1500 - 1700

“Titian’s portrait of Laura Dianti, a lover of Alfonso I d’Este, Duke of Ferrara, is evidently the first painting to show a person of high rank accompanied by a Black attendant, in this case a small boy. Subsequently male portraits of the nobility often show Black pages who accompanied them into battle. The tradition of such portraits will continue until the late eighteenth century, being revived by Sir Joshua Reynolds. Source: Titian. Laura de Dianti. 1520-25. Oil on canvas. Kreuzlingen, Kisters Collection.

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“1537 Pope Paul III issues the papal bull Sublimis Deus, which declares that Amerindians are rational beings and forbids their enslavement. Africans do not benefit from the edict. Source: Albert Eckhout. Tupi native. 1643. Oil on canvas. Copenhagen, National Museum of Denmark.
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“Debate at the Council of Valladolid (Spain) pertaining to military expansion in the Americas, as well as the forced conversion and enslavement of Amerindians. Juan Giéns de Sepulveda argues, relying on Aristotelian ideas of natural slavery, that Amerindians are inherently inferior to Spaniards and therefore their subjugation is necessary. Bartolomeo de las Casas argues in defense of Amerindian rights to self-governance and self-determination without Spanish intervention, as well as peaceful rather than forced conversion. Source: Codex Magliabechiano.

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“First publication of Leo Africanus’s Discovery of Africa, an account of his travels in sub-Saharan Africa undertaken thirty years earlier, during the 1520s. It is soon translated into several European languages and often reprinted. He provides new information on the Nile River, and his account of the fabled city of Timbuktu in Mali describes a brisk trade in gold, cloth, books, and Black slaves. Source: Woodcut map of Africa from Leo Africanus, Historiale description de l’Afrique, 1556.
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“The term race, used to mean a group of people descended from a common root, enters into the English language from the Old French räiz or räis, which originally referred to families with royal blood. Source: Lineage of Ham. Black Dathan as last descendant of Ham. From Hartmann Schedel, Liber Chronicarum (Nuremberg: Anton Koberger, 1493).
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“Sir John Hawkins initiates British involvement in the slave trade with three expeditions to Africa. Source: The coat of arms of John Hawkins (1532-1595 CE).
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“First edition of the French historian and political theorist Jean Bodin’s Method for the Easy Comprehension of History, in which he rejects the theory of the multiple origins of humans. He develops a rudimentary sense of the geographical distribution of the world’s people, based solely on skin color and climate theory. Source: Andreas Cellarius,1660.
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“Giordano Bruno, Italian priest, philosopher, and savant, rejects the biblical monogenist position of universal human descent from Adam. In his opinion, Jews and Ethiopians could not share the same ancestor. The consideration of differences in skin color and geography leads to his proposal of separate Adams or pre-Adamite forebears of the races, which will later be adopted by eighteenth-and nineteenth-century polygenists, often with a toxic racist agenda. Source: Alexander Winchell. Preadamites; Or, A Demonstration of the Existence of Men Before Adam, 1888.
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“Jean Riolan the Younger, anatomist and professor of medicine at the Faculte de Medecine of Paris, performs one of the first recorded vivisections of a black body. His observations lead him to reject the notion that dark humors within the body cause the skin’s darkness, instead attributing this quality to the heat of the tropical sun and therefore aligning himself with such ancient Greek writers as Homer and, above all, Herodotus. Source: Dissected torso of a black man. From Joseph Maclise, Surgical Anatomy (London, 1851). Hand-colored lithograph.
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“In August 1619, a year before the Puritan settlers arrived in Plymouth, an English privateer named The White Lion brought the first enslaved Africans to Virginia. The captives were sold as indentured servants. Source: Cultivating and curing tobacco. 1686. Engraving. ”

“Sir Thomas Browne, the English physician, polymath, and encyclopedist, publishes his Pseudodoxia Epidemica, or Enquiries into vulgar and common errors, in which he discusses the origin of black skin. Browne refutes several explanations: environmental factors, the effect of maternal impression, and the Curse of Ham. Instead, he argues that black skin is inherited and transmitted from generation to generation through sperm, which he asserts becomes “dealbinized” by an as yet undefined internal generative process. Source: Portrait of Sir Thomas Browne, attributed to John Carlile, c. 1650.
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“Robert Boyle, the famed Anglo-Irish natural philosopher and a pioneer of modern chemistry, proposes in Experiments and Considerations Touching Colors that the origin of blackness is “some peculiar and seminal impression,” thus rejecting the idea that differences in climate alone determines blackness. Source: Engraving, 1680.
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“The Italian anatomist Marcello Malpighi dissects a sample of black skin and demonstrates that the African epidermis is as light as that of a European and that the source of blackness is confined to a thin, netlike stratum covering the true skin, or dermis. Malpighi’s identification of this anatomical structure, known as the rete mucosum or Malpighian layer, ushers in a new era in the scientific community’s attempt to define the origin of blackness. It soon becomes a major topic of scholarly discussion, though the source and nature of the coloring agent remains the subject of heated debate. Source: Albinus, Bernhard Siegfried. “Second dissertation on the origin and causes of the color of Africans and other men.” Mezzoprint, 1737). ”

“Foundation of the Royal African Company, an English trading company by the royal family and City of London to trade on the west coast of Africa. It is led by the Duke of York, King Charles II’s brother, later King James II. Source: Charter granted by Charles II to the Royal African Company, London, 24 Sept 1672. London, National Archives.

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“Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, an amateur naturalist and designer-maker of microscopes, examines African skin under a microscope and affirms that blackness did not come from the blood, but from scales in the deeper tissues of the skin. Among anatomists, his views are perhaps the least less trenchant since he avoids asserting thatthere are any essential differences between whites and Blacks. Source: Antonie van Leeuwenhoek. 1686. Mezzotint.

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“In an important article published in the Journal des savants, the physician, philosopher, and travel writer François Bernier puts forward the first real proto-racial classification of humankind. The title is “New Division of the Earth by the Different Species or Races of Man that Inhabit It.” Bernier, who initially hesitates about how to class Amerindians, ultimately divides humankind into four distinct categories. Source: “Négresse du Congo,” Jacques Grasset de Saint-Sauveur, Costumes de Differents Pays. Ca. 1797.
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“Louis XIV signs an ordonnance that will soon be called the Code Noir. This document, which is distributed to France’s overseas colonies, formalizes the institution of slavery in French colonies by declaring that African slaves are property. Source: Horse- and water-powered sugar mills, French West Indies.
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“John Ray, a priest and biologist whose work is an important precursor to Linnaeus, works out the earliest comprehensive taxonomic system for many parts of the natural world, primarily plants, fish, and insects (in part by making use of the new expression species). Source: John Ray. Synopsis methodica stirpium Britannicarum, 1724.
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