Home » category : Architecture, Histoire » article : Blackamoor

Blackamoor

Posté par admin
vendredi 02 septembre 2005 [n° 366]


I have already told how the envoys of the King of Arda, an African prince, gave to the Queen a nice little blackamoor, as a toy and pet. This Moor, aged about ten or twelve years, was only twenty-seven inches in height, and the King of Arda declared that, being quite unique, the boy would never grow to be taller than three feet.

The Queen instantly took a great fancy to this black creature. Sometimes he gambolled about and turned somersaults on her carpet like a kitten, or frolicked about on the bureau, the sofa, and even on the Queen’s lap.

As she passed from one room to another, he used to hold up her train, and delighted to catch hold of it and so make the Queen stop short suddenly, or else to cover his head and face with it, for mischief, to make the courtiers laugh.

He was arrayed in regular African costume, wearing handsome bracelets, armlets, a necklace ablaze with jewels, and a splendid turban. Wishing to show myself agreeable, I gave him a superb aigrette of rubies and diamonds; I was always sorry afterwards that I did so.

The King could never put up with this little dwarf, albeit his features were comely enough. To begin with, he thought him too familiar, and never even answered him when the dwarf dared to address him.

Following the fashion set by her Majesty, all the Court ladies wanted to have little blackamoors to follow them about, set off their white complexions, and hold up their cloaks or their trains. Thus it came that Mignard, Le Bourdon, and other painters of the aristocracy, used to introduce negro boys into all their large portraits. It was a mode, a mania; but so absurd a fashion soon had to disappear after the mishap of which I am about to tell.

The Queen being pregnant, public prayers were offered up for her according to custom, and her Majesty was forever saying: “My pregnancy this time is different from preceding ones. I am a prey to nausea and strange whims; I have never felt like this before. If, for propriety’s sake, I did not restrain myself, I should now dearly like to be turning somersaults on the carpet, like little Osmin. He eats green fruit and raw game; that is what I should like to do, too. I should like to—”

“Oh, madame, you frighten us!” exclaimed the King. “Don’t let all those whimsies trouble you further, or you will give birth to some monstrosity, some freak of nature.” His Majesty was a true prophet. The Queen was delivered of a fine little girl, black as ink from head to foot. They did not tell her this at once, fearing a catastrophe, but persuaded her to go to sleep, saying that the child had been taken away to be christened.

The physicians met in one room, the bishops and chaplains in another. One prelate was opposed to baptising the infant; another only agreed to this upon certain conditions. The majority decided that it should be baptised without the name of father or mother, and such suppression was unanimously advocated.

The little thing, despite its swarthy hue, was most beautifully made; its features bore none of those marks peculiar to people of colour.

It was sent away to the Gisors district to be suckled as a negro’s daughter, and the Gazette de France contained an announcement to the effect that the royal infant had died, after having been baptised by the chaplains.

[This daughter of the Queen lived, and was obliged to enter a Benedictine nunnery at Moret. Her portrait is to be seen in the Sainte Genevieve Library of Henri IV.'s College, where it hangs in the winter saloon.—EDITOR'S NOTE.]

The little African was sent away, as may well be imagined; and the Queen admitted that, one day soon after she was pregnant, he had hidden himself behind a piece of furniture and suddenly jumped out upon her to give her a fright. In this he was but too successful.

The Court ladies no longer dared come near the Queen attended by their little blackamoors. These, however, they kept for a while longer, as if they were mere nick-hacks or ornaments; in Paris they were still to be seen in public. But the ladies’ husbands at last got wind of the tale, when all the little negroes disappeared.

The Memoirs of Madame de Montespan, Complete
by Madame La Marquise De Montespan The Project Gutenberg EBook

__________________

blackamoor, Negro, Negroid
a person with dark skin who comes from Africa (or whose ancestors came from Africa)

Heraldic

“the coat of arms of the blackamoor which proliferated in both the private and civic European escutcheons (coat of arms) throughout the 13th, 14th and 15th centuries.”

Carved wooden figures like this were often placed at shop entrances to show what products were available inside. The ‘Blackamoor’ represented the Caribbean region where tobacco was first discovered.

“There are a number of distinct types of standard real-world heraldic charges which represent non-Caucasian people. Standard real-world human charges include the Saracen, the Blackamoor, the Turk, and the Moor. There is some confusion in the definition of the real-world non-Caucasian human charges. For example, Brooke-Little’s An Heraldic Alphabet distinguishes between the Negroid Blackamoor and the Semitic Moor, but Woodward’s A Treatise on Heraldry, British and Foreign indicates that the Moor is Negroid, and only draws the Saracen with Semitic features. What types of humans should the SCA consider to be distinct types of humans ?”

Laurel Letter of Pends and Discussion: August 31, 2002

Arts

Jan Mostaert (about 1475 – about 1556), Portrait of an African man The Rijksmuseum Amsterdam

French 18th C Bronze & Ormolu Blackamoor Candelabra

Boucher Blackamoor with Turban Pin

Blackamoors

Beauty and the Beast : Images of Whiteness and Blackness. From Jonson’s The Masque of Blackness (1605) to Richard Brome’s The English Moor or The Mock-Marriage (1637)

SIGILLUM SECRETUM (Secret Seal)

On the image of the Blackamoor in European Heraldry (a preliminary proposal for an iconographical study) by Mario de Valdes y Cocom

Black Images During the Middle Ages

Pushkin’s ancestor : Blackamoor of Peter the Great

Alexander Pushkin (1799-1837) kept a “blackamoor” figure on his desk to remind him of his great-grandfather, Abram Hannibal, an Abyssinian prince who served under Peter the Great. 1

Pushkin wrote :

“The appearance of Ibrahim, his figure, education and natural intelligence aroused general interest in Paris. All the ladies wanted to see and introduce in their homes “le Negre du czar“… many a time the regent invited him for… supper…” 2

This is preceded by the verses:

“Tempus fortuné, marqué par la licence,
Où la folie, agitant son grelot,
D’un pied léger parcourt toote la France,
Où nul mortel ne daigne être dévot,
Où l’on fait tout excepté pénitence“.

WITH KOVALEVSKAYA AND PUSHKIN AT THE END OF THE ROAD, or two centuries after Katica (Stevanovi?) Hedrih, Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, Niš, Yugoslavia

In Petrouchka Columbine cares nothing for Pétrouchka’s sentiments. She is capricious and vain, attracted by the gaudy clothes, braids and brass buttons of the Blackamoor.

___________________

Alessandro Bonvicino, known as Moretto da Brescia (ca. 1490–1554)

MORETTO, IL ( The Blackamoor, a term which has not been particularly accounted for), the name currently bestowed upon ALESSANDRO BONVICINO (1498-1554), A celebrated painter of Brescia, Venetian school


  1. The rise and fall of Hanibal T. J. Binyon ABRAHAM HANIBAL. L’Aieul noir de Pouchkine. By Dieudonne Gnammankou. 251pp. Paris: Presence Africaine. ISBN – 2 7087 0609 8 [back]
  2. Blackamoor of Peter the Great” (A. S. Pushkin: “Sobranie so?injenij v šesti tomah“, Vol. 5, published by Pravda, Moscow, 1969, p. 7) [back]
Architecture, Histoire

Si vous avez apprécié cet article, s'il vous plait, prenez le temps de laisser un commentaire ou de souscrire au flux afin de recevoir les futurs articles directement dans votre lecteur de flux.

Commentaires

Pas encore de commentaire.

Laisser un commentaire

(requis)

(requis)




Navigation : Home » Architecture, Histoire » Blog article: Blackamoor