The black andromeda.pdf - camberwellmastudents

4 ELIZABETH McGRATH
Heliodorus's story is a chaste response to divine bidding-as a cheerful and colour-
ful romp, something that both artist and patron doubtless found appropriate for
the 'exotic' Moorish couple. There was much interest in exotica at the court of
Christian IV, on the part of Van Mander himself among others, and this is reflected
in the paintings of the Ethiopian romance, both in their general theme and in par-
ticular details. The sumptuous turban with hoopoe feathers, for example, which
Hydapses wears in the recognition scene (P1. la) and which he has evidently put
aside before embracing his wife in the painting of the conception (P1. 2a) virtually
replicates that in a portrait by Van Mander of a black man in fancy dress.17 Significantly,
Chariclea herself is in the cycle a model of decorum, something which is
perhaps to be credited, along with her skin-colour, to the influence of the painted
Andromeda, whom Van Mander depicted in accordance with a familiar late sixteenth-century
formula best exemplifed in the elegant engraving by Goltzius (P1.
Ic).18 It would surely have been a surprise to the artist to learn of Ovid's characterization
of Andromeda as black. It certainly surprised his Spanish contemporary,
Pacheco, who first encountered the idea not in Ovid himself but in Petrarch,
one of the ancient poet's more perceptive readers.
Pacheco's Arte de la pintura, completed by 1638 but not published until 1649,
five years after his death, makes much of the care and research this scrupulous artist
devoted to getting iconographic matters correct. He was principally concerned with
religious orthodoxy and gave over an extensive appendix, the Adiciones a algunas
imdgenes, to detailed recommendations on the correct way to represent specific
themes involving Christ, the Virgin and the saints; but he occasionally mentions in
the body of the text examples of artists' misrepresentations of secular subjects, il-
lustrating thereby the need for the painter 'to broaden his horizons of knowledge'
('acrecentar su opini6n'), if necessary by appealing to learned men.19 It is in this
context that he brings up the colour of Andromeda. Three lines of Petrarch
(Trionfi, ii, 142-44) had alerted him to the problem. In the first chapter of the
Triumph of Love he read:
Perseo era l'uno; et volli saper come
Andromeda gli piaque in Etiopia,
vergine bruna, i begli occhi et le chiome.
(Perseus was one and I wanted to know
how it was that in Ethiopia the dark-skinned
maiden Andromeda
attracted him with her fine eyes and hair.)
'Accordingly,' he writes,
I took the opportunity to consult Francisco de Rioja, who was such a great scholar, and he
produced a sheet with the following observations:
'Andromeda who, according to Apollodorus, was the daughter of Cepheus and Cassiopeia,
17 As Munk points out (as in n. 5, p. 91), where this
portrait is illustrated (fig. 5), the man serves as a kind of
living 'rarity': his pole hammer is Turkish and his sword
Japanese; see generally Munk, pp. 89-91, on the collecting
of rarities at the court.
18 A. Bartsch, Le peintre-graveur, edn Leipzig 1854-70,
iii, p. 47, no. 156.
19 On Pacheco see notably J. Brown, Images and Ideas
in Seventeenth-Century Spanish Art, Princeton, N. J. 1978,
pp. 33-34, 44-62.