Thread by @medievalpoc

How about today we do a thread about Facebook Memes, the Sudarium and Saint Veronica, what medieval Europeans thought Jesus looked like, why 19th century Europeans decided to that earlier depiction of Jesus as dark skinned were a problem, and how they decided to explain it away?

Preemptively, I'll tell you I used to have a pinned tweet: “I am not a biblical race-prover”. This discussion pertains to depictions of biblical figures in visual culture & literature, how they vary with region and the passage of time, & sociopolitical reasons for those changes.

The story of Saint Veronica is basically that she offered her veil to wipe the face of Jesus as he made his procession carrying the cross. Miraculously, an image of his face was transferred to the cloth without pigment or paint. "Veronica" means "True Icon."

There's quite a bit of art that shows this miraculous image of the face of christ as unambiguously dark-skinned. This one's from Brussels KBR ms. IV 1293 (c. 1425-50) f. 132v.
heritage-kbf.be/collection/van…

This one is also from the 1400s, but is a larger scale painting on a wood panel, once part of a bigger altarpiece
Robert Campin of Flémalle
St Veronica
Netherlandish (c. 1410)
Oil on wood, 151.5 x 61 cm
Städelsches Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt
wga.hu/frames-e.html?…

The motif is pretty consistent, although in these, the face is larger-than-life:
Saint Veronica with the Sudarium (Veil of Veronica), and (possible copy?)
Germany (c. 1420)
Panel Covered With Canvas, 78.1 x 48.2 cm.
wga.hu/frames-e.html?…

^^ those, I'm not 100% sure if it's two different photos of the same work, or an original and a copy (although I'm leaning towards "different photos, same work" which is why I just posted them together)

As far as I've been able to ascertain, this particular depiction stayed pretty consistent for hundreds of years, based on copies of older copies that claim to go back to either Saint Luke or the original veil: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veil_of_V…

So, in addition to physical artworks, you also had a lot of people *writing* about the artworks, and writing ideas of what they believed Jesus would have looked like. Christian Mystics like Julian of Norwich consistently described visions of Christ as brown-skinned, w/ black eyes

Not that there isn't wiggle room for interpretation in the text, especially if someone's coming to it with a bellyful of needing to justify or explain away anything that doesn't associate Jesus explicitly with our concept of whiteness.

I also have read accounts from that time that mention *as an aside* that it could be known that the Mother of God was brown, because it was a given that Jesus is brown- or dark-skinned and the child would take after the mother.
academia.edu/14483862/From_…

I'd also encourage people to read that paper with a grain of salt, as it constantly demands from its subject matter a level of specificity or explicitness that wouldn't have existed in its own context: publicmedievalist.com/medieval-peopl…

Here's the thing. All of the modern writing about the works I've posted, and honestly any works from Europe positively depicting people who aren't white, are filtered through centuries of writers on art history who were in the process of inventing pervasive, structural racism.

Here's an example from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's aesthetic criticism, as quoted by Monique Scheer
felixonline.co.uk/articles/2014-…
and
academia.edu/14483862/From_…

The attempt to actively erase or dismiss any artwork, cultural accomplishments, academic achievements or aesthetic value of any person or society unconnected to whiteness isn't just an "idea". You can look it, up, point it out.

Here's a direct quote from Immanuel Kant, you know. That guy revered in every History of Modern Philosophy undergrad course?
(The Oxford Handbook of Culture and Psychology edited by Jaan Valsiner; page 562)
books.google.com/books?id=Dh5pA…

Oh, and here's the quote from Hume Kant is talking about in the previous tweet:

And if you think that these 18th and 19th century writers somehow influence modernity in every way EXCEPT their racism, you're absolutely wrong. Erasing the overt slurs and pretending everything else is probably fine only preserves racism and passes it on to the next generation.

This is from Oxford University's "Academic Insights for the Thinking World", from *2015*, in regard to both medieval depictions of the Veil of veronica AND Julian of Norwich's descriptions; virtually indistinguishable from von Goethe's assessment: blog.oup.com/2015/06/jesus-…

Not only did colonial Europeans burn the histories and steal the artwork of entire nations, and then claim they never had any art or culture to begin with; they felt compelled to retcon whiteness onto THEIR OWN art history to suit their own economic & political agendas.

But the worst part is that THEY NEVER STOPPED.
That's 200+ years' worth of perfectly preserved "aesthetic disappointment" over medieval European artworks depicting Jesus (and famously, the Holy Mother) as brown/dark-skinned.

So, to finally conclude this, I'm once again talking about *depictions* of people and how they looked in the popular cultural consciousness. It's about art and historiography, and the purposes they are both used for, socially and politically.

P.S. since I know a lot of people are conditioned to "not notice"; there's Black man in the procession in the painting from that Facebook meme, which I can say no one on FB noticed:
Biagio d’Antonio
Le Portement de Croix
Italy (c. 1480-1520)
Musee de Louvre, Paris, France