Black History Month with Rosy Akalawu-Ellman

Intriguing online lecture from the National Gallery examining the presence or lack of presence of Black figures in two Titian paintings.

The talk was given by Rosy Akalawu-Ellman, an artists and student who had started he BA a few days before. She had been on the gallery’s Articulations scheme to encourage public speaking skills to young people. She talked about Black History Month and some of the problems she thinks it raises in that it can concentrate on suffering and liberation and put Black people in a white context and she discussed some of the philosophers being this.

For me the more interesting section of the talk looked at the Black figure to the far righthand side of Titian’s “Diana and Actaeon”. Is she a maid or an allegorical figure? Why is she the only clothes female in the work? She talked about the trend for Black models across Europe but particularly in cosmopolitan Venice.

She then looked at “Perseus and Andromeda”, in the same series of paintings for Philip II, and the anachronism that Andromeda was described as an Ethiopian princess  and yet she is shown as white in the painting. She talked about how it was not only Titan who did this and how the Queen of Sheba often had a similar fate in art. 

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