4 - Appropriating Black Africa

Summary

White western art history started before the first century with the Greeks, who carved statues, laid mosaics, and constructed monuments and temples with a high degree of artistic skill. Hellenic art has a character of balance and symmetry, often following the golden ratio and producing realistic portraits of humans. Greek art and ideas about beauty set the standards for what white philosophers and scholars would call the rules of aesthetics. Art for the Greeks celebrated gods and goddesses, public figures, and the good life. However, poor and enslaved people could only interact with public works; the wealthy collected art to decorate their homes and give them status. The Romans copied Greek forms, myths and art, spreading them throughout Europe as they moved their Empire north.

The next movement in white western art is Celtic and Norse art in the early first century. This artwork is highly stylised and figurative, incorporates language elements and does have realistic figures. As with much Greek and Roman art, Celtic art often had ritual significance and reflected the people’s cosmology. Not much changed in white western art until the end of the medieval period. The 1400s began the European Renaissance, Enlightenment, industrialisation, and the formation of ideas about art and aesthetics. This is also the start of the white European Colonisation of Black Africa.

At the start of the European Renaissance, artwork imitated nature as closely as possible. The Renaissance was an era when painting became a popular artistic medium when sculpture and three-dimensional objects held primacy before. The Belgium Jan van Eyck popularised realistic oil painting in Northern Europe, which the southern Italians like Benini picked up. The subject matter of white European art during colonisation consisted of Christian stories and portraits of wealthy nobles who could afford to hire a painter. Art had been used by the Catholic church previous to this to illustrate the bible for the illiterate masses; the church-sponsored various skilled artists to create monuments to god, Jesus and the saints, so artists painted what the Catholic church desired. White western art from this time still relies on Hellenic notions of beauty and proportion but is focused on capturing life in the artwork. We see the first concern for the accuracy of representation, which is influenced by science, during this period, as scientists used illustrations for Enlightenment classification projects before photography existed.