How Black Women Were Whitewashed by Art [View all]

Clash of the Titans was one of the most popular films of 1981. Its glittering retinue of Hollywood stars told the story of Perseus, the demigod from Greek mythology who kills a sea monster and saves the beautiful princess Andromeda from being said monster’s lunch. Such was the film’s popularity that it was remade in 2010; the film managed a rather disparaging 26% on the Rotten Tomatoes site. How many of those rating the film had a classical education is unclear, but perhaps it would have performed better had its producers done their research. As according to British art historian Elizabeth McGrath’s 1992 article The Black Andromeda, Andromeda was, indeed, originally depicted as a black princess from Ethiopia.

Anyone who watched either of the two Clash of the Titans films will know that Judi Bowker and Alexa Devalos are both white women, and anyone who has seen Andromeda in a painting – perhaps Titian’s or Poynter’s – will believe she is white too. But McGrath’s article was definitive in addressing three things: that all the Greek mythographers placed Andromeda as a princess of Ethiopia, that Ovid specifically refers to her dark skin and that artists throughout Western art history frequently omitted to depict her blackness because Andromeda was supposed to be beautiful, and blackness and beauty – for many of them – was dichotomous. There is no doubt about Andromena’s race, according to Professor McGrath.

Yet Renaissance art repeatedly depicts Andromeda as white. In Piero di Cosimo’s Perseus Freeing Andromeda from the 1510s she is actually whiter than all the figures around her, including a black musician and her parents, who are considerably darker and in exotic costume. We do know that there was active debate about her skin colour, a debate that would certainly seem racist to modern eyes. McGrath references Francisco Pacheco, a Spanish artist and writer, who asks in one passage of his book Arte de la Pintura why Andromeda is so often painted as white-skinned when several of the sources say she is black.

“He obviously got a terrible shock that Ovid could be talking about a woman as beautiful but black,” McGrath tells BBC Culture, almost three decades after the publication of her article. Books such as Pacheco’s were used as reference guides for painters on how to paint who and what – so it’s easy to see how his views could have spread. Black Andromedas were few and far between – and images like Bernard Picart’s print of Perseus (1731) and Andromeda by Abraham van Diepenbeeck (1655) appear to show a woman with stereotypical white features and hair, but with dark skin.



http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20190114-how-black-women-were-whitewashed-by-art