| This thesis explores various methods of visual representation used to portray non-white Others by white European artists throughout the Age of Discovery and the dawn of colonialism. There are three major phases of visual representation of Others in European Renaissance and Baroque art. These will be examined and compared to suggest a visual manifestation of the shifting ideas of race throughout these centuries. The representation of black Africans in Europe and the New World, the court commissioned paintings of Albert Eckhout in Dutch Brazil, and lastly, the development of the casta genre in New Spain will be investigated in connection with a changing perception of race. When explored as a group, these representations of Others offer insight into the contemporary racial mindset and expand upon the understanding of the development of established races based on physical appearance in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. By following the introduction of the black African into the works of Renaissance painters, over the bridge of Albert Eckhout's titillating Baroque works recording supposed ethnographic realities in Dutch Brazil, and ending in colonial Mexico with casta paintings, one can see European racial concepts forming, morphing, and leading to an almost explicitly visual understanding of race. |
