Foreign Tokens: The Blackamoor Brooch
Princess Grace Kelly of Monaco wearing blackamoor heads.
By Guest Contributor Rama Musa
The legendary Vogue editor Diana Vreeland once wrote, “Have I ever showed you my little blackamoor heads from Cartier with their enameled turbans? I’m told it’s not in good taste to wear blackamoors anymore, but I think I’ll revive them.”
A blackamoor head is a bejeweled bust of a dark-skinned African wearing a pseudo-Oriental turban. Italian designers Dolce & Gabbana recently caused a firestorm for featuring blackamoor imagery in their spring 2013 runway collection. Rapper Azealia Banks went on Twitter to boycott the brand. In its defense, D&G claims that the collection is inspired by Moorish imagery on Sicilian majolica ceramics. That’s a plausible rebuttal. The 9th-century Moorish invasion of southern Italy was so cataclysmic that it’s immortalized in Sicilian arts. But, the ornamental use of blacks in European luxury culture has a more complex history.
As early as the 1200s, African servants played a fashionable role in European courts. Rare, exotic, and expensive, their black bodies became synonymous with luxury. In the groundbreaking book, Blacks in Renaissance Europe, various historians note the aristocratic obsession with the African. Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II (1194-1250) so closely associated himself with African servants that a royal pretender in the 1280s kept an entourage of Africans to lend credibility to his fake persona. Marchesa of Mantua Isabella d’Este (1474-1539) went through extraordinary lengths to procure African children as human accessories. Catherine of Austria (1507-1578) showed off the opulence of her cosmopolitan court by gifting enslaved Africans to her family and favorites.
With its pseudo-Oriental clothing and jewelry, the blackamoor is a caricature of the Arab, the black African, and the Muslim. It’s unfortunate that his earrings, an African adornment, became an emblem of enslavement in European culture. In the 20th century elite jewelers such as Cartier, Nardi, and Verdura designed blackamoor brooches. Naturally, a new batch of European elites was again the most insatiable collectors of blackamoors. The visual language of race and representation in these brooches has received little attention.
Alberto Nardi, the third-generation owner of the eponymous Venetian jewelry house, says that his grandfather, Giulio Nardi, was the first to create Venetian blackamoors. In the 1920s the elder jeweler drew inspiration from the Morčić, crudely designed blackamoor jewelry from the Dalmatian coast, a former territory of the Venetian republic, La Serenissima. A spokesperson from the City of Rijeka Office says the jewelry commemorate the 16th-century retreat of Barbary pirates, vassals of the Ottoman Empire who terrorized the Adriatic coast. The Dalmatian blackamoors–dark-skinned with thick lips–appear to be someone’s idea of a black person. Muslims from Iberian Spain enlisted their enslaved Africans to plunder and pluck Christians off the Mediterranean coast. It’s possible that the Barbary pirates did the same.
Nardi also ascribes their brooches to the iconography of Shakespeare’s Othello; a company representative says their brooches embody “a character that at best represents the fusion of the different cultures and artistic influences related to Venice.” The Venetian jeweler insists that the defining characteristic of their blackamoors is that the facial features “does not reproduce [the face] of a Nubian, but more of an Ottoman prince.”
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