“Flesh Color” and Race Making in Early Modern Painters’ Manuals

Ruilin Fan
Spring 2023
HIST GU4962: Making and Knowing in Early Modern Europe: Hands-On History

BnF Ms. Fr. 640 contains a number of recipes for making pigments and paints. Among them, the author-practitioner is especially interested in “flesh color (carnation),” providing 18 entries that mention this category of colors. It is evident from the diverse instructions contained in these recipes that flesh color is not a singular skin tone but refers to a range of colors that may represent various human complexions. This essay is concerned with the ways in which the concept of “flesh color” engaged with the understandings of race and ethnicity in the author-practitioner’s early modern Toulouse, at a time when European colonial enterprises continued to expand in the Atlantic world.

Dark skinned Afro-diasporic people, both enslaved and free, lived in early modern France. Theater scholar Noémie Ndiaye, who studies the portrayal of people of African ancestry in early modern European drama, notes that historians tend to begin their narrative in the late seventeenth century when studying the history of race in France, because “hard” archival evidence became available only in 1685, when the French state began to systematically implement social control over people of African descent. The lack of official data, however, does not imply that an African diaspora did not exist before this date.¹ Scholars such as Imitiaz Habib have done tremendous work to comb through the English archives and unearth traces of Black life on the British isles.² Though no comparable work has been done on materials in French, France, like England, also maintained connections with Spain and Portugal, two early slave-trading nations that cemented the practice of race-based slavery in the Atlantic world.³ The city of the author-practitioner’s residence, Toulouse, had a particularly strong tie with the Iberian peninsula, given its access to river systems that allowed entry into the Atlantic.⁴ Spanish merchants living in Toulouse traded in fibers, dyes, and spices.⁵ Insofar as Iberian expatriates brought enslaved servants to England and to the low countries–other European nations that had no legal sanction for slavery on paper⁶–it is conceivable that Spanish merchants in Toulouse did the same. Early modern Toulouse was almost certainly home to Afro-diasporic communities.

Making race

Critical race theorists have demonstrated that cultural productions, including the fine arts, shape racial ideologies. The concept of race is malleable and can be molded into new shapes by contemporary political and economic contexts in service of power. As Ndiaye has written, “racial paradigms are … perpetually ready for reactivity as needed, simultaneously past, present, and future.”⁷ While the concept of race denoted rank, blood, and religion in earlier periods, the sixteenth and seventeenth century saw the solidification of phenotypic traits, such as dark skin, as the primary marker of difference. We find evidence of this evolution in art. Art historian Joaneath Spicer provides a general timeline for the depiction of Africans in European art in early modernity. European artists in the 1500s produced a number of realistic, sympathetic, and humanistic depictions of African subjects, but in the 1600s dark skinned figures were increasingly portrayed as savage, servile, and objectified, in tandem with the growth of the slave trade.⁸ Literary scholar Kim F. Hall observes that the “‘black skin’ of both male and female attendants” in the fine arts became “a key signifier… associated with wealth and luxury” in the seventeenth century.⁹ Earlier images of African kings, diplomats, and religious figures thus gave way to objectifying representations of Black African servants, likened to other exotic commodities obtained through overseas ventures. The fine arts actively contributed to the development of color-based racial prejudice in early modernity.

Artists’ manuals contemporary to BnF Ms. Fr. 640 provide additional context for understanding the ways in which early modern Europeans attached significance to human skin color. According to these texts, various factors can affect how a painter chooses to depict skin: the subject’s gender, age, and class; whether the person is healthy, ill, or dead; the light conditions in which the painter worked, etc.¹⁰ As Cleo Nisse notes, the author-practitioner took special care to record different instructions for depicting the shadow on the skin of male and female subjects.¹¹ This is in line with other treatises of the period. Italian painter Cennino Cennini (c.1370-before 1427) wrote in The Craftsman’s Handbook that “the handsome man must be swarthy, and the woman fair.”¹² Furthermore, Cennini recommends using the egg of “country or farm hens … for tempering flesh colors of aged and swarthy persons,” because their yolks are redder than “town hen’s egg[s].”¹³ A later Italian painter, Gian Paolo Lomazzo (1538-1592), similarly wrote in his Trattato dell’arte della pittura, scoltura et architettura (1584) that “colors which tend toward darkness and without bright vivacity” are suitable for “the old, philosophers, the poor, melancholics, and those who are serious.”¹⁴ Finally, Ann-Sophie Lehmann’s extensive research demonstrates that German and Dutch sources also display similar concerns about differentiating skin colors on the basis of the subject’s gender, age, and social station.¹⁵ Evidently, art writing throughout Western Europe largely agreed on the criteria an artist should consider when preparing the hue for a human figure’s flesh color.

In what ways do these flesh color recipes provide a snapshot of the race-making work accomplished by painters in early modern Europe? Why did the author-practitioner, Cennino Cennini and others neglect to cite geographic origin and ancestry as categories of consideration for preparing appropriate flesh colors? Two distinct possibilities emerge. First, the authors may have seen people of African descent as on the margins of or even outside of the realm of humanity, and the methods for portraying their skin tones, therefore, cannot be generalized under the umbrella term “flesh color.” On several occasions, Cennino Cennini excludes certain classes of people from his instructions on depicting human figures because one can “never discover any system of proportion” among the marginalized classes.¹⁶ He refuses to give instructions on the proportion of women, since he believes that they, unlike men, have no “set proportion.”¹⁷ In another section Cennini limits his instructions on the hues of “flesh colors” to the portrayal of “Christian[s], or of rational creatures.”¹⁸ Women, non-Christians, and animals are alike marginalized in Cennini’s aesthetic paradigm, though perhaps to different extents. That these categories of difference are inconsistent at best attests to the elastic nature of racial ideologies.

An additional possibility is that the connection between skin color, ancestry, and the condition of enslavement was not yet firmly established, though one can detect traces of this association in both BnF Ms. Fr. 640 and Cennini’s Handbook. Darker skin color seems to be correlated with physical labor and even enslavement. Cennini’s instruction for using the yolk of a “country hen” to darken flesh colors correlates “swarthy persons” with rusticity. Further, if “non-Christians” cannot be depicted with “flesh colors,” differences in religion were already being associated with differences in skin color in Cennini’s milieu. This is congruent with the popular belief that dark-skinned people were pagans or muslims, whom Christians can enslave with no compunction. Perhaps contradictorily, dark skin can also denote a lack of vitality and liveliness: the old, the melancholic, and the overly cerebral are to be portrayed with more somber hues. Altogether, darker flesh color evokes the lack of health, vitality, and social privilege.

Carnation, Liveliness, and Fairness

Fig. 1. Titian’s Diana and Actaeon (1556-1559). Oil on canvas, 184.5 x 202.2 cm. The National Gallery, London. https://jstor.org/stable/community.15656006.

Red pigments are essential when making the flesh color for beautiful and youthful bodies. In both BnF Ms. Fr. 640 and Cennino Cennini’s Handbook, red pigments are associated with liveliness. Cennini advises against using “pink” for corpses, “because a dead person has no color.”¹⁹ The author-practitioner of the manuscript writes in similar terms: “To make a beautiful flesh color, the reddest & liveliest lake is the best.”²⁰ Using the conjunctive “and,” he juxtaposes and equates “red[ness]” with “liveli[ness].” The author-practitioner further reports that the red tint of “Florence lake” is so vital to making a desirable flesh color that women would apply the same pigment as cosmetics.²¹ One would perhaps put on the red hue after using another recipe the author-practitioner records for “whitening the face,” which calls for powdered puffball mushrooms.²² Both red and white played a role in creating the desirable skin tone for white women. Investigating cosmetic practices of early modern English theater, Sujata Iyengar has argued that the creation of “blushface” through red paint was as productive of racial ideologies as blackface, insofar as the former accentuates the paleness of the wearer.²³

Because I have not found substantial conservation literature on the composition of different shades of flesh colors, I can only provide anecdotal evidence on the racial connotation of red pigments in early modern painting. Titian’s Diana and Actaeon (1556-1559) is a fascinating example for my purpose (Fig.1). Infrared imaging and analysis of a paint cross section taken from the servant’s shoulder reveals that she was meant to be a white woman in the original composition. Titan painted over the original figure, whose skin color is nearly identical to that of Diana’s, with a darker shade. Conservators surmise that the change may have been the result of “the sudden availability of a model, allowing Titian to achieve a striking chiaroscuro of flesh.²⁴ The goddess’ flesh is achieved with “four layers of varying shades of pink based on lead white, vermilion, red lake, yellow earth, some black and in one later a little ultramarine.”²⁵ Contrasted against her pink skin tone, the servant is painted with “lead white, yellow earth, black, umber, lead-tin yellow and even a little blue pigment.”²⁶ Unlike Diana, the skin color of the servant contains no red tint made of vermillion or cochineal. I postulate that the lack of red pigments not only make darker skin seem less desirable according to contemporary beauty standards, but also makes dark skinned figures appear inanimate and therefore further objectified. But this theory cannot be confirmed until further evidence can be found to support that the omission of red pigments is a consistent practice for representing darker skin colors.

Conclusion

Instructions for mixing flesh colors from early modern artists’ manuals and paint recipe collections reveal that the fine arts contributed to the shaping of racial ideology. While categories such as gender, class, and religion dominated the earlier European understanding of difference, inheritable phenotypic difference, especially skin color, became a dominant marker in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Although the painters’ manuals studied for the current paper do not mention ancestry and geographical origin as determinants of a subject’s appropriate flesh color, they already display a tendency to exclude and marginalize certain segments of the human population. Darker skin tones may be associated with negative connotations, such as poverty and ill health. Anecdotal evidence suggests that the absence of red pigment in dark flesh colors may have served to portray African figures as inanimate and object-like, but further research is needed to establish this theory.

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