the Tongue: the Relations between Sight and Taste in Early Modern Europe

This article examines the articulation between the senses of taste and sight through the representations of their organs, the tongue and the eye, in early modern Europe. The relationship between taste and sight first brings to mind gastronomical aesthetics, and the part played by the eye in the relish of beautifully presented dishes. The first part of this article is therefore devoted to exploring the taste of the eye (or the foretaste of sight) and highlights the harmony of taste and sight in early modern cuisine. However, the forms of reciprocity between taste and sight cannot be reduced to the sole figure of culinary aesthetics, which tends to blur the other multiple modalities that this sensorial association could reveal. The second part, the sight of the tongue (or the invisibility of taste), thus examines more complex layers of the relationship between the sense of sight and the taste organ, through a study of the representations of the tongue and of the gaping mouth in early modern visual culture. Drawing on early modern textual and iconographic resources and exploring: cookbooks; physiognomic works; conduct books; and also engravings and paintings related to the culinary arts, the seven deadly sins, and representations of madness and the fool in early modern visual culture, this essay argues that examining the representations of the sense organs is a suggestive way to explore the relationship between the senses.

Commerce and early-modern visual representations in natural history and medicine

Yet another book on early-modern visual culture? After Svetlana Alpers’ pioneering study on The Art of Describing in the Netherlands of that period? After Sachiko Kusukawa’s so masterful scrutiny of early-modern atlases and prints in Picturing the Book of Nature: Image, Text, and Argument in Sixteenth-Century Human Anatomy and Medical Botany (2012)? After Paula Findlen’s focus on the skills and the ‘‘body of the artisan,’’ in Art and Experience in the Scientific Revolution (2006)? After Adrian John’s classic on The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (1998)? After Harold J. Cook’s survey of the economic contexts in which all of this took place, in Masters of Exchange: Commerce, Medicine and Science in the Dutch Golden Age (2007)? And yet, Daniel Margocsy (assistant professor at New York University’s Hunter College and graduate of Harvard University’s History of Science Department) has found a niche amongst all these celebrated studies that distinguishes this book as an important and overall convincing contribution. His new book is situated smack in the middle ground between all of the aforementioned studies, and a plethora of others, listed in the 40? page-long bibliography at the end of the volume. Margocsy grabs the reader’s attention by diving straight into his story with a gripping account of Baron Zacharias Conrad von Uffenbach’s (1683–1734) shopping tour through Europe, starting out in The Groote Keyserhof on Amsterdam’s main shopping street, the Niewendijk. Passing by Nicolaus Visscher’s shop for art and maps, he gets totally engrossed in the huge assortment of shells and other naturalia, cameos and antiquities. Later on, he pays a visit to Maria Sibylla Merian in her private quarters in Amsterdam, where he buys one copy of Georg Eberhard Rumphius’s Amboinsche Rariteit-kamer (1705), and an atlas of marine life of the Dutch East Indies, hand-colored and illustrated by Merian herself, plus a hand-

Teaching Mesoamerican Indigenous Codices: Early Modern Visual Culture in the Liberal Arts Language Classroom

Teaching Mesoamerican Indigenous Codices: Early Modern Visual Culture in the Liberal Arts Language Classroom

Modernity's Regimes of Wonderment

Modernity’s Regimes of Wonderment Jonathan P. Eburne (bio) and Aaron Jaffe (bio) Curious Visions of Modernity: Enchantment, Magic, and the Sacred by David L. Martin. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011. xviii + 255 pages. $32.95 cloth. When Walter Benjamin writes in Convolute N of the Arcades Project that he has “nothing to say, only to show,” does anyone really believe him?1 David L. Martin cites this well-known statement in the first pages of his excellent study Curious Visions of Modernity. He does so less to explain his own methods, however, than to invoke something of a modernist incantation. Indeed, Benjamin’s dictum echoes a line by Pablo Picasso borrowed by Jacques Lacan in Seminar 11: “I do not seek, I find.”2 Where we might expect to find a statement of method, Lacan instead presents us with findings. As Sigmund Freud said, “Wo es war, soll ich werden.” (Where it [the id] was, I [the ego] shall be.) What is curious, though, is that the claim itself—”I don’t seek, I find”—discloses the very methodological reflection it professes to withhold, albeit in the form of a borrowed line, a resonant fragment of historical discourse. By the time Lacan gets to Seminar 24, moreover, even finding is off the table: “Long ago, I happened to say, imitating a famous painter, ‘I don’t seek, I find.’ At the point I’m at now, I don’t find as long as I don’t seek.”3 Of course, there’s more to such statements than merely the showy disavowal of method—how could there not be? Still, there’s something of the conjuring trick in these inscrutable mottos. Don’t find, don’t seek, don’t even tell: our eyes are directed [End Page 685] elsewhere, thereby sustaining the master’s sleight of hand. Such claims thus amount to something other than a hermeneutic (or an object-oriented ontology). Rather than inducing us to heed the call of things from within the tangle of discourse that enshrouds them, these utterances instead comprise the magic words of philosophical stagecraft, a theoretical version of welcome to the show, presto, hocus pocus, abracadabra. Reason supplies its own magic words: the terms saying, showing, seeking, finding, and telling all have ordinary meanings, yet they are no less caught up in the irrational constellation of terms in Martin’s subtitle—enchantment, magic, and the sacred. Insofar as these common participles also underwrite the formation of modern rationality of the scientific sort, they also have complex critical genealogies, which Martin’s book aims to trace. In his three-part study of early modern cabinets of curiosity, anatomical specimens, and pictorial technologies, Martin examines the “stagecraft” that underpins the way modern science—not to mention philosophy—has been able to make inert matter speak (60). Michel Foucault, whose work underpins Martin’s study in profound ways, named his version of this stagecraft “archaeology.” Benjamin likens his own approach to montage. Martin’s is more akin to Industrial Light and Magic, full of stunning archival pyrotechnics, and appropriate to the “regime of wonderment” he wants to rescue. As Martin writes, When the task of the scholar was to get objects to speak of the truth that was hidden within them, a truth that only the object itself fully “knew,” illumination came through an act of unpacking the microcosmic collection, of arranging the words of the text of creation so that one might interpret the signatures inscribed within all things. In this setting, the fake often pointed to higher truths. (45) Like Benjamin, Martin is interested in exhibiting telling fragments; he indicates by pointing out, illustrating, and illuminating. On this front, he offers a telling confession: “For many years,” he writes, “I have been something of an academic collector, watching out for fragments and broken pieces of early modern visual culture discarded and scattered by the vagaries of historical discourse” (xi). What he exhibits in Curious Visions are holdovers of early modern curiosity—”the fragment, the narrative, the excursion, the fleeting glance, the sympathy, and the resonance” (ix)—that animate the scientific practices he features in his book: the assembly of collections, the examination of human...

Leggere nella Spagna moderna. Erudizione, religiosità e svago by Antonio Castillo Gómez (review)

Reviewed by: Leggere nella Spagna moderna. Erudizione, religiosità e svago by Antonio Castillo Gómez Linde M. Brocato Leggere nella Spagna moderna. Erudizione, religiosità e svago. Pàtron Editore, 2013 By Antonio Castillo Gómez This anthology masterfully synthesizes previously published work to provide a coherent and nuanced account of reading practices in Golden Age Spain. Castillo Gómez approaches reading, writing, and the history of texts in the traditions of Roger Chartier and histoire du livre, Armando Petrucci’s paleographic and documentary approach, and reception theory, making excellent use of an array of non-literary and non-canonical texts, both manuscript and print, their materiality and layout, and examples of early modern visual culture. He also marshals an astounding array of Inquisitorial processes to fill out this full social portrait of reading. Nor does Castillo Gómez hesitate to mine the canon for representations of non-literary reading, using Cervantes’ representations of his own and Don Quixote’s readings to frame his study, and Lope’s representations of and protestations about reading by the barely literate—indeed, Castillo Gómez shows that Cervantes had a kind of reception theory avant la lettre. While one chapter is dedicated to erudite reading, the majority are dedicated to the textual experiences of everyday people, the total horizon of texts and reading in this historical time and place. In the first chapter, “‘Dell’ampio e brillante esame.’ La lettura tra norma e trasgressione,” he makes use of early modern discourses about reading to show what “reading” meant, for both men and women, as authors and subjects of such discourses. He uses the escrutinio of Don Quixote’s library as a launching point for tracing the taxonomies and ethics of books and reading, using many sixteenth- and seventeenth-century primary texts, including treatises, popular and devotional works, correspondence, memoirs, and Inquisitorial archives, to lay out a quasi official canon, both what and how to read. This canon was aimed at preventing uncontrolled practices though there are abundant testimonies of transgressive readings; readings were divided into “good” and “bad,” and the bad were almost ritualistically characterized as “profane, dishonest, and chivalric books,” for being “lies” (fictional) and “poisonous” to the soul and to good habits, and thus harmful to vulnerable readers like women, children, and the uneducated (“gente semplice”). Readings were also prescribed according to status, so that genres generally deprecated for the vulnerable, like poetry, might be useful for powerful elites; thus “proper readings” were those texts that properly formed one’s person in virtue and social propriety according to class. Much of the focus for guiding reading is on children and women, because of the weakness of their intellects, and texts for primary education were supervised by parish priests; throughout the period, catechisms shifted the proportions of pedagogical versus moral and religious formation in favor of the later, particularly after Trent progressively eliminating profane texts from children’s reading. Finally, he details early modern anxiety about what seemed even then to be massive production of reading matter, which increased possibilities of reading among different audiences, and thus the possibility of ideas that escaped official control; hence the imposition of various layers of control, licencias to regulate production and Inquisitorial surveillance to monitor circulation. [End Page 311] The second chapter, “Leggere e annotare. La lettura erudita,” discusses learned reading. Erudite readers are habitual readers, but look for useful teachings rather than entertainment, and in few rather than many books. Castillo Gómez examines this form of private, silent intense reading evidenced in notes, both in margins and in common-place books, using several surviving manuscript commonplace books. In preaching, too, the explicit doctrine was to read a few books well, rather than many badly. For these readers, reading was tightly connected to writing, also explicit in sixteenth-century instruction for “los que son novicios en leer libros” (Castillo Gómez 44; citing Alejo Venegas, Tractado de ortographía en tres lenguas principales, 1531, c1v). Long characterized by intensive rather than extensive reading, appropriating the substance of “essential titles” by deep and repetitive interaction could also consist of underlining or otherwise marking in books themselves—hence the utility of Agostino Ramelli’s book wheel (reproduced...

Rubens and the bird of paradise. Painting natural knowledge in the early seventeenth century

This paper explores the interconnections between early modern natural history and European visual culture by focusing on the representation of a single motif, the bird of paradise, in one of Peter Paul Rubens's most celebrated paintings: the Adoration of the Magi (1609; 1628–29), now in the collection of the Museo del Prado in Madrid. Portrayed as an aigrette in the Black Magus's headwear, the bird of paradise is interpreted as a symbol of exoticism and geographical diversity, in a painting of unmistakable Counter‐Reformist facture, produced in a context of tense religious and political disputes and conflicting commercial interests. By considering the representation of this motif in the Prado Adoration as well as in other works by Rubens and his contemporaries, this paper studies the contribution of artists and paintings to the dissemination of natural knowledge, and examines early modern visual culture as part of a wider context shaped by religiosity, political interests, the cult of the exotic and global trade.

Tennis in Early Modern Visual Culture

Taking as its departure point the celebrated passage in Galileo’s Dialogo sopra i due massimi sistemi del mondo on the game of pallacorda, this paper is an invitation to re-read the ample visual documentation on the game, on its perception and its representation in early modern Europe. In fact, prints and paintings produced between the end of the sixteenth and the middle of the seventeenth centuries testify to the vast and complex panorama of themes and motifs which marked the development of the imagerie linked to games (in particular, its allegorical dimension), and to tennis as its most noble expression. The metaphor conceived by Galileo and the interest of other scientists in games as a source of models and illustrative examples can be seen as part of a broader cultural and social sensibility in which games played a central role.

Shakespeare and Early Modern Visual Culture

AbstractThis essay presents an overview of recent work in the area of studies of Shakespeare and visual culture. Aiming to give an indication of the diverse range of approaches that may be adopted in this highly interdisciplinary field, the essay focuses particularly on a recent trend for the analysis of Shakespeare’s engagements with visuality from strongly literary perspectives. This trend has produced some valuable work, with significant implications for our understanding of Shakespeare’s status as a ‘literary’ figure. An emphasis on literariness in Shakespeare’s interactions with visual culture is linked partly to concerns about the status of visual culture in post‐Reformation England. Recent developments in art history and visual studies challenge some of the assumptions about post‐Reformation English visual culture that inform current works on Shakespeare and visual culture. By looking closely at relevant new art‐historical thinking, literary critics may significantly broaden the framework for the exploration of Shakespeare’s works as a part of early modern visual culture.

:Beyond the Yellow Badge: Anti-Judaism and Antisemitism in Medieval and Early Modern Visual Culture. Brill's Series in Jewish Studies 37

:<i>Beyond the Yellow Badge: Anti-Judaism and Antisemitism in Medieval and Early Modern Visual Culture. Brill's Series in Jewish Studies 37</i>

Invisibility Speaks: Servants and Portraits in Early Modern Visual Culture

Invisibility Speaks: Servants and Portraits in Early Modern Visual Culture

Invisibility Speaks: Servants and Portraits in Early Modern Visual Culture

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.