1966: I, JUAN DE PAREJA by Elizabeth Borton de Treviño
I, Juan de Pareja, was born into slavery early in the seventeenth century.
So there’s this thing from about two years ago where a painting got stolen from the law school at the Catholic University of America. You probably have some educated guesses as to where this story is going, but to start, here’s the actual artwork:
So now you have some very educated guesses as to where this story is going. That icon, titled “Mama” and created by St. Louis-based artist Kelly Latimore, obviously exists within the tradition of Pieta art, depicting Mary mourning over the body of the crucified and dead Jesus. Obviously, both Jesus and Mary in this work are Black. You’ve probably already guessed who reacted to this (racist people) and how they reacted to it (racistly). Latimore made the icon in 2020, and the depiction of Jesus bears more than a passing resemblance to George Floyd; and if you were, say a writer at right-wing blog The Daily Signal, I suppose I could imagine you seeing “image of dead Black man” and immediately jumping to “that must be George Floyd”. Which is what happened, and then The Daily Signal ran their story, and then other media picked it up, and then people started a petition to tell CUA to remove the icon, and then other people started a petition to tell CUA to keep the icon, and then Latimore started getting death threats, and then the student government passed a resolution asking the law school to replace the icon with “other forms of art that represent diversity and bring forth representation of the African American community in a non-political and uncontroversial way, and then and then and then all of the other stuff happened that normally happens in situations like this, and eventually someone just up and stole the painting off of the wall. So the law school hung up another copy, and then that got stolen too.
Now, Latimore - I happen to have a print of his up in my home1 - is not an idiot. He knows how to talk about his faith and his work intelligently, and, when asked about the reasons behind why he created this work, said this:
"[The icon of] a Black mother and a son who was unjustly murdered by the state [depicts the] nature of the personhood of Christ. I believe Christ is in that image, just as much as it would be in 'normal' pietà — the European version of Christ. In Matthew's Gospel, Jesus asks us to find him in all people, especially those who suffer as George Floyd did…Are you looking for Christ among you? Walk around your neighborhood and you'll find him. In America, especially with images of Christ, we're really looking too small. We're not paying attention to what's around us."
Latimore is correct, in the sense that I agree with his approach to religious art, and he’s also correct in a more literal way: people really do hate depictions of Black Jesus. There’s even a reference in one of those stories to a different controversy that happened around the same time (in this case, late 2020) at the Vatican, when a Vatican official tweeted out a different depiction of the Pieta with the body of a Nigerian refugee in the place of Jesus’ body, sending conservative Catholic media into a tizzy over what must have been an obvious Vatican endorsement of those anti-Catholic thugs in Black Lives Matter and Antifa, two organizations that the Vatican has clearly been aligning itself with, which is why the Vatican definitely deliberately profaned a famous artwork and decided to politicize the body of Christ, a series of words that definitely all make sense and correctly reflect reality.
Look, people are stupid, and that goes double for people who claim to speak for the Catholic church. You come to me and say “there’s a painting of a Black Jesus at a Catholic law school”, I could have easily predicted every single one of these beats, and you probably could have too. But there’s an interesting question here, one that Latimore is getting at, and one which certain right-wing idiots are loudly shouting their response to, one which different people have put together different answers for in different eras, and one which is the topic of the 1966 Newbery medalist: who is worthy of being depicted in our art?
Juan de Pareja was a real person, although his Newbery-winning “autobiography” by Elizabeth Borton de Treviño is fiction extrapolated from a few scraps of correspondence and details from seventeenth-century Spanish portraits; this is, maybe, why the pacing of the book is kind of weird with lengthy and unpredictable time jumps peppered in to the narrator’s life. What we know for sure is that de Pareja was a slave, and eventually owned by the famous Diego Velazquez. That covers most of what we know for sure about de Pareja, although we certainly know a lot about Velazquez, one of the most famous artists in Spanish history and the official court painter for King Philip IV. We know that de Pareja worked as Velazquez’s assistant at court, grinding colors and stretching canvasses across frames, and we know that de Pareja dreamed of being a painter as well; we know this last bit because Velazquez eventually gave de Pareja his manumission papers and de Pareja went on to become a painter; his most famous work is on display at the Museo del Prado in Madrid.
But the most famous painting associated with de Pareja is not one he did, but one he sat for, because Velazquez once painted his portrait, while de Pareja was still enslaved. Here is that portrait:
Of course, if you want to see the real thing in person, you can go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (or, I suppose, run away from home, live there, and scavenge coins from the fountain to pay for your lunches), because they purchased the painting in 1971 and still display it today. It happens to be the first painting that ever sold for over a million pounds, which looks like it would have been worth $5.5 million in real money back in 1971. It is also, notably, the first portrait ever made of an African slave in Spain. Most people didn't make portraits of slaves. They didn't see slaves as human beings worthy of having their portraits painted. It's how that era answered the question of who was worthy to be depicted in art. Velazquez chose to answer it differently, and when he chose to debut his painting at a show at the Pantheon in Rome, it was a huge success immediately.
Velazquez was not a prolific writer or speaker; one of the only quotes we can reliably attribute to him is “I would rather be first in painting something ugly than second in painting beauty”. Taken out of context, that sounds like an insult to de Pareja, but he was speaking more generally, and it’s really not what he meant at all; as the author put it in her afterword, “Velazquez was a man who loved truth, loved to paint it, and did not flatter himself that he could improve it.” The true art was what - and who - was in front of us. The slave deserved a portrait as much as the king or the Pope.
In one notable passage from the novel, de Pareja is teaching himself to paint behind his owner’s back, as slaves in Spain were banned from learning how to practice any of the arts. Not only were they never depicted in art, they weren’t allowed to make their own; the Spanish government tried - obviously unsuccessfully - to seal off the world of art from their chattel. But de Pareja is working on this painting of the Virgin Mary, and shocks himself with how it comes together:
“A few days later I began to paint the face…As I painted, working up the colors on the bit of broken porcelain I used for a palette, some changes began to take place. My hand made those changes while my eyes watched in wonder, as if I had no control over myself at all. The face of the Virgin I was painting became subtly darker, the features softer and more round. The face was becoming that of a girl of my own race, the eyes enormous, velvety black, faintly showing the sparkling white around them, the nose broad with sensitive, flaring nostrils, the lips fleshy, with deep corners. The hair, where it showed beneath the hood of her cloak, was black, tightly curling. I had painted a Negro madonna. At first I was satisfied, even happy with my painting. Then I felt sorrow, for it seemed as if some devil had guided my hand and that I had painted Our Lady as a Negro maid in order to exalt myself and to protest that my race was the chosen one. I put my head into my hands and wept. Then I thought, Could it be that an angel had guided me to paint in this manner so as to make me realize fully how wrong it was to try secretly to put myself on the same plane as Master, to show him that I could be as good as he was, could paint as well, could reveal my race in beauty, just as he showed the dignity, the pride of the Spaniard? I was all confused and I did not know what to do, and so I wept and suffered great torment of soul.”
This was really a remarkable passage to read, for two reasons. The first is how de Treviño spells out de Pareja’s ingrained sense of shame from a lifetime of being treated like property, a shame so deep that when de Pareja paints an icon of a Black Mary, his first explanation is that the devil made him do it, and his second explanation is that an angel made him do it but out of spite. But the second reason is that this passage, obviously, is what reminded me of the stupid theft of that painting at CUA’s law school, and I know that this is the same lesson that I learn with every single Newbery medalist that I read, but none of this is new. Controversy over a portrait of a Black man in a religious icon is not new. The CUA painting isn't new, Black Madonnas have existed for centuries. There's one in my parish and I took a picture of it while chasing my daughter around during Mass:
The annoying conservative CUA students were not victims of some new insidious evil, they were looking at a kind of painting that has existed for centuries. And as for the argument that we need to look at the people around us if we really want to see the divine, the argument that Latimore was making when his painting was stolen and he was getting death threats? As you have probably already guessed, that wasn’t a new argument or a new answer, because nobody in the controversy was asking a new question. That’s in the book, too: eventually, de Pareja shows the painting to one of his close friends and confidants, who is stunned by de Pareja’s skill. When de Pareja asks him “do you think it was a mistake to paint Our Lady as a Negro girl?”, the friend responds:
“How so? Our Lord appears in many forms to loving Christian souls. As a child, as an old man, sometimes even as a leper. And Our Lady can reveal herself within the body of a child, of an Italian girl, a Spanish maid, or a young woman of the black race. Her tenderness, her gentleness, her sanctity can shine through whatever vessel she chooses to house her spirit for a time. And…the gentle women of your race, Juan, have a beauty Our Lady would never scorn.”
Especially with images of Christ, or of any holy person, we're really looking too small. We're not paying attention to what's around us. Someday we’ll learn that, I hope.
Newburied is a series by Tony Ginocchio on the history of the Newbery Medal and a whole bunch of other stuff related to it. You can subscribe via Substack to get future installments sent to your inbox directly. The next installment will cover the 2011 medalist, Moon Over Manifest by Clare Vanderpool.