READING RACE IN WESTERN CHRISTIAN VISU AL CULTURE:

TRACING A DELIRIUM FROM RENAISSANCE ART TO THE CHRIS OFILI AFF AIR AND

CONTEMPORARY RELIGIOUS CINEMA

by

Ruth Barbara Burns

Department of Art History and Communication Studies McGill University, Montreal August 2005

A thesis submitted to McGill University in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the degree of Master of Arts in Art History.

© Ruth Burns (2005)

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Reading race in Western Christian visual culture: tracing a delirium from Renaissance art to the Chris Ofili affair and contemporary religious cinema

Ruth Barbara Burns

This thesis examines the role of the Manichean dualism, the pervasive colour symbolism of white as good and black as evil. It looks at the manifestation of this symbolism in representations ofChristianity, and the subsequent implications for race and racism in Western society. Through images of Jesus Christ and the Virgin Mary, 1 posit that the Western conflation ofholiness with whiteness is a primary means through which whiteness retains hegemony. 1 argue that Renaissance painting has had a pivotaI role in privileging the white body through its hyper-whitening ofboth Jesus and Mary. Both figures emerge as improbable ideals of male and female whiteness, demonstrating the anxiety around the intersection of race, gender and religion. 1 am primarily interested in Mary and how the canon of Western art has didactically laid out the terms ofher representation as a means of controlling the female body, dependant on the disavowal and whitening ofher body. The privileging of religious Renaissance art results in the continued infection of the construction and reception of the Virgin's image as an ideal figure offeminine whiteness. As such, 1 analyze the lasting effects of the whitening of her image in the controversy surrounding the display of Chris afili' s The Holy Virgin Mary (1996) at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, as weIl as her representation in Hai! Mary (1985) and The Passion ofthe Christ (2004). These readings attempt to draw out the specious nature of the Manichean dualism of black and white, aiming to help in the creation of a space for alternative readings of race through the eyes of hegemonic society.

2 Résumé

Lire la race dans la culture visuelle chrétienne occidentale: tracer un délire (manichéen) à partir de l'art de la Renaissance jusqu'à l'affaire Chris Ofili et le cinéma religieux contemporain

Ruth Barbara Burns

Ce mémoire examine le rôle du dualisme manichéen, le symbolisme de couleurs répandu du blanc représentant le bien d'un côté et du noir représentant le mal, de l'autre. Il aborde la manifestation de ce symbolisme à travers les représentations du Christianisme et de ses implications pour la notion de race et le racisme dans la société occidentale. À travers des images du Christ et de la Vierge Marie, je soutiens que la fusion de « sainteté» avec « blanchitude » est un des principaux moyens par lequel le blanc conserve son hégémonie. J'affirme que la peinture à la Renaissance ajoué un rôle crucial pour privilégier le corps blanc à travers l'hyper-blanchiment de Jésus et de Marie. Ceux-ci émergent en tant qu'idéaux improbables de la blanchitude mâle et féminine, démontrant ainsi l'entrecroisement entre race, genre et religion. Je suis surtout intéressée par Marie et par la façon dont le canon de l'art occidental a défini de manière dialectique les termes de sa représentation - une représentation dépendante à la fois de la blanchitude et de la pureté. De privilégier la peinture religieuse de la Renaissance a comme résultat une infection continue de la construction et de la réception de son image comme figure idéale de la blanchitude féminine. Après avoir établit la montée du dualisme manichéen dans l'art de la Renaissance, j'analyse ses effets durables en Amérique du Nord contemporaine à travers la controverse qu'a suscité l'exposition de l' œuvre The Holy Virgin Mary (1996) de Chris Ofili au Brooklyn Museum of Art. Je lis dans cette controverse une réaction à la création d'une Marie non-hégémonique, autrement dit non-blanche, dans l'œuvre de Ofili. Je lis aussi dans les films Je vous salue, Marie (1985) et The Passion ofthe Christ (2004) des lieux où Marie est définie en tant que féminité purifiée, celle-ci à la fois définie à travers, et dépendante de, sa blanchitude. Ces lectures tentent de déstabiliser la nature réconfortante de ce dualisme manichéen entre noir et blanc, créant ainsi un espace pour une lecture autre de la race à travers les yeux d'une société hégémonique.

3 Acknowledgements

There are many people who have contributed to the writing of this thesis. 1 would like to thank my supervisor Professor Charmaine Nelson, whose mentorship inspired me to tackle the difficult subject ofwhiteness as a race. 1 am deeply grateful to my family who has been an incredible source of support and love. Thank you Mom, Dad, Carolyn and Cameron. 1 would also like to thank my friends (you know who you are) who listened and helped me as 1 grappled with the ideas presented here.

Thank you to Professor Ting Chang for her support throughout my undergraduate degree and pushing me to pursue graduate studies. Thank you to the McGilllibrary staff and to Karin, Maureen, Vincia and Susanna for their administrative support. AIso, a special thank you to Carolyn, Shane and Vera for their late night editing. 1 couldn't have done this without you.

4 Table of Contents

Abstract ...... 2

Résumé ...... 3

Acknowledgments ...... 4

Introduction: the white bodies of Jesus and Mary ...... 6 Colour symbolism and race in Western visual culture ...... 8 Critical whiteness studies and the field of Art History ...... 14

Chapter one: Race-ing Christianity: white and black in Renaissance art ...... 20 The racialization of Christianity ...... 23 Laying the foundations for a Manichean Delirium ...... 31 The rising cult of whiteness in Venetian painting ...... 36 Art Historical mis-readings of race: Ignoring race in Venetian painting ...... 39 Benign justification of atrocity: The black Magi' s gift of Africa to Europe ...... 41 Conclusion ...... 43

Chapter Two: A challenge to whiteness: Chris Ofili's The Holy Virgin Mary ...... 45 The Controversy ...... 50 Idealized white femininity: The intersection of race and gender in the Virgin Mary ...... 59 Comprehending The Holy Virgin Mary: Blackness, elephant dung and pornography ...... 70

Chapter Three Race and Christianity in cinema: Encounters with the white holy body ...... 78 Biblical films and the canon of Art History ...... 80 Shining light in film: A motif of Christian 'goodness' and spiritual transcendence ...... 81 Whiteness as a sign of evil...... 87 Aryan Christs and the creation of racial hierarchies ...... 88 Judas: the race ofa traitor ...... 93 Engagement with an icon: the Virgin Mary in Hai!, Mary and The Passion ofthe Christ ....94 Conclusion ...... 1 02

Conclusion ...... 1034

Bibliography ...... 11 0

List of Illustrations ...... 10319

Illustrations ...... 120

5 Memo

Copv1

The two pages following page 119 are not numbered. Introduction The white bodies of Jesus and Mary

Throughout the history ofWestem painting the bodies ofboth Jesus and Mary have successively been marked as pure through virtue of their whiteness and a denial of their bodies as living biological entities. In the tradition of painting we witness the blood of Christ and the tears and drops ofmilk of Mary. However, the prospect that Mary menstruated, that

Jesus ejaculated, or that they both urinated and defecated is a taboo subject. This mutation of their bodies is coupled with a conception of purity that is based on their whiteness. It is only in the latter part of the twentieth century that artists have subverted this whiteness and purity; however, politicians and activists, particularly in the United States, have met this subversion with vehement prote st.

Andres Serrano's Piss Christ (1987) is a cibachrome print of a crucifix floating against a deep red, the color evocative of pain and sacrifice (fig. 1). The crucifix emits a luminescent gold, a divine light often seen in medieval art. The title informs us, otherwise we would not know, that this crucifix is floating in urine. Serrano resoundingly brings the sacred in contact with the profane, a state the artist defends arguing, "you can't have one without the other."l When publicly exhibited in 1988 this work was the subject ofwidespread outrage, and was quickly thrown into the American 'culture wars' presided over by the likes of

Senator Jesse Helms? When the republican senator Alfonse D'Amato ripped up a copy ofthe exhibit catalogue featuring Piss Christ on the floor of the senate, Helms ineloquently announced "The Senator from New York is absolutely correct in his indignation.... 1 do not

1 Jerry D. Meyer, "Profane and Sacred: Religious Imagery and Prophetie Expression in Postmodem Art," Journal ofthe American Academy ofReligion (Spring 1997, vol. 65, Iss. 1) 30. 2 Jesse Helms was a Republican senator for North Carolina. He had a central role in the late 1980 and early 1990s American 'culture wars'. Helms retired in 2003.

6 know Mr. Andres Serrano and 1 hope 1 never meet him. Because he is not an artist, he is a jerk.")

1 begin here with Piss Christ because 1 want to elucidate the terms around which white purity is defined, and the costs of our society's understanding. Given the reaction to

Piss Christ, we can deduce that purity can only be achieved through a rejection of the body.

Furthermore, the reaction to Piss Christ suggests that the sacred body of Christ cannot be sustained unless the fluids ofhis body are denied. This is a Christ without life, a Christ who only exists post-resurrection. Theologians would be correct in arguing that this supposition denies the full implications ofChrist's incarnation in human form.4 However, my interest here is in the racial implications ofpurity, particularly purity within a Christian context.

What is not immediately obvious in Piss Christ is that the crucifix that was once pure, before

Serrano had his way with it, is a crucifix of a white Christ. The purity that Serrano had tainted is predicated not only on a disavowal ofChrist's leaky body but is tied up in the racialization of Christ as white.

The racial implications of Piss Christ become crystallized in two ofSerrano's works created in the wake of the controversy: White Christ (1989) and Black Jesus (1989). White

Christ is a tightly cropped photograph of the head of Christ submerged in milk and water.

Serrano focused in on the twisted features of Christ's face, juxtaposing the dead and sanitized quality of the marble with the agony ofChrist's torture (fig. 2). Commenting on his intention for the piece Serrano said, "They want a white Christ, a Christ they can calI their own, so l'm giving it to them.,,5 White Christ calls attention to the sanitization of Christ' s body in order

3 Richard Meyer, "The Jesse Helms Theory of Art," Oetober (Spring 2003, Iss. 104) 136. 4 Richard Rambuss, "Sacred Subjects and the Aversive Metaphysical Conceit: Crashaw, Serrano and Ofili", ELH. Baltimore (Summer 2004,vo1.71, Iss. 2) 497. 5 Meyer, "Profane and Sacred," 31.

7 to appeal to a white desire that despotically claims Christ as one of their own, and the subsequent sapping of the vitality ofChrist's story. lndeed, Richard Rambuss is quite right in describing White Christ as "a banal image about the banality ofreligious purity.,,6

Black Christ is the other side: Serrano photographed a caucasian figure of Jesus, painted black, standing in a plexiglass tank filled with water. Bubbles float past Christ and the luminescence ofthis black is magnetic (fig. 3). Here black, a colour historically used to symbolize evil and death, evokes the religiosity ofChrist's piety. In these two works Serrano has capitalized upon the Manichean dichotomy ofblack and white long used in the West to evoke the ideals of Christianity and to create a hierarchy of bodies based on skin colour.

Throughout modem history black has been degraded, made synonymous with evil, and white has been deployed as a marker of goodness and holiness. White Christ illustrates the racialization of Christianity as white. Black Christ seeks to reverse this process. White Christ depicts the lifelessness of the hegemonic norm of Christian whiteness. Black Christ rehabilitates the spirituality ofblackness. Serrano has tapped into the Christian dualism of white and black, where white symbolizes divinity and black symbolizes evil. By inverting this dichotomy he renewed blackness.

Colour symbolism and race in Western visual culture

This thesis concerns itself with the Manichean delirium that has infected society with the common sense but specious and dangerous notion that white symbolizes goodness and purity, and black symbolizes evil and chaos. Its premise is that this dichotomy has aided in the production of colonial stereotypes of race, that are sustained through Christianity and are a driving force behind the maintenance of white identity and racism against blacks and

6 Rambuss, "Sacred Subjects and the Aversive Metaphysical Conceit," 497.

8 people of colour. It proposes that the degradation of black and the privileging of white has become 'common sense': that it has become so, in part, through the systemic and prolific influence of the racialization ofChristianity. As such this opposition promotes a common sense racism that benefits whites and oppresses non-whites on the basis of their skin. My concept of 'common sense racism' is drawn from Mason Stokes critical race reading of

Antonio Gramsci's notion of common sense. Stokes writes that common sense is a

'chaotic aggregate of disparate conceptions,' where 'one can find anything one likes'. For Gramsci, common sense is itself a product ofhegemony and becomes a me ans through which oppression and inequality is naturalized [emphasis mine]. Gramsci is interested in how intellectual systems can tap the productive capacities of common sense so as to create a new common sense, one that would be less conducive to systemic inequalities.7 ln line with this argument 1 seek to dispute the common sense dichotomy of black and white enabling a re-association of these col ours with alternative meanings beyond the age-old good and evil. 1 participate in the disabling of this common sense racism which predicates itself on this opposition. This thesis proposes that black as a marker of evil and white as marker of good is not natural, but is a historically constructed phenomenon used to sustain racism for the benefits of whites.

Even at the time of the early Renaissance, colours could evoke any number of meanings, making colour symbolism a difficult if not fruitless task. 8 While black as a marker of evil can be traced aIl the way back to ancient civilizations,9 this association existed in tandem with black as a marker of fertility (seen in mother goddesses and black Madonnas

7 Mason Stokes, The C%r ofSex: Whiteness, Heterosexuality and the Fictions of White Supremacy (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001) 205, fn 3. 8 John Gage, C%ur and Culture: Practice and Meaningfrom Antiquity ta Abstraction (London: Thames and Hudson, 1993) 120. 9 Frank M. Snowden Jr., Before C%r Prejudice: The Ancient View ofBlack (London and Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1983) 83-84.

9 lo found throughout Europe ) and black as a marker of divinity (seen in mosaics which

ll surround Christ in black light at the moment ofhis transfiguration ).

The 'hardening' ofnegative stereotypes ofblacks occurred in Europe with the rise of the Transatlantic Slave Trade and the subsequent influx of black slaves into European society at a time when European white identity was forming. On this topic, Kate Lowe, a professor of Renaissance history and culture, writes,

the most pertinent question here seems to be: why was there a 'European­ wide' reaction? How is it possible that different European peoples with different traditions reacted in overwhelmingly similar ways to the arrivaI of black Africans? One answer is because they perceived them to be in opposition to the particularly Renaissance vision of white European culture and civilization. l

Prior to the whitening of divine figures in the Renaissance there was no clear correlation between white bodies, white light and divinity. The hardening of white and black symbolism manifested itself in European high art through a rising cult of whiteness, and is sustained by our contemporary privileging of those works that benefit whites and degrade blacks. 1 argue that this privileging is a product of the continued racialization ofChristianity and the complicity of high art in this system. This thesis concerns itself with the influence of the hardened black/white dichotomy on contemporary North American notions of race. It suggests that representations of Christianity in Western painting have diffused throughout visual culture and have infected our commonsense understandings of white and black.

My strategy is to focus on Western representations of Jesus Christ and the Virgin

Mary both in the canon of Western art and in visual culture at large. My reasons for doing so

10 Lucia Chiavola Birnbaum, Black Madonnas: feminism, religion and politics in Italy (Boston: Northeastem University Press, 1993) 24. Il Gage, Colour and Culture, 55. 12 Kate Lowe, "The stereotyping of black Africans," Black Africans in Renaissance Europe, eds T.F. Earle and K.J.P Lowe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005) 19.

10 are three-fold: first, representations of Jesus and Mary compress the effects of the racialization ofChristianity onto their bodies. They are hyper-visualizations of the racialization of Christianity. It is no coincidence that today Christ is often depicted as Aryan, despite being Jewish, or that while Black Madonnas exist throughout Europe they are frequently whitened by the church. 13 Second, as Richard Dyer argues, Jesus and Mary are impossible gender models for whites. 14 That is, Jesus and Mary embody what whites should be, but can never be. They stand at an apex, of sorts, of whiteness. Thus, by studying representations of Jesus and Mary we can further elucidate how whiteness functions. Lastly, there is a great deal of defensiveness around representations of Christ and Mary. In these moments of tension, I believe, the stakes whites have in representations of Christ and Mary are revealed. Not only limited to Piss Christ, controversy has dogged a number of the cultural works I discuss here, which are aU to sorne degree innovative in their depictions. The second chapter focuses on Chris Ofili's The Holy Virgin Mary (1996), which depicts an

Africanized Mary that incorporates elephant dung as weU as pictures of female genitalia.

This work was denounced by New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani as "sick stuff', and a protestor vandalized it with white paint.

I have analyzed representations of Mary more frequently than those of Christ: this addresses what I see as a focus ofscholarship on Christ to the detriment of Mary, particularly in film studies. As a feminist, it enables me to elucidate how representations of the Virgin

Mary dictate ideals ofwhite femininity, that is how ideals ofboth race (whiteness) and gender (femininity) intersect in her figure. The idealization of figures like the Virgin Mary aUow for the accruement of power by white women, over and against women of colour who

13 Birnbaum, Black Madonnas, 3, 45, 108, 131. 14 Richard Dyer, White (London: Routledge, 1997) 16-17.

11 cannot fit into the ideal. This has had particular strong ramifications in a colonial context, an enterprise in which the Church was indelibly intertwined. Anne McClintock spoke directly to this in her important book Imperial Leather: Race Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial

Context. She wrote,

The rationalized position of race all too often puts white women in positions of decided - ifborrowed - power, not only over colonized women, but also over colonized men. As such, white women were not the hapless onlookers of empire but were ambiguously complicit both as colonizers, privileged and restricted, acted upon and acting. 15

White femininity, in which the Virgin Mary is an exemplar, is bound up in sustaining racism against both women and men of col our. As such, by de-mythologizing the Virgin's purity 1 hope to subvert the idealization of white femininity, and the subsequent accruement of power by white females.

"Chapter One: Race-ing Christianity, white and black in Renaissance art", outlines the racialization ofChristianity, contextualizing the black/white dichotomy as part ofthis racialization. It posits that this dichotomy became firmly entrenched as the Transatlantic

Slave Trade rapidly grew in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Attempting to show the fallacious nature ofthis dichotomy, 1 trace the beginning moments of the cult ofwhiteness in

Venetian Renaissance painting. 1 analyze how whiteness is deployed around the Virgin Mary and Christ Child, the popularization of the black Magi in 'The Adoration of the Magi', and the appearance ofblack staff characters seen in works such as Gentile Bellini's Miracle at the Bridge ofSan Lorenzo (1500). "Chapter Two: A Challenge to Whiteness: Chris Ofili's

The Holy Virgin Mary" jumps forward in time to Chris Ofili's important and controversial work, The Holy Virgin Mary (1996).1 read this controversy within the context of Manichean

IS Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Context (New York and London: Routledge, 1995) 5.

12 dichotomy of white and black established in the first chapter, and the hegemony of the white

Virgin Mary. l attempt to refocus critical attention onto The Holy Virgin Mary which has been widely misrepresented by the North American media. This work challenges a European

Mary by presenting a Virgin who is not white, is sexualized, and rejects any hierarchy of bodily fluids.

The final chapter, "Chapter Three: Race and Christianity in Cinema: Encounters with the white holy body", demonstrates the influence of Western painting on popular conceptions ofChristianity by analyzing high art's influence on representations of

Christianity, and subsequently race, in cinema. The first section demonstrates how the conflation of whiteness with holiness, seen in Renaissance art, prevails in biblical narrative and films that use Christian allegorical figures. It analyzes the aryanization of Christ in film, and the racial hierarchy created between Christ and Judas where Christ sits at a pinnacle of whiteness, and the juxtaposition of the explicitly Jewish Judas is used to highlight Christ's white purity. This juxtaposition would reach its pinnacle in the casting of a black actor in the role of Judas in Jesus Christ Superstar (1977). The final section retums to the Virgin Mary, focusing on two films that feature her prominently, Jean-Luc Godard's Hail Mary (1984) and

Mel Gibson's The Passion ofthe Christ (2004). largue that in these films, although she is engaged beyond what her iconic status typically enables, the Virgin Mary is maintained as a paragon of white feminine purity. This is achieved in film by activating a language of whiteness and holiness firmly established in canonical Western art. Throughout these chapters l attempt to draw out the underside of whiteness: that is, the representation of the

Mary and Jesus as hyper white and pure saps the vitality oftheir stories. At the same time l

13 hope to activate positive associations of blackness, enabling a re-reading of black as a positive and spiritual symbol.

This thesis positions itself as a feminist and critical race analysis of Christian art. It is influenced by the field of critical whiteness studies, and is particularly informed by Richard

Dyer's White (1998), a seminal book that analyzes a vast array of images of the white body.

Dyer approaches whiteness through images of Christianity, 'race' and imperialism/enterprise

He argues that these images "do not just provide the intellectual foundations for thinking and feeling about the white body, but also their forms and structures, the cultural register of whiteness.,,16 Dyer proposes a concept ofwhite embodiment as something that emerges out ofChristianity, subsequently constituting whiteness as something that "is in but not of the body.,,17 My thesis focuses on the constitutions ofwhiteness in Christian imagery, analyzing what Dyer terms "the European feeling for self and the world [that] has been shaped by

Christianity.,,18 It draws from an array ofvisual cultural artifacts that inform a whiteness that manipulates Christianity, creating an ideal ofthis religion that is based on race. This thesis posits that the canon of Western painting has been instrumental in supporting a colour symbolism of white and black that has been crucial in perpetuating a white ethic that is based on an exclusionary conception of Christianity.

Critical whiteness studies and the field of Art History

The widening of the critical race Jens to include whiteness was in recognition of an asymmetry to critical race studies, which failed to study whiteness, precisely due to its invisibilityand its pretensions to universality. As Dyer wrote, "whites must be seen to be

16 Dyer, White, 14. 17 Dyer, White, 14. 18 Dyer, White, 15.

14 white, yet whiteness as race resides in its invisible properties, and whiteness as power is maintained by being unseen.,,19 The project of critical whiteness studies becomes to give whiteness a colour, to unveil it as a race. It is not a project without risks, to be sure: the ultimate failure of critical whiteness studies would result if whiteness is essentialized rather than undermined. As such, it is crucial that whiteness not be read as an object of study, but as a process that continually reproduces the boundaries of inclusion and exclusion.20 Ruth

Frankenberg positions critical whiteness studies as emerging from a variety of fields which, particularly from the 1980s onwards, have grappled with whiteness and whites?l She notes historical studies that have examined the formation of national and class identity,22 sociologists and cultural analysts which examine the place of whiteness in the European and

American in the body politic,23 the analysis of the performance ofwhiteness and representation of whiteness,24 and lastly the study of racism in moments of social change?5

The critical study of whiteness is bom from a large-scale dissatisfaction with normalized

Eurocentric feminist discourse and colonial studies. The former has been accused, largely by women of colour feminists of ignoring "the fundamental ways in which white women have benefited from the oppression of black women.,,26 The latter has been accused oflimiting their object of study to the colonized, while ignoring the colonizer. The emergence of critical

19 Dyer, White, 45. 20 Ruth Frankenberg, Displacing Whiteness: essays in social and cultural criticism, ed. Ruth Frankenberg (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1997) 1. 21 Ibid, 2-3. 22 Early examples include Theodore W. Allen, The Invention ofthe White Race. London and New York: Verso, 1994, and David Roediger, The Wages ofWhiteness: Race and the Making ofthe American Working C/ass, London: Verso, 1991. 23 Early examples include David T. Wellman, Portraits of White Racism (1997) and Phil Cohen's "It's Racism What Dunnit," Race, Culture and Difference (1992) 24 Early examples include Richard Dyer, "White, "Screen (Autumn 1988: vol. 28, Iss. 4) 44-64, and Ruth Frankenberg, White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction ofWhiteness. London: Routledge, 1993. 25 Queer theory seems to be ahead of its time in this regard. See Mab Segrest, My Mama 's Dead Squirre/: Lesbian Essays on Southem Culture, Ithaca: New York, 1986. 26 Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather, 7.

15 whiteness studies owes much to identity politics which demands that ethical scholarship reveal the position the writer speaks from. No longer is it acceptable to hide behind omniscient authorship, masking one's whiteness. That is, as authors have increasingly named their whiteness they are forced to encounter the meaning of that whiteness.

The field of critical whiteness studies is not without its detractors. In 1993 Leslie

Roman wrote that it was "a form of white defensiveness.,,27 Marilyn Frye has also doubted the sincerity and depths ofthese studies. She writes that the "white women's effort to gain self-knowledge are easily undermined by the desire not to live out the consequences of getting it.,,28 Here Frye speaks of a moralizing discourse that advocates diversity, but stops short of examining and dismantling the self-interests that prohibit that diversity. There is a thin line in critical whiteness studies where white writers risk either egotistical self- flagellation or the unwillingness to completely displace the "unmarked marker,,29 status of whiteness

The contribution to critical whiteness studies from the field of art history has been decidedly limited. The seeming innocence of aesthetics and beauty, and the disciplines focus on connoisseurship and formalism, has shielded the study of art from an analysis of the power relations that it constitutes. The act ofviewing as 'simple perception', and the modem concept of artist as genius, obfuscates the role of power in art and visual culture at large.3o

Visual culture in not a simple mirror of power relations, but an active participant in producing the commodification of bodies, stereotypes and racist, sexist and imperialist discourse. An unwillingness to name whiteness is a systemic problem that haunts art history.

27 Himani Bannerji, The Dark Side ofthe Nation: Essays on Multiculturalism, Nationalism and Gender (Toronto: Canadians' Scholar Press, 2000) 39. 28 Cynthia Levine-Rasky, Working through Whiteness: International Perspectives (Albany: SUNY, 2002) 8. 29 Frankenberg, Displacing Whiteness, 1. 30 Lisa Bloom, With Other Eyes: Looking at Race and Gender in Visual Culture, ed. Lisa Bloom (Minneapolis and London, 1999) 8-9.

16 The nascent state of critical whiteness studies in art history can be attributed to art historians' lack of consistent engagement with race at all. The unwillingness to engage issues of race by art historians is exemplified by the writings on Edouard Manet's Olympia (1862-3), "often considered one of the most important modemist works of the nineteenth century. ,,31 Despite the wealth of writing on this work, Olympia, which features a white prostitute with a black woman standing solicitously behind her, was not cohesively analyzed in terms of race until

1985.32 The explicit study ofwhiteness in representations received further critical weight three years later in Richard Dyer's 1988 "White", followed by bell hooks essay

"Representing whiteness in the Black Imagination" in 1992. In it she revealed whiteness as a site of terror for the black subject, which emerges from collective memories of repression and exploitation by whites. Hooks' essay called for a shift in analysis from the victims of racism, to those who perpetuate it.33 It is telling that neither hooks nor Dyer hold professorships in the field of art history; rather, these contributions have come from outside the field.

Although these works were well received they did not bring about a cohesive shift in the field of art history. As Kimberly N. Pinder writes, at the close of the twentieth century suffocated by pop culture sound bites and the conservative backlash against 'political correctness,' the potential of multicultural studies to effect change beyond superficial diversity awareness within and outside academia has petered out. 34

31 Kimberly N. Pinder, Race-ing Art History: Critical Readings in Race and Art History, ed. Kimberly N. Pinder (New York and London: Routledge, 2002) 4. 32 Sander Gilman, "Black Bodies, White Bodies: Toward an Iconography of Female Sexuality in Late Nineteenth-Century Art, Medicine and Literature," Critical Inquiry (Autumn 1985, vol. 12, No. 1) 204-42. 33 Bell hooks, "Representing whiteness in the Black Imagination," Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston: South End Press, 1992) 165-179. 34 Pinder, Race-ing Art History, 2. Notable exceptions include Olu Oguibe and Okwui Enwezor, eds. Reading the Contemporary: African Artfrom Theory to the Marketplace. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999. Also see, Lisa Bloom, ed. With Other Eyes: Looking at Race and Gender in Visual Culture. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1999.

17 Pinder's recent anthology Race-ing Art History: Critical Readings in Race and Art History

(2002) has gone a long way in enabling the teaching of race and art in the classroom.

However, while Pinder's own essay "Biraciality and Nationhood in Contemporary American

Art" analyzes ethnic-whites, interracial bodies, and the politics of passing, in this anthology race emerges as belonging to people of colour, with whiteness sliding underneath the radar.

The most significant study of whiteness in art has come from a professor of film studies, Richard Dyer. His book, White, as 1 have already noted, draws from a range of visual sources. He ignores any respect given to canonical works of art as being purely within the realm of 'high-art.' The work of art historian Maurice Berger has been the notable exception to the rule that art historians are disinterested in critical whiteness studies. In the 2004 exhibit of contemporary art, White: Whiteness and Race in Contemporary Art in New York brought together a diverse numbers of artworks that confronted the power and privilege of whiteness and white racism.35 Viewing contemporary artworks through Berger's lens ofwhiteness as a category, demanded that the white viewer recognize their own complicity in a society where they likely benefit from their one's whiteness to the detriment of people of colour.

My work seeks to show how whiteness has emerged through canonical religious art and how, through these works, a bid for white hegemony is made. In this way, 1 am most clearly influenced by Dyer and Berger, though it has been Dyer's work that has propelled me in the direction this thesis takes. This thesis seeks to expand on Dyer's insights on whiteness and Christianity, tracing, in particular, their legacy in ideals of white femininity seen in the

Virgin Mary. It seeks to dismantle the protective white shield that enshrines both Jesus and

Mary. It also simultaneously seeks to disable the Manichean delirium.

3S Maurice Berger, White: Whiteness and Race in Contemporary Art. Baltimore County: University of Maryland,2004.

18 1 have come to this thesis as a white Canadian. Raised as an Anglican, 1 have spent many years at Catholic school, and in my undergraduate studies was entranced by the religious art in Renaissance and Baroque art. As 1 have increasingly engaged with critical race studies 1 have been forced to recognize my own whiteness, and the benefits 1 have reaped from it. 1 have also questioned how my religious background and my interest in art has informed how 1 embody and enact my whiteness. As 1 have processed through the research and writing ofthis thesis 1 have constantly kept in mind the warning words of John

T. Warren,

1 am going to do whiteness even as 1 prepare to work against whiteness. Audre Lorde's voice echoes: "The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house." And 1 smile because 1 am unsure how to talk about whiteness. 1 am a paradox.36

Throughout this thesis 1 have spoken through my own whiteness; however, 1 have not used the master's tools. 1 have been inspired and guided by the words ofthose marginalized by hegemonic whiteness, that is black, queer and many feminist theorists. This speaks to the insurmountable task of critical whiteness studies and the unwillingness of the majority of whites to encounter, recognize and dismantle their power. This only underlines the worthiness of the endeavor of critical whiteness studies and the absolute necessity of academics in continuing to do so.

36 John T. Warren, Performing Purity: Whiteness, Pedagogy and the Reconstitution ofPower (New York: P. Lang, 2003) 9.

19 Chapter One Race-ing Christianity, white and black in Renaissance art

The Virgin Mary sits holding the Christ Child before her, offering the compact, fleshy whiteness ofChrist's body to the viewer (fig 4). Their skin, almost ivory white, is offset by the bright whiteness of Mary's headdress that encircles them. The mingling of the white st skin and the white st fabric create an alluring focal point around which the altar painting's many subjects organize themselves: a painting in which colour plays not only an important compositional role, but a symbolic one. Titian's Madonna with Saints and Members ofthe

Pesaro family (1519-26) starkly diverges from traditional compositions by placing the Virgin and Child to the side of the picture, besides whom Titian asymmetrically positioned St. Peter and St. Francis. A noted colorist, Titian relies on colour to create a balanced composition. 37

While colour creates balance (note the similarity between the Virgin's robe on the left and the flag on the right), it is whiteness and light that retains the Virgin and Child at the apex of the composition. Commissioned by the Venetian Pesaro family in thanks for a military victory over their Turkish neighbors, this work sits at an important moment in Renaissance art when hue of skin began to retain enormous social value, when the degree of whiteness of a person came to signify their degree of holiness and when whiteness was deployed to retain power.

The Pesaro altarpiece takes part in a process 1 call the visual racialization of

Christianity. This racialization was deployed by white patrons of art to align themselves with the power of the church over and against people of colour and non-Christian religions, with whom they were increasingly coming into contact. It is a process that, as Richard Dyer has

37 E.H. Gombrich, The Story ofArt (Oxford: Phaidon, 1984) 252-254.

20 shown, began in the early Renaissance, and was firmly imbedded by the Renaissance's end.38

The Pesaro altarpiece illustrates how white identity formed against people of colour, with whom whites increasingly came into contact due to imperial and colonial policies. However, whiteness and blackness, particularly in Italy was a slippery concept. Its constitution proved a difficult concept for those on the Italian peninsula, whose population has long been considered dark skin and therefore 'less than ideal. ,39 W orks like the Pesaro altarpiece can thus be read as a means to establish the boundaries of whiteness within an Italian context.

In this altarpiece, the Virgin Mary and the Christ Child are objects of worship who sit at a pinnacle of whiteness. Power and righteousness are bequeathed to those around them, either through relational distance or by degrees of whiteness. Saint Peter and Saint Francis, who are quite tanned, are to the direct left and right of the Virgin respectively. This exemplifies their status as important saints, while the darkness of their skin emphasizes the

Virgin Mary and Christ Child's whiteness. St. Francis gestures down to the male members of the Pesaro family. A subtle glow follows the direction ofhis hand, illuminating the Pesaro males kneeling below. However, the glow the Virgin Mary and Christ Child emanate is limited to the white people around them. Our eye draws a line between the Virgin Mary's white headdress and the white turban of the Turkish prisoner being dragged away by a flag bearing guard. The dark prisoner is the furthest away from the Virgin and Child, who ignore him. Here, a line is drawn between 'saved' and 'unsaved' that is effectively manifested through skin colour as a sign of racial difference. Whiteness, purity and salvation compress themselves onto the figures of the Virgin and Child banishing darkness, embodied by the

Turkish prisoner, to the outreaches of the picture.

38 Dyer, White, 66-68. 39 Lowe, "The stereotyping of black Africans," Il.

21 This chapter concerns itself with the entrenchment of the visual racialization of

Christianity. It questions the conditions for the change in depicting skin colour, and the accruement of meaning and power, or lack thereof, in 'race'. This shift was in response to the imperial policies of European countries and the increased contact of white people with people of col our, and the desire to dominate them. The results are manifested in early

Renaissance art in two ways: the rising cult of whiteness, and the minimization of people of colour in religious painting. The result is the hardening of the association of the Manichean dualism of good and evil with white and black people respectively.

The increased polarization of white and black within a religious and moral framework was in large part a response to the rise of the Transatlantic Slave Trade. The demonization of black people was necessary to justify their widespread enslavement. My argument is that the

Manichean dualism of white and black, where white embodies purity and black embodies evil was a simplistic dichotomy utilized in Renaissance Europe to create a racial hierarchy that placed whiteness at its apex. This occurs though the rising cult of whiteness in

Renaissance art (found in pottery, sculpture, painting and architecture) and the increased inclusion ofblack bodies into high art, no matter how benign they may seem. 1 begin here with a summary of the racialization ofChristianity, and the colonial context ofthis racialization. After introducing Manichaeism, 1 analyze the rising cult of whiteness found in religious Venetian Renaissance art, and the black bodies introduced in the same period. For matters of coherence 1 focus on art in Venice. 1 do so both because of its long-standing influence on subsequent artistic production and Western culture, and because its geographical

22 position, as a city so close to the 'East' and an established port, made it a racially charged site.40

The racialization of Christianity

ln his book White Richard Dyer argues that "not only did Christianity become the religion, and religious export, of Europe, indelibly marking its culture and consciousness, it has also been thought and felt in distinctly white ways for most ofits history.,,41 Christianity is not in itself a white religion, but it has been harnessed to establish white hegemony. 1 will argue here that in its relationship to people of colour Christianity has too often become a racist enterprise. In the following section 1 do not follow a timeline, but attempt to draw out the racism of different facets of Christianity. 1 begin here with the role of Old and New

Testament texts in supporting racism, and their openness to racist oppression. 1 move on to the complicity ofChristianity in colonial and racist state policy. 1 focus on slavery, because arguably it is the pivotaI example of the prolific Western racialization of Christianity and a 42 widespread institution from which whites have widely and disturbingly benefited.

Furthermore, the widespread classification of blacks as slaves and whites as the master of slaves from the fourteenth to nineteenth centuries is both a reflection and driving force of the colour symbolism of white as good and black as evil. 1 will return to this colour symbolism in the next section.

Ancient scholars of the Old Testament did conceive of difference between bodies based on skin colour and physiognomy. Though they did not, as Cain Hope Felder argues,

40 Florence Sergio Tognetti, "The trade in black African slaves in fifteenth-century Florence," Black Africans in Renaissance Europe, eds T.F. Earle and K.J.P. Lowe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005) 215-216. 41 Dyer, White, 17. th 42 The effects of racism in Christianity can be seen throughout modem history exemplified in the 20 century by American segregation based on colour, CanadianJAnglican residential schools for aboriginal children, and South African apartheid.

23 use this to demean and exploit people on the basis ofrace.43 Rather, what has occurred both historically and recently is the diminishment of the role non-Western people played in Old

Testament texts to the detriment of African peoples and nations.44 This has been achieved through a number of strategies most of which involve silent exclusion, denial of origins and innocuous racist translations. They include, but are not limited to: (1) the overwhelming focus ofOld Testament scholarship on Mesopotamia and ancient Near Eastern studies; (2)

The exclusion of Africa from Biblical maps; (3) The minimization of African involvement in

Bible dictionaries; (4) The diminishment of Egypt's role in the Old Testament or the denial that Egypt is a part of Africa; (5) The denial that certain Old Testament peoples were

African, for example the Haamites; and (6) the denial that Moses' wife was a Cushite, and thus African.45 As John H. Waters succinctly writes, "It seems to be a hallmark of Western

(Eurocentric) biblical scholars to seize upon every opportunity to read their racial biases into the interpretation and translations of the ancient biblical text.',46

While the Old Testament includes a range ofnations and influences, the New

Testament is undeniably Eurocentric in its focus. Cain Hope Felder argues this is the influence ofthe dominant Roman Empire at the time of Christianity's inception. Not only does Hellenistic language and culture influence the vision of God through Jesus Christ, but the appeal to Rome as the capital of the world counteracts the New Testament vision of

'racial inclusiveness and universalism.,47 The Eurocentric leaning of the New Testament has,

43 Cain Hope Felder, "Race, Racism, and the Biblical Narratives," Stony the Road We Trod: African American Bible Interpretation, ed. Cain Hope Felder (Minneapolis, Fortress Press, 1991) 127. 44 Randall C. Bailey, "Beyond Identification: The Use of Africans in Old Testament Poetry and Narratives", Stony the Road We Trod: African American Bible Interpretation, ed Cain Hope Felder (Minneapolis, Fortress Press, 1991) 165. 45 Ibid, 165-184. 46 John M. Waters, "Who Was Hagar?" Stony the Road We Trod: African American Bible Interpretation, ed Cain Hope Felder (Minneapolis, Fortress Press, 1991) 205. 47 Felder, "Race, Racism, and the Biblical Narratives," 14l.

24 throughout the centuries, enabled racist interpretations of the bible. By example Felder cites

Luke's writings in which the baptism and conversion of an Ethiopian official (Acts 8:26-40) happened without the descent of the Roly Spirit, in comparison to the baptism and conversion of the ltalian Cornelius (Acts 10: 1-48) where the Roly Spirit descends and baptism by holy water follows. 48 While Luke's motivations for the framing ofthis story cannot be discerned, and as Felder states Luke's vision for the church was one ofracial pluralism, his favoring of an ltalian over an African enabled white Europeans to later assert sorne sort of divine superiority.49 Furthermore, we cannot be certain that we have inherited

Luke' s version of this story, and not the version altered by successive generations of clergy and politicians. In reading the Bible we must be aware that the privileging of Europeans in the New Testament has been compounded by later revisions, editions and translations that further enable a white-centric reading of the Bible.

The racÏalization of Christianity is inextricably tied up in the project of colonialism.

Indeed, as Dyer has argued "the Christian religion has come to be an important part of the ideological framework that has supported the existence of successive regimes in different parts of the world who affirm the dominant values of the West."so This has no doubt been aided and abetted by the collusion of Christian churches with European state apparatuses.

The adoption of Christianity by Constantinople in 313CE essentially resulted in the overnight transformation of Christianity from a persecuted minority religion to an official religion of the state. Christianity became the religion of elites and aristocrats and quickly forgot its roots

48 Ibid, 141-142. 49 Ibid, 143. 50 Charles Villa-Vicencio, Theology and Violence: The South African Debate, ed. Charles Villa-Vicencio (Grand Rapids: Eardmans Pub. Co., 1987) 2.

25 as the religion of the oppressed, to the extent that by the high Middle Ages the Church had become a 'despotic political force.'51

The collusion between state and Church quickly became a racist enterprise through the Crusades52 and later through colonialism and the rise of the Transatlantic Slave Trade.

The Church, along with nations and empires, reaped enormous profit from the trade of slavery. Christianity turned colonialism into a benevolent exercise that in the eyes of the missionaries could only benefit the colonized. In his important book Religion, Rebellion and

Revolution Bruce Lincoln writes,

Colonial expansion is cast as an altruistic crusade, bringing hope of salvation to those irrevocably lost ... Salvation is thus presented as an exclusive club, admission to which is European-controlled.53

An image taken from Christ and the Fine Arts (1959), titled The Healer, illustrates the

Christian altruism that colonialism was cast in. In this work, a white man benevolently kneels, purportedly administering medicine to a sick black child cradled by his mother. Two black men stand fascinated by the proceedings, impervious to the apparition of a European

Christ who stands behind the white man, reaching out to touch this 'doctor' (fig. 5). While the black adults look inept and bewildered, the white man is the only one with the knowledge, given by Christ, to save this child. The illustrator of this image seems impervious to the irony that the child is likely infected with a European disease. The picture is organized around a diagonal axis that separates blacks from whites, the latter whose side Christ is clearlyon. This division is further emphasized by the squared posture of the fully clothed

51 Ibid, 1. Charles Villa-Vicencio argues that throughout the centuries the Church, both Catholic and non, has overwhelming sided with the state rather than the people: sanctioning state violence to sustain law and order while condemning the use of violence by the oppressed. By way of example he cites the 1525 German Peasant Rebellion in which the peasants sought socio-politicalliberation and Martin Luther backed the princes in suppressing them. 52 Robert Miles, Racism (London: Routledge, 1989) 13. 53 Greg Cuthbertson "The English-Speaking Churches and Colonialism," Theology and Violence: The South African Debate, ed. Charles Villa-Vicencio (Grand Rapids: Eardmans Pub. Co., 1987) 16.

26 whites, and the sloped posture of the blacks whose unclothed state, is by Western standards, a sign oftheir primitiveness. This work clearly demonstrates the belief on behalf of the colonizers that their mission was one based on self-sacrifice, which benefited blacks through the introduction of Western technologies and the appearance of Christianity in their lives.

The Healer also demonstrates the complicity of missionaries in colonialism and racist state policy. The intersection of colonialism and Christianity is embodied in the figure of the missionary. Greg Cuthbertson argues that, "British missionaries of the mainline Protestant denominations were instigators and proponents of the dismantling of African societies through the introduction of capitalism and the extension of imperial control. ,,54 Colonialism served the interests ofmissionaries: not only did it offer them protection, and a sense of the comforts of home, it gave their voices added weight in inducing otherwise uninterested populations to convert to Christianity. As a result, missionaries were at the forefront of colonial expansion bringing with them capitalist enterprises for the benefit of colonizers and tacit support for the military strategy oftheir home country.55 In the end, as Cuthbertson writes, they were "the prime movers in the expansion and exploitation and consolidation of white political power.,,56

The use of Christian ideology to support state policies and law is particularly disturbing in the context of the Transatlantic Slave Trade. Christian scripture and churches were complicit injustifying and sustaining this human atrocity. From the beginning, both

Catholic and Protestant leaders and doctrine sanctioned the ownership of slaves, separate from its abuses. Quite simply, Church leaders preferred that owners did not torture their

54 Ibid, 15. 55 Ibid, 18-26. 56 Ibid, 16.

27 slaves, but thought the ownership of these slaves was perfectly acceptable. 57 From the beginning of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, Christian theology was used to justify the trade ofblack slaves. In particular, traders and owners evoked the 'Curse of Ham' to justify their practices. As early as 1460 Zurara, a Portuguese officer under Henry the Navigator, wrote in his Chronicle ofGuinea "these blacks ... are nevertheless their [Muslim Moors] slaves by virtue of an ancient custom which, 1 think, cornes from the curse laid by Noah on his son

Ham after the Deluge, as a result of which his race must be subject to all the other races in the world.,,58 This 'curse' that Zurara speaks of stems from Genesis 9: 18-27 which de scribes the population of the earth as coming from Noah's three sons. Verses 18-19 provide

'rationale' for the different destinies of different groups. In it Noah places an ambiguous curse on his son Canaan, though previously Ham had sinned by not covering his father when he found him drunk and naked (a sin of disrespect under Jewish law). The ambiguity has allowed the interpretation that Noah in fact cursed Ham, blackening his skin and cursing his descendants, thus 'destined' to be enslaved. Cain Hope F elder argues that the entirety of

Genesis 9:20-27 should be cast in doubt for, it takes place in a process called sacralization.

This process, whereby "cultural and historical phenomenon are recast as theological truths with vested interest for particular groups,,,59 enables systemic social inequalities to be justified.

Christianity has also been utilized in legal discourse in the West to justify slavery as an institution ordained by God. In 1701, American Superior Court Judge John Saffin used

Christian theology to uphold his ruling on the legality of slavery. His argument was as

57 H. Shelton Smith, In His Image, But ... : Racism and Religion, 1780-1910 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1972) 7-8. 58 Jean Devisee and Michel Mollat, The Image ofthe Black in Western Art II: From the Early Christian Era to the 'Age ofDiscovery', v. 2 Africans in the Ordinance ofthe World (l41h to 161h c.) trans. William Granger Ryan (New York: William Morrow & Company, 1979) 156. 59 Felder, "Race, Racism, and the Biblical Narratives," 130.

28 follows: God had decreed that sorne men were to be slaves and others masters,60 and that by bringing 'heathens' to a land they could be converted and etemally saved.61 His use of religious doctrine to support state law would have been supported by church leaders, such as

George Whitfield (1714-1770), Samuel Davis (b. 1723) and William Fleetwood (early 18th century bishop of Asaph). These men actively sought the conversion of slaves to Christianity.

However, they went to great lengths to stress to owners that conversion would make these men and women better slaves, not worse. They did not advocate for their freedom. 62 To their annoyance, and occasional outrage, owners were reluctant to admit their slaves to a religion which professed spiritual unity. By example, in 1711, one mistress of slaves asked, "Is it possible that any of my slaves could go to heaven and 1 might see them there?,,63 The words ofthis white woman demonstrate the depth of desire for racial segregation and hierarchy.

Likely her fear of etemal integration in the hereafter would have been assuaged by the segregation of blacks within Churches (through, by example, demarcated pews). The enforced illiteracy of slaves meant that scripture was most often read to them by white men and women who believed in the civilizing capacity ofChristianity, but who by and large had no intention of ending the institution of slavery. Slaves were consistently told their enslavement was sanctioned by God. In a 1748 sermon directed to a congregation of

Episcopalian slaves, Rev. Thomas Bacon preached, "Almighty God hath been pleased to make you slaves here, and to give you nothing but Labour and Poverty in this world." He

60 In his ruling Judge Saffin cited Leviticus 25: 44-46: ,,44Both thy bondmen, and thy bondmaids, which thou shaH have, shaH be of the heathen that are round about you; ofthem shaH ye buy bondmen and bondmaids. 45Moreover of the children of the strangers that do sojourn among you, ofthem shaH ye buy, and oftheir families that are with you, which they begat in your land: and they shaH be your possession. 46 And ye shaH take them as an inheritance for your children after you, to inherit them for a possession; they shaH be your bondmen for ever: but over your brethren the children ofIsrael, ye shaH not rule one over another with rigor." (King James Version) 61 Smith, In His Image, But..., 17. 62 Ibid, 8-14. 63 Quoted by Francis Le Jau in The Carolina Chronic/e, 1706-171 J cited in Smith, In His Image, But ... , Il.

29 continues, "If you desire Freedom, serve the Lord here, and you shaH be his Freemen in

Heaven hereafter.,,64

The use of religion to justify racist state policy was refurbished in pro-slavery discourse in the United States to accommodate the weight given to 'scientific' beliefs.

Biblical scholarship was used to justify the burgeoning 19th c. American 'science' of ethnology in which an American fixation on physical difference became dangerous and specious 'fact'. 6S Ethnology, the ridiculous science of racial difference, proposed a theory of polygenesis which denied that blacks were part of the human race. This ran counter to the

Genesis account of the sons of Noah and their population of the earth. Thus, biblical scholars created counter narratives in support of ethnology's claims: mainly that black people existed prior or contemporaneous to Adam and Eve. In these accounts the tempter in the Garden of

Eden was not a serpent but a black man, and sometimes a black woman (fig. 6).66 In this context Eve's desire for a Black man, and thus the possibility of a white woman having sex with a black man (the threat ofmiscegenation), becomes the reason for humanity's faH from grace.67 Ethnology is a prime example of both the manipulation and complicity of Christian thought in justifying the enslavement of upwards of 4 million blacks in nineteenth century

America.68 Christianity bestowed a righteousness on slave owners, aHowing an evil

64 Two Sermons Preached to a Congregation ofBlack Slaves, at the Parish Church ofS. P. in the Province of Mary/and(London, 1749 and 1782) 16 in Smith, In His Image, But ... , 12. 65 Stokes, The C%r ofSex, 85. Stokes writes: "Scientific 'discoveries' often contradicted biblical ''truth'', creating a double bind for so-called Christian slaveholders and their apologists. The ethnologists offered one way out ofthis double bind by giving theological racÏsm a biblically acceptable narrative ofpolygenesis (83)." 66 Ibid, 86-87. 67 See Caucasian (pseudonym for William Campbell), Anthrop%gy for ail the People: A Refutation ofthe Theory ofAdamic Origin ofall Races (1891) and Ariel (pseudonym for Charles CarroI), The Tempter ofEve (1902). Cited in Stokes, The C%ur ofSex, 96. 68 According to census results their were 3.2 million slaves in the United States in 1850.80,538 infants were bom into slavery that year, approximately 13% of aIl births. Data taken from University of Virginia Library's th Geospatial and Statistical Data Centre, http://fisher.lib.virginia.eduJ. Accessed on August 25 , 2005.

30 institution to be absolved of aIl moral qualms. It is no wonder in 1845 Frederick Douglass would write,

l assert most unhesitatingly, that the religion, of the south is a mere covering for the most horrid of crimes, - a justifier of the most appalling barbarity, - a sanctifier of the most hateful frauds, - and a dark shelter under which ... slaveholders find the strongest protection ... For of aIl the slaveholders l have ever met, religious slaveholders are the worst. 69

It is clear that the Christian religion has been a tool to shore up power for whites and to suppress and demean others on the basis of their skin colour.

Laying the foundations for a Manichean Delirium

In the following pages, l establish that European high art has played an important role in the racialization ofChristianity by its visuallightening of the Virgin Mary and Jesus

Christ, so much so that although they were of Jewish descent, by the nineteenth century they were depicted as Aryan. 70 The aryanization of Mary and Jesus is tied up in the hyperbolic modem dichotomy of white and black. Where once white and black were used to conjure up associations with both good and bad, over time white simplistically became that which is good and pure, and black became that which is bad and evil. For example, in the fifteenth century Rabelais described white as the colour of 'joy, pleasures, delights, and rejoicing,.71

Pleasure stands outside of a contemporary understanding of white as virginity, sterility, and purity based on the absence of 'sin'. Black also has an historical Western association with holiness. For example, a Byzantine mosaic in a monastery of Sinai illustrates the sixth century theory that at the moment ofhis transfiguration Christ was surrounded by a black

69 Frederick Douglass, Narrative ofthe life ofFrederick Douglass, an American Slave: Written by Himse/f. Boston: Anti-Slavery Office, 1845. 70 Roger Bastide, "Color, Racism and Christianity," Daedalus (1967, vol. 96, Iss. 2) 315. 71 Gage, Colour and Culture, 89.

31 light (fig. 7).72 This stands in direct contrast to later depictions of Christ such as Jean-Léon

Gérôme's Jérusalem (1867) (fig. 8) where a bright white light casts Christ's cross into shadow. Gérôme's white light is the focus ofthis work as the actual crosses are cut out of the frame. This suggests that white light is synonymous with Christian miracles, represented here by Christ's death. Associations of white and black beyond the age-old dichotomy of good and evil are weIl suppressed in later religious works. This change, the 'hardening' of a

Manichean dualism can be directly related to the stereotyping ofblacks in Europe, and the formation of white European identity across nations. According to Lowe, this occurred at the same time Europeans ceased to enslave whites and systematically changed to using black slaves. This switch at a "momentous time of white, European self-definition,,,73 enabled whites to entrench the Manichean dichotomy of dark and light to their own advantage.

In White Richard Dyer writes of the influence in Western society of the persistent

Manichean dualism, and the translation of good versus evil, light versus dark, white versus black, and beauty versus ugliness, onto skin colour.74 This mutation of Manichaeism has enabled a collapse of signifier and signified within Western art when evoking a white or black subject: white is purity and virtue, while black is chaos and degradation. Indeed, the

Manichean dichotomy was so persistent and ubiquitous in Western Europe, that in 1952

Frantz Fanon would diagnose society with a 'Manichean delirium.,75 The term Manichean refers to the world religion Manichaeism, that was based on the writings of a fourth century

Persian philosopher Mani. Manichaeism conceived of the inception of the world as the result

72 Gage, Colour and Culture, 55. Gage writes this is "a reflection of the view propagated by the sixth-century theologian the Pseudo-Dionysus, that at this moment in Christ's life, 'a cloud and darkness were about him' (Psalm 9617,2)." 73 Lowe, "The Stereotyping of Blacks Africans,"17. 74 Dyer, White, 17. 75 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grover Press, 1967 (1952)) 183.

32 of a battle between good and evil, where good manifested itself as light and black manifested itself as dark. The influence of the language of Manichaeism can be found throughout

Western thought. 76

While today good vs. evil, light vs. dark is conceived as white vs. black this has not always been the case. GoodiLight/White and EvillDarkIBlack is a modem assumption which builds upon conflations that have occurred through out the centuries.77 For example, linguists

Brent Berlin and Paul Kay argued in 1969 in favour of a univers al development of colour vocabularies where the initial stage is the acquisition of black and white. However, their critics demonstrated how "languages rarely distinguish between black and white but rather

'dark' and 'light', 'cool' and 'warm', or 'moist' and 'dry' .,,78 The conception of divine light beyond whiteness is common in pre-Renaissance works. For example, in a thirteenth century atrium mosaic in San Marco in Venice an angel presides over the separation of light from dark, which is symbolized by a red sun and a blue moon (fig. 9).79 Meanwhile, in Daphni in a mosaic of The Annunciation (c. 1080) (fig. 10) the holy spirit is a shimmering gold caught hovering between Gabriel and the Virgin Mary. In Colour and Culture John Gage argues that the question 'What is the colour of Divine Light?' is misleading as it was hue, not col our that was important in portraying divinity, and by extension God.80 This lack of c1ear colour symbolism is reflected in the writing of Mario Equicola, an art critic from sixteenth century ltaly. Equicola wrote in 1525 that there is no use in deducing colour meaning as there is no congruence between contemporary and ancient times, or for that matter between different

76 For more on this subject see Johannes van Oort, "Manichaeism: Its Sources and Influences on Western Christianity," Gnosis and Hermeticism: From Antiquity ta Modern Times, eds. Roelofvan den Broek and Wouter J. Hanegraff(New York: SUNY, 1998) 37-51. 77 For are the ancient roots of colour symbolism see Snowden Jr., Before C%r Prejudice, 1983. 78 Gage, C%ur and Culture, 78. 79 Ibid, 52. 80 Ibid, 58.

33 contemporary European countries. Likewise, in 1535 Fulvio Pellegrini Morato wrote in a book on colour symbolism that the "eye should be the only judge of colour assortments, irrespective ofmeaning.,,81

These 'non-theories' of colour symbolism contrast greatly to post-Renaissance conceptions of colour, in particular black and white. This shift in cultural perceptions was aptly summarized by art critic Paillot de Montabert in 1838. He wrote,

White is the symbol of Divinity or God; Black is the symbol of the evil spirit or the demon. White is the symbol of light ... Black is the symbol of darkness and darkness expresses aIl evils. White is the emblem ofharmony; Black is the emblem of chaos. White signifies supreme beauty; Black ugliness. White signifies perfection; Black signifies vice. White is the symbol of innocence, Black that of guilt, sin, and moral degradation. White, a positive color, indicates happiness. Black, a negative color, indicates misfortune. The battle between good and evil is symbolically expressed By the opposition of white and black. 82

From the early Renaissance onwards black finds its expression in representations of evil: this had direct implications for race. Of Renaissance England Anu Korhonen writes,

White Englishmen believed that they quite literally carried the image of God in their bodies and faces, whereas black Africans, whose bodies lacked the clear, pure, white, physical reflection of the divine presence, were seen in terms of sin and alienation from God.83

In this light, black people were associated with the devil. The examples from the Renaissance to the twentieth century are countless. Kate Lowe reports that European folk stories about

81 Both sources quoted in Gage, C%ur and Culture, 120. 82 Albert Boime, The Art ofExclusion: Representing Blacks in the IgJh century (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1990) 2. 83 Anu Korhonen, "Conceptualising black skin in Renaissance England," Black Africans in Renaissance Europe, eds T.F. Earle and K.J.P Lowe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005) 97.

34 people with black skin enabled negative stereotyping of Africans. In Spain, a common practice was to sneeze in the presence of a black person to ward off the devil. 84 In English medieval plays, Lucifer's skin would tum black as a sign ofhis faU from he aven to heU. 85 ln

1838 in the United States, Charles Dea would paint the devil as a black man with homs and glowing eyes in The Devi! and Tom Walker (1838), though the novel he was illustrating

(Washington Irving's Tales ofa Traveler, The Devi! and Tom Walker) provided no such description. 86 ln the 1906 silent film by American Alice Guy Blanché, La Vie du Christ, blacks are the villains of the piece, flageUating and crucifying Jesus, while white women and children aid, help and guide him.87

1 believe the shift of the hardening of black and white as evil and divine respectively can be attributed to two factors: the rising cult of whiteness whose roots are particularly evident in early Renaissance Venetian painting, and the demonization of black peoples to justify the rise of the Transatlantic Slave Trade. As Abdul R. JanMohamed writes: "Africans were perceived in a more or less neutral and benign manner before the slave trade developed; however once the triangular trade became established, Africans were newly characterized as the epitome of evil and barbarity. ,,88 Furthermore, "in the imaginary colonialist realm to say

'native' is automaticaUy to say 'evil' and to invoke immediately the economy of the

Manichean allegory.,,89 ln this way, canonical works which privilege the cult ofwhiteness, and the diminishment of people of colour helped lay the groundwork for the' Manichean

84 Kate Lowe, "The stereotyping of black Africans," 20. 8S Ibid, 106. 86 Guy C. McElroy, Facing History: The Black Image in American Art 1710-1940 (Washington DC: The Corcoran Gallery of Art with Bedford Arts Publishers, 1990) 36. 87 Gwendolyn Audrey Foster, Performing Whiteness: Postmodern Re/Constructions in the Cinema (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003) 56. 88 Abdul R. JanMohamed, "The Economy of Manichean Allegory: The Function of Racial Difference in Colonialist Literature", Critical Inquiry (1985, vol. 12, Iss. 1) 6l. 89 Ibid, 65.

35 delirium' that has infected Western society, and leads to the aryanization of Christ and the demonization of black people so prevalent in later centuries. In the pages that follow 1 will underline the rise of the cult of whiteness in Venetian painting, the appearance of Africans within Venetian painting in tandem with the arrivaI of African slaves in Northern Italy, and the symbolism of the black Magi in the Adoration of the Magi. In doing so 1 hope to make c1ear the role of canonical art historical works in racializing Christianity for the benefits of white Europeans, and the specious nature of the grafting of the white and black dichotomy onto good and evil.

The rising cult of whiteness in Venetian painting

ln Venetian C%ur Paul Hills introduces the concept of the Renaissance cult of whiteness. He describes the rising popularity for white in mosaics, glass works and pottery.

Hills attributes this to the "growing esteem for the sculpture of antiquity, for form as preeminent value, and hence for unpigmented marble ... White became the colour of sacred.,,90 This 'growing esteem' results in the blurring of the line between object, architecture and flesh, seen here in the preference for 'unpigmented marble'. This cult of whiteness stems form what John Gage calls, for most people, a 'reduced colour vocabulary' where colour "has a powerful effect on perception itself, so that colour-perception and colour-Ianguage turn out to be c10sely bound up with the other.,,91 That is, colour becomes an overwhelming signifier: white automatically conjures up purity, and black, chaos. The privileging of whiteness in the decorative arts and in architecture resonates and infects the

90 Paul Hills, Venetian c%ur: marb/e, mosaic, painting and glass, 1250-1550 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999) 151. Hills writes that this view echoes that of Cicero and Plato who proposed that temples should be 'perfectly clean and white.' 91 Gage, C%ur and Culture, 78.

36 depiction of skin colour. This results in an increased association of the sacred and pure with white skin.

The rising cult of whiteness is particularly evident in Giovanni Bellini's 1505 S.

Zaccharia Altarpiece (fig. 11), which precedes and undoubtedly influences Titian's Pesaro altarpiece. In it the Virgin Mary holds a naked Christ Child before her; below them an angel plays a violin. On her right stands St. Catherine with a palm leaf, a sign of Christ's martyrdom, and St. Peter with his keys. To the left stands St. Lucy and St. Jerome. A perfectly balanced composition, the Christ Child is the whitest. The heads of St. Lucy and St.

Catherine, which are closest to the Christ Child, are similarly white, while St. Jerome and St.

Peter on the periphery are much darker. The white arches above echo the circular and radiating composition ofwhiteness. On the one hand, this reflects Hills' view that,

according to the standard medieval decorum goveming complexion, women and children had paler skin than adults, peasants more tanned skin than nobles; saints known for a rugged out-of-doors existence, such as John the Baptist, were painted as swarthier than gentler, more studious ones.92

Hills continues and admits that "the se distinctions, while having sorne basis in experience, nevertheless privileged whiteness.',93 However, skin colour in the S. Zaccharia Altarpiece, has more to do with the compression of the sacred with flesh, than with actual experience of skin colour. St. Jerome who is the saint associated with the outdoors is just as dark as St.

Peter, suggesting their skin colour has more to do with their relational distance to the Virgin

Mary and Christ Child than any standard portrayal of these saints. This work expresses a compression ofwhiteness with Christianity, where the Virgin Mary and Christ Child must be

92Hills, Venetian C%ur, 212 93 Ibid, 212.

37 the white st people in the work, and bequeath degrees ofwhiteness on those around them.94

Both Bellini and Titian's altarpieces signal a transition to a simplistic and symbolically loaded means ofperceiving white skin in terms ofpurity. Works that privilege the association of white skin with holiness and thus the association of good/light/white typically express this by having a central white point that decreases by degrees as it radiates out. This central white point is often the Virgin Mary and nude Christ Child, the Virgin Mary and dead nude Christ, or the adult Christ alone. In Renaissance and post-Renaissance works they are often so white that they themselves radiate light.95 Whiteness is also emphasized by white c1othing, seen here in the Virgin Mary's white headdress in Bellini and Titian's altarpieces.

White c10thing prominently appears in non-religious works at this time for as Paul Hills writes, "to be able to afford white c10thes implied a rarefied lifestyle ... immaculate whiteness signified total protection from dirt, and therefore leisured activity.,,96 Meanwhile, Dyer adds that "whiteness, we have come to believe, shows the dirt with unique c1arity and certainty. In particular, it shows the dirt of the body.,,97 Thus, white c10thing ensures the purity of the body: something of paramount importance in the Virgin Mary and Christ Child who are, in the Christo-European sphere of influence, paragons ofwhiteness.

Whiteness is also marked in Christ and Mary, as Richard Dyer writes, by their 'gentile' features. Works such as Giovanni Bellini' s Madonna and Child with John the Baptist and

Ste. Elizabeth (c. 1490-95) (fig. 12) depict the Madonna and Child with strikingly white skin and "refined" features. Dyer writes, "while this may be an anachronistic perception, the difference between JohnlElizabeth and ChristlMary resembles that between Sephardic Jews

94 That said, when the Virgin Mary and Christ Child are depicted alone they are likely to not be as white, seen in Titian's 1512 Gypsy Madonna, so-called because her dark skin is so unusual. 95 Dyer, White, 67. % Hills, Venetian C%ur, 192. 97 Dyer, White, 76.

38 (Arab in appearance) and Gentiles (white ones, that iS).,,98 Their hyperbolic white skin is an obsessively repeated motif in later works, so much so that Venetian critic Mario Equicola cautioned painters to not allow the pallor of white skin to resemble marble.99

Equicola's waming no doubt is a precursor to Dyer's insight that the consequences of the ways whites embody and enact their whiteness is an inescapable deathliness. Dyer tums to Walter Pater to make his point. In his late nineteenth century writing on Greek sculpture,

Pater addressed the whiteness of antique marble/flesh. He wrote, "That white light, purged from the angry, bloodlike stains of action and passion, reveals, not what is accidentaI in man, but the tranquil godship in him, as opposed to the restless accidents of life. ,,100 That is, the

(Christian) struggle for man is to locate his white light, which is tainted by energy, action and passion. To embody this white light man must disembody, and absolve himself of the

'restless accidents of life,' suggesting this can only be achieved in death.

Art Historical mis-readings of race: Ignoring race in Venetian painting

In his small book Africans in Europeans Eyes: The Portrayal ofBlack Africans in llh and 15th c. Europe (1974) Peter Mark makes explicit the connection between the appearance of West Africans in both Northem European and Italian painting, and the arrivaI of West

Africans in these countries due to the rise of the Transatlantic Slave Trade. 101 For Mark, the inclusion ofblacks within high art signaIs a fascination with difference in physiognomy and colour on behalf of the Europeans and the tactical inclusion of West Africans to create

98 Ibid, 67. 99 RiIls, Venetian Colour, 212. 100 Dyer, White, 207. h lOI Peter Mark, Africans in European Eyes: The Portrayal ofBlack Africans in 14' and 15,h Century Europe (Syracuse: Syracuse University, 1974) 85-86.

39 variation in a work's colour scheme. I02 For example, he describes the naked black man in

Gentile Bellini's Miracle at the Bridge ofSan Lorenzo (1500) (fig. 13) as follows:

Gentile often enlivened his pictures with anecdotal incidents, and in this painting he has depicted a black man, stripped to his undershorts and preparing to dive into the canal. . .In this small episode, undoubtedly derived from Gentile's observation of everyday life in Venice, the body of the young African contrasts against the sunlit wall against which he is silhouetted ... Gentile saw and emphasized well the possibilities of the black body. 103

Mark goes on to argue that the representation ofblacks within early Renaissance Venetian art had an 'egalitarian spirit' and 'does not present a racist view of the black man . .I04 This willingness to subsume racial implications to aesthetic considerations within painting by art historians is echoed by Paul Hills in Venetian C%ur who assures the reader that rather than resort to "indiscriminate association of dark skin with exoticism, Venetian paintings indicate more nuanced differences [than other cultural productions]." 105 This unwillingness, endemic amongst art historians, to investigate the complicity of high art in attitudes and beliefs about race, Christianity and colonialism is further echoed by Hills when he does not discuss the black man in Gentile Bellini's Miracle though he does note the artist's aptitude for contrasting "varied skin tones ... [and] the nuancing offlesh tints.,,106

While Mark makes the connection between the rise of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, the arrivaI of West Africans in Europe, and the appearance of West Africans within European art, his scholarship fails to reveal the literaI connection between slavery, the black bodies of early Renaissance art, and racism. For one, in Miracle it is telling that the black man is the only one who stands nearly nude amongst the plethora of clothed individuals, and that he is

\02 Ibid, 93-95. \03 Ibid, 92-93. 104 Ibid, 95-97. \05 Hills, Venetian C%ur, 212. 106 Ibid, 212.

40 one offew who is seemingly unaware of the miracle happening before him. That Mark chalks this up to 'Gentile's observation of everyday life' ignores the exclusion from divine happenstance on the basis of colour, in tandem with the cheery degradation of a Black man who seemingly does not care, as the white people likely would, that he is nearly naked. Kate

Lowe argues that the across-the-board European classification of black Africans as slaves (in comparison to Jews, Muslims, gypsies and Amerindians) stems from their classification as

'savages' based on their status as non-Christians, and other factors such as sparse clothing.

Almost aH Europeans who went to Africa commented on African's 'near nakedness', placing

Africans at the bottom of a European hierarchy where status was marked by the value of the material of one's clothing. 107 Miracle at the Bridge ofSan Lorenzo stands firmly within the racialization of Christianity where white people are deemed to be closer to salvation than people of colour. That this man does not figure within the miracle, which is the focus of the work, reflects the Eurocentric nature ofChristianity. This work is complicit in supporting a divine superiority of Europeans over non-Europeans. This privileging of Europeans can be traced back to the New Testament, whose effects we can see here.

Benign justification of atrocity: The black Magi' s gift of Africa to Europe

The intersection ofChristianity, colonialism and the rise of the Transatlantic Slave

Trade is reflected in the popularization of the theme of the Adoration of the Magi, whose popularity is distinguished by its frequent, though not exclusive, depiction of one of the kings as black. This first occurred in 1355 on a woodcarving on the tympanum in the Church of

Thann in Germany, though it took nearly a century for this motifto spread. In Northem Italy

107 Lowe, "The Stereotyping of Black Africans," 21. Furthermore, that sorne groups of African wornen did not coyer their breasts, counter to European ideals of sexuality, served to enforce negative stereotypes ofblack fernale sexuality.

41 the increased depiction of a black Magi came with the increased complicity of the region with the trade of African slaves in the last quarter of the fifteenth century. One ofthe region's first examples is by Andrea Mantegna and entitled Adoration ofthe Magi (1464) (fig. 14).108

Noting the 'sweetened' features ofthese many black kings, Jean Devisse and Michel MoHat argue this appearance has "little to do with the increasing number of Africans in Europe foHowing the Portuguese discoveries [in Africa].,,109 Devisse and MoHat offer few conclusions about the meaning ofthis figure. They portray the black Magi's arrivaI as the manifestation of a new European mentality about Africans. "One would see in it the growth of curiosity, the hesitations and prejudices, the open mind, naïveté and ignorance, wealth old and new, and decadence.,,110 Neither art historians Devisse and MoHat nor Mark, aH working in the mid to late 1970s, seek to explain the almost across the board minimization of the black Magi in comparison to his companions, which was first noted by sociologist Roger

Bastide in 1967. III The black Magi is consistently painted farthest away from the Virgin

Mary and Christ Child. He is weH behind the other two Magis, and the closest to the ground in Mantegna's piece. Even in the case of Jacopo Bassano's The Adoration ofthe Magi

(1560-1565), where the black Magi appears to be closer to the manger than his companion, the white Magi's hand snakes past him to claim that status (fig. 15). It is not until1990 that

Albert Boime in The Art ofExclusion offers the foHowing insight,

One does not have to be a Freudian to perceive the wish fantasy inherent in this image. Instead ofmissionaries and slavers invading the black man's lands and plundering its wealth and subjugating its people by force, this noble and "wise" black ruler cornes ofhis own volition to the white man's land and lays down his

108 Mark, Africans in European Eyes, 49. 109 Jean Devisse and Michel MoHat, The Image ofthe Black in Western Art II: From the Early Christian Era to the "Age ofDiscovery, "trans. William Granger Ryan (New York: William Morrow & Company, 1979) 178. 110 Ibid, 175. III Bastide, 'Color, Racism and Christianity," 316. Bastide writes: "Racism subsisted in the disguised form of a patronizing attitude in this flfst attempt [by depicting Balthazar as black] to remove the demoniac symbolism from the black skin" 'Color, Racism and Christianity."

42 wealth and his power at the feet of the Christ child. His recognition of the superiority of the Christian religion is his ticket to the august company from which he had been heretofore excluded. 112

Here Christ, Westem Europe and Whites are one and the same. The black Magi is the first major black character in European art and he is granted that status by his wholesale acceptance ofChristianity, "admission to which is European-controlled.,,113 Balthazar "lays down his wealth and his power" making him another Ham, another scapegoat for the enslavement of black people. His presence signaIs and justifies the severe degradation of ohis people' based on their skin colour in later works of art.

Conclusion

l have endeavored to show how European art has partaken in the racialization of

Christianity by enabling a shift in the color association of white and black, where white is on the side of Christianity, and black is its antithesis. This shift largue occurs around the influx ofblack slaves into Europe in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, and at a time where European white identity was forming for the first time across national borders. This shift is clearly manifested in Venetian Renaissance art where we witness the use of whiteness to mark holiness, and to aryanize both Christ and Mary. It is also witnessed through the increased inclusion of black bodies into art, which emerge as a means to deepen negative stereotypes around blacks, and to soften the brutality of slavery. The simplistic association of colour with flesh and person with symbol (black pers on equals evil, and white person equals good) justified indiscriminant enslavement based on skin colour, and the alignment of

Christianity with whiteness. l have cited numerous sources that depict divinity and holiness through the use of colour, rather than that non-colour white. l have done so to illustrate how

112 Boime, The Art ofExclusion, 9. 113 Cuthbertson "The English-Speaking Churches and Colonialism," 116.

43 constructed, and indeed unnatural whiteness as a marker of holiness is. By the end of the

Renaissance, the Manichean dualisms would later spiral out of control. Whiteness would take on death-like qualities, and black seem beyond recuperation. In the end, it is only by activating alternative associations with black and white that we can move beyond the

'Manichean delirium' that has so infected our society.

44 ChapterTwo A Challenge to Whiteness: Chris Ofili's The Holy Virgin Mary

Painted against a background of glittering gold, Chris Ofili's The Holy Virgin Mary

(1996) leaned against the wall supported by two clumps of dung, the word Virgin inscribed on one clump and Mary on the other (fig. 16). She floated on the Canvas, her black body alternately covered and revealed by the blue vaginal folds of her dress. Like many representations of the Virgin Mary one breast was exposed, yet this time it had been delicately molded out of a resin-coated piece of dung decorated with brightly coloured pins.

The Christ Chi Id, to whom this breast is usually offered, was notably absent. A sparkling halo radiated from the Virgin's head intersecting with butterfly shapes, evocative ofputti that spread across the canvas and layered atop her blue dress. On closer inspections these butterflies revealed themselves as women's buttocks and labia, cut and pasted from pornographic magazines. The Holy Virgin Mary re-inscribed blackness and sexuality onto

Mary's body. These elements emerge as beautiful and intrinsic to her body, not antithetical to her form and blasphemous as protestors would later charge this piece with being.

Chris Ofili (b. 1968) was born and raised in Manchester, England. The child of

Nigerian immigrants, he is a practicing Catholic. Having graduated from the Royal College of Art in London in 1993 with a Masters in Painting, he quickly became an established artist, winning the prestigious Turner Prize in 1998. The Holy Virgin Mary signaled a shift towards figurative work and literaI representation for Ofili. It was the first in a number ofworks that complicated representations ofhyper-sexed black women. Works such as Foxy Roxy (1997),

Blossom (1997), and Rodin (1997-1998) and even The Naked Soul ofCaptain Shit and the

Legend ofBlackstars (1999) put a great deal of responsibility on the viewer for an

45 examination oftheir collusion in racial stereotypes (fig. 17-20). The Holy Virgin Mary is distinguished in Ofili's oeuvre for recasting a typically white icon as black, and for merging a

Western sensibility of the sacred and the profane. In doing so, Ofili joined ranks with other contemporary artists, such as Andres Serrano, who refused to respect Western divisions of pure and impure. The subsequent controversy surrounding The Holy Virgin Mary stems from the entrenchment of notions ofpurity, and the stakes many feel are at risk in preserving it.

This painting, simply described by many viewers as 'beautiful,' 114 was the subject of controversy and outrage when first exhibited at the 1999 Brooklyn Art Museum's Sensation.

For Ofili, the disruption ofhegemonic norms, embodied by typical 'white' and 'pure' Virgin

Marys, and the stereotypes of black femininity, represented here by the pornographic cut- outs, are not meant to be blithely digested. However, no one, not Ofili, or the Brooklyn

Museum anticipated the vehement anger directed against this piece in the United States. This prote st was marked by Catholics holding pictures of what they believed the Virgin Mary should look like, and ultimately culminated in the vandalization of The Holy Virgin Mary. 1 argue that this response stems from the media's manipulation of the situation, and the capitalization by Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and Catholic League president William Donohue on hegemonic defensiveness surrounding the Virgin Mary. The Holy Virgin Mary is a potentially volatile piece because it assaults an ideal of Christianity that is based on whiteness. Ofili achieved this disruption by conflating two opposing racial types of femininity: the hyper-white, serene and maternaI Virgin Mary and the hyper-sexualized black women, the juxtaposition of which dismantles the two.

\14 David Halle, Elisabeth Tiso, and Gihong Yi, "The Attitude of the Audience from 'Sensation' and of the General Public toward Controversial Work of Art," Unsettling "Sensation": Arts-Policy Lessonsfrom the Brooklyn Museum ofArt Controversy, " ed. Lawrence Rothfield (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2001) 140. The authors write that audience members, who they surveyed upon their exiting the exhibit, most often described Ofili's piece as beautiful.

46 In this chapter 1 begin by recounting the controversy, analyzing it as strategy by

American whites to "resecure the centre, the place, for whites.,,115 The prominent display of

The Holy Virgin Mary in the second largest museum in the Unites States, and the wide publication ofthis event, provided the ultimate challenge to the Manichean dualism ofblack and white. The display of this work unseated whiteness as the colour of holiness and replaced it with black. In the first chapter 1 recounted how the hardening of the colour symbolism of white and black occurred in Renaissance Europe, within the context of the rise of the

Transatlantic Slave Trade, as a means to strengthen and centralize the core of Europe as white, and its other as black. The ramifications of this Manichean delirium were widely felt at the controversy surrounding the Brooklyn Museum of Art. Protestors and the media repetitively focused on the elephant dung, far outweighing any concem expressed about the pomography. It became c1ear that elephant dung was more offensive than explicitly photographed vaginas and anuses. Dung was quickly disassociated from its fertile qualities and redressed as shit, as an abject substance. Like Serrano's infamous Piss Christ, in The

Holy Virgin Mary the purity of a Christian icon came under attack by suggesting the leakiness ofMary's body, that her body was a living functioning entity. Racist anxiety about protecting this white icon was not expressed by protesting directly against her blackness, but by protesting against the dung. In this way the inversion of the Manichean dichotomy, which occurred here through a spiritual representation ofblackness, is negated. The editors of New

th York's most popular black newspaper, Amsterdam News, in the September 30 , 1998 edition were the first to get to the heart of the matter. They wrote,

115 Thomas K. Nakayama and Robert L. Krizek, "Whiteness as Strategic Rhetoric," Whiteness: The Communication ofSocial Identity, eds. Thomas K. Nakayama and Judith N, Martin (Thousand Oaks, Califomia: Sage Publications, 1999) 93. In understanding this controversy 1 am partieularly aided by the insights of Nakayama and Krizek who, drawing form Michel de Certeau's distinction between strategies (which are tools of the dominant) and tactics (whieh are tools of the marginalized), propose that in America whites partake in a strategie rhetoric that "functions to resecure the centre, the place, for whites."

47 Ofili portrays Mary as a rather exciting Black with impressive eyes, a hint of breast upon which a piece of dung has been placed, signifying nourishment, the color of darkness, a broad nose and a sensuousness not generaUy assumed when one sees the Eurocentric version of Mother Mary ... We believe that his [Giuliani's] sensibilities were shocked by the beliefthat Mother Mary happened to be sorne colour other than the colour that he has accepted for 1 everything that is good and pure and right and white. 16

Like the editors of Amsterdam News l believe that what is objectionable to Giuliani, what he caUs 'sick,' ll7 is the Virgin Mary's colour: she is not white, she is black. A black Mary becomes objectionable because of the primacy attributed to the hegemonic white Mary.

To demonstrate that the skin colour of the Virgin Mary is a crucial site of contention l will contextualize The Holy Virgin Mary against those Madonnas to which she is implicitly compared: traditional Western representations of white Virgin Marys. l will demonstrate how these iconic Marys function as ideals for white femininity and how non-white Madonnas are marginalized in order to bolster their hegemony. In essence, largue that the white Virgin

Mary is the epitome of the female body successfuUy contained and controUed. Lynda Nead argues that the principal goal of the c1assical female nude is the successful control of women's sexuality through "a kind ofmagical regulation of the female body, containing it and momentarily repairing the orifices and tears."ll8 The European Virgin Mary goes one step further for its principal goal is the successful control ofwoman's sexuality through a complete disavowal ofher body. In these works, the disavowal of the Virgin's body is expressed through a masking ofher entire body in robes and the severe whitening ofher skin.

The Virgin Mary is often so white that her earthly existence in a living and active body is put into doubt. The Virgin Mary is an improbable ideal offemininity, marking what women

116 Steven C. Dubin, Displays ofPower: Controversy in the American Museum from the Enola Gay to Sensation (with a new afterward) (New York: New York University Press, 2001) 253-254. 117 Dan Barry and Carol Vogel, "Giuliani Vows to Cut Subsidy Over 'Sick' Art," The New York Times (September 23 rd 1999) Al. 118 Lynda Nead, The Female Nude: Are, Obscenity and Sexuality (London and New York: Routledge, 1992) 7.

48 should but cannot be. As Richard Dyer writes, "the Virgin Mary is a supreme exemplar ofthis feminine whiteness ... She goes even further than the most refined white lady: she reproduces without sex.,,119

While the Virgin Mary is often experienced by white women as oppressive of any positive experience of female sexuality,120 she also enables an identification on behalf of white women with the pinnac1e ofChristianity. This pinnac1e, through the body of the Virgin

Mary (and the body of Christ), is marked as white. Through the hegemonic white Virgin

Mary, women of colour are displaced outside the centre ofChristianity, indeed colour is antithetical to the body ofthis Virgin Mary. Chris Ofili's The Holy Virgin Mary directly counters hegemonic Virgin Mary's in terms ofboth sexuality and race, which, in the case of

Western Virgin Mary, are endlessly bound up in each other. Hence, 1 posit that at its heart the controversy surrounding the Brooklyn Museum is in direct response to Ofili's challenge to 'race' and female sexuality, particularly how it is constituted through Christianity.

Despite its infamy, The Holy Virgin Mary has typically been granted little real critical attention. My intention is to critically focus on this work, displacing misconceptions heaped upon it by the controversy. My argument is that in Ofili's oeuvre dung is utilized as a means to both manifest and counter racism against black people in the West. However, 1 will show that it is exactly that which Ofili uses to subvert racism, elephant dung, which enabled the expression ofracism in the Brooklyn Museum controversy. 1 begin here with the controversy. 1 will then move us away from the controversy, demonstrating the relationship of whiteness to the Virgin Mary and why The Holy Virgin Mary is problematic in this sphere.

119 Richard Dyer, White, 74. 120 Julia Kristeva, "Stabat Mater," The Female Body in Western Culture: Contemporary Perspectives, ed. Susan Rubin Suie iman (Cambridge London: Harvard University Press, 1985) 108. Kristeva writes that in the Virgin Mary "sexuality is reduced to a mere implication ... A woman has only two choices: either to experience herself in sex hyperabstractly (in an 'immediately universal' way, as Hegel would say) so as to make herselfworthy of divine grace and assimilation to the symbolic order, or else to experience herself as difJerent, other, fallen."

49 Finally, 1 will conclude with an analysis ofOfili's piece, refocusing the reader's attention on a work that has been gravely misrepresented within the public sphere.

The Controversy

The Holy Virgin Mary came to New York via the traveling exhibit Sensation from the

Royal Academy of Arts (London, UK), which featured the collection of Charles Saatchi. His collection is largely comprised of the works of Young British Artists (yBa) who include, amongst others, Chris Ofili, Damien Hirst, Richard Billingham, Marc Quinn, Rachel

Whiteread, and Jake and Dinos Chapman. The furor around Chris Ofili's piece burst onto the scene when New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani vehemently reacted to a Daily News article entitled "Gallery of Horror", based on a joumalist' s sneak peak of the exhibit.!2! This article erroneously described Ofili's piece as depicting the Virgin Mary 'splattered in dung'.

A couple days later, after viewing the exhibition catalogue (but not the actual exhibit),

Giuliani staged a news conference where he denounced Sensation, describing the work as

122 'sick stuff. Despite the many potentially controversial works in the exhibit , his outrage focused on Ofili's Holy Virgin Mary saying,

You don't have the right to govemment subsidy for desecrating somebody else's religion. And therefore we will do everything we can to remove funding from the Brooklyn Museum until the director cornes to his senses and realizes that ifyou are a govemment-subsidized enterprise, then you can't do things that desecrate the most personal and dee~ly held views of people in society. 1 mean, this is an outrageous thing to do.! 3

th \2\ Adam Stembergh, 'Aftershock,' New York (May 9 2005, vol. 38, Iss. 16) 84. \22 Halle, "The Attitude of the Audience," 134-152. When displayed in England it was Marcus Harvey's portrait of child-killer Myra Hindley that caused the largest protest. In New York an exit poll ofviewer's reactions illustrates that viewer's found other works to be more offensive than The Holy Virgin Mary. In particular, Damion Hirst's dissected pig in This little piggy went to the market, and this little piggy stayed at home, or Jake and Dinos Chapman's sculpture of young mutant girls with deformed genitalia in Zygotic acceleration, biogenetic, de-sublimated libidinal model (enlarged x 1000). \23 Barry, "Giuliani Vows to Cut Subsidy Over 'Sick' Art," Al.

50 With this gauntlet thrown down The Holy Virgin Mary was thrown into the spotlight: political and religious figures, and the media at large, jumped into the fray.

In New York State, Catholics constitute 44% of the electorate, making them an important voting group in the eyes of politicians.I24 No doubt their political power, combined with the need to distract voters from systemic problems in the running of the city, influenced

Giuliani's decision to atlack the Brooklyn Museum. Although, how effective he was in doing so is doubtful. I25 The Mayor's public displays of outrage were also likely influenced by his desire to run for the Senate. Giuliani needed the approval of the State Conservative Party, whom he had alienated by his support of abortion rights groups. Their endorsement in the upcoming Senate election, in which he was competing against First Lady Hilary Clinton, was crucial. Reacting to Sensation, which received wide news coverage, Clinton disagreed with

Giuliani's stand, calling it "a very wrong response" but stated, "that there are parts ofthis show that are very offensive. l would not go to see this exhibit.,,126 Despite Clinton's refusaI to engage the contents of this exhibit, Giuliani lambasted her: "Well, then, she agrees with using public funds to atlack and bash the Catholic religion.,,127 The Holy Virgin Mary became a ping-pong ball in agame where the points were votes. I28

124 Franklin Foer, "The fme art ofpolitics: A New York museum's scatological show makes it an issue in the Rudy- Hillary race," U.S. News & World Report (Oct Ilth 1999, vol. 127, Iss. 14) 30. 125 Dubin, Display ofPower, 261. Dubin also writes "almost a month after the story was first published, a Daily New poil showed that city residents disapproved of the Mayor's handling ofthis incident two to one and repudiated his decision to cut funding to the museum. Roughly the same percentage ofCatholic's opposed the Mayor's actions (272)." 126 Adam Nagoumey, "First Lady Assails Mayor Over Threat to Museum," The New York Times (September 2Sth 1999) B5. 127 Foer, "The fine art ofpolitics," 30. 128 Throughout the controversy Giuliani levered any number of charges against the museum: that it improperly used private donors, that it violated the terros of the city's funding by charging for admission to the museum, and so on. In the end, the courts stopped Giuliani from retracting funding from the museum, ruling that to do so would violate the first amendment.

51 Franklin Foer reported that Clinton's position was tempered so as not to "alienate white ethnics," whose mouthpiece he identified as "sorne prominent Italian-Americans.,,129

The Brooklyn Museum controversy hinged on the claiming of ethnic status by Catholics (by groups such as the prominent New York based Catholic League), and their mistreatment in the wake of 'fair treatment' for minority groups. The president of the Catholic League,

William Donohue, spoke to this sentiment on The Today Show (NBC, September 27, 1999) when he said,

Our Blessed Mother is very important to Catholics. It's more important to Catholics than Martin Luther King (Jr.) might be to the African American Community. And when you throw elephant dung, have pictures ofvaginas and anuses surrounding her in this kind of invidious fashion, my answer to that is, 'Go show your filth down the street, find a fat-cat bigot - there's plenty of them - and let them sponsor it. ,130

Donohue makes a parallel between Catholics (whose si de the Virgin Mary is on) and African

Americans (whose side King Jr. is on). Implicitly, white Catholics become a marginalized group, akin to black Americans, and to deny their victimhood is to become a bigot; never mind the strength and power of Catholic numbers, and the longstanding influence and power of the Roman Catholic Church.

The right of white Catholics to claim an ethnic status is entirely different than racially marked Americans, such as African and Asian Americans, whose ethnicity is continually reinforced in a white centric society. In her seminal study Ethnie Options: Choosing

Identities in America, Mary Waters argues that this claiming of ethnicity (which she terms symbolic ethnicity) "persists because it meets a need Americans have for community without individual cost and that a potential societal cost of this symbolic ethnicity is in its subtle

129 Foer, "The fine art ofpolitics," 30. 130 Andrâs Szânt6, "Don 't Shoot the Messenger: Why the art W orld and the Press Don't Get Along," Unsettling "Sensation "; Arts-Policy Lessons from the Brooklyn Museum ofArt Controversy, ed. Lawrence Rothfield (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2001) 186.

52 reinforcement ofracism."l3l In this controversy the subtle reinforcement ofracism occurs around the figure of the Virgin Mary, whose blackness runs counter to a white Christian norm. What this controversy reinforced was the beliefthat the Virgin Mary, particularly in a site concemed with the public good such as a museum,132 should only be depicted in one way: as an icon of white femininity.

The most virulent of the protesting voices aimed at The Holy Virgin Mary came from the president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, William Donohue. The

Catholic League is a far-right group which presents itself as a civil rights organization. As

John M. Swomley describes in the Humanist, "its primary mission is to censor or suppress any activity, language, speech, publication, or media presentation that it considers offensive to the papacy, the Vatican, or the Catholic Church in America.,,133 The Catholic League positions Catholics as victims in today's society due to the privileging ofminorities (in particular Jewish and queer communities), which they believe are granted undue amount of media and state favoritism. Catholic groups who fall out of line from the Vatican, such as

'Call to Action', 'Catholics for a Free Choice', and 'Dignity', are also subject to their ire.

The Catholic League's tactics are highly effective in influencing the media's portrayal of

Catholicism.134

The Sensation show was an ideal target for the League. Before Giuliani even called a news conference, the League was sending members onto the streets to distribute pamphlets.

\31 Mary Waters, Ethnie Options: Choosing Identities in America (Berkeley: University ofCalifomia Press, 1990) 164. 132 Kathryn Maria Freise, Reverberating disputes: Public art, controversy, and memory, PhD Dissertation (New Mexico: The University of New Mexico, 2003) 151. 133 John M. Swomley, "A league of the Pope's own," The Humanist (JanlFeb 1998 vol. 58 Iss. 1) 32. 134 For an account of the Catholic League's trials and tribulations see their yearly reports posted on their website th at http://www.catholicleague.org. Accessed on June 30 , 2005.

53 When the controversy hit the news stands they called for the whole city to picket the show, 135 and later organized protests outside of the museum where they handed-out vomit bags.

W.J.T. Mitchell explains the indignation felt by many pious Catholics at these protests,

The logic go es like this: the Madonna's image is offended by being rendered in excremental materials; if her image is offended, than she herself must be offended, then all who venerate her and her image must be offended as well. If the thing l respect or love is insulted, than l am insulted. 136

What Mitchell pinpoints, is that often a representation of the Virgin Mary is literally read as the Virgin Mary. At time flirting with iconoclasm, there is little separation between a representation of the Virgin Mary, and the Virgin Mary herself. Rence, any offence toward the purity ofher image is perceived as an offence against her and thus all Catholics. For these protestors the mis-representation of the Virgin Mary as impure is a direct affront to

Catholics.

At the prote st people carried signs reading: "Paint Mary the way Jesus Sees Rer!" and

"Sensation Art Looks Like Your Mother, Not Our Blessed Mother".137 These signs seem to suggest that paintings are literaI representations of the body of the Virgin. This controversy became, in many ways, about how the Virgin Mary should or should not be depicted.

Protestors touted traditional images of the Virgin Mary that invariably depicted a light skinned Virgin, her body always shrouded from view: one placard showed an illustration of a white pious Mary, another group ofprotestors held up images of the Virgin of Guadalupe

(Fig. 31) and Robert Feruzzi's maternaI and conventional La Modonnina (1896-97). The

135 Barry, "Giuliani Vows to Cut Subsidy Over 'Sick' Art," A5. 136 W.J.T. Mitchell, "Offending Images," Unsettling "Sensation": Arts-Policy Lessonsfrom the Brooklyn Museum ofArt Controversy, " ed. Lawrence Rothfieid (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2001) 124. 137 For pictures of the protest see Steven C. Dubin, Disp/ays ofPower: Controversy in the American Museum from the Eno/a Gay to Sensation (with a new afterward) (New York: New York University Press, 2001) 248- 249. Also see, Steven C. Dubin, "How Sensation became a ScandaI," Art in America (January 2000, vol. 88 Iss. 1) 53-55.

54 signs demonstrate the problem of representing the Virgin Mary. It seems that in the mind of the faithful worshiper there is no separation between the Virgin Mary and her image.

Protestors thus tote representations of 'their' Virgin Mary to provide a counter image to The

Holy Virgin Mary.

The media played a pivotaI role in sustaining this controversy. In fact, it was reporters from The DaUy News who initially brought The Holy Virgin Mary to Giuliani and Donohue's attention and solicited their response. 138 For the media's part, they unduly focused on the elephant dung describing it in a number of incorrect ways. In an investigation of the media's framing of this story Steven Dubin summarized the florid use of vocabulary in describing the plece.

It was 'dotted', 'spotted', 'dappled', 'daubed' and 'laced' with it. Mary was 'immersed,' 'splashed,' 'splotched,' 'studded,' 'covered,' and 'festooned' in dung, after it allegedly had been 'flung,' 'hurled,' and 'thrown' - in lumps. The painting was reported to 'blaspheme' the Vircfin Mary and to 'disparage,' 'degrade,' 'desecrate,' and 'bedevil' her image. 13

It seems that when reporting on art, joumalists are not held to a high standard of accuracy.

Andras Szant6 reports that The Holy Virgin Mary was inaccurately portrayed, without retractions or corrections, once by the Today Show, five times by The New York Post, and twice by the Cleveland Plain Dealer. In this last newspaper, Columnist Dick Feagler went as far to write, "The creative muse visits people according to her whim. And when she visits artists, she often picks sociopaths.,,140 The vehemence ofmany people's response was particularly disturbing and revealed anxieties about the intersection of race, sex and religion.

When reporters favorably presented Ofili's work (distinguished by initial coverage from The New York Times, and Newsweek) they justified the use of dung as a reference to

138 Dubin, Displays ofPower, 264-265. 139 Dubin, Displays ofPower, 265. 140 Andras Szant6, "Don't Shoot the Messenger," 189.

55 Ofili' s African heritage, and as a symbol of regeneration. While there is merit to this estimation, it simplifies the piece and avoids the multifarious meanings the dung takes on in particular the use of feces to subvert and challenge racist stereotypes ofblackness.141 In a

Times article Steven Madoff dismissed The Holy Virgin Mary as a 'calculated come on.'

However, l was struck by how Madoffs complaints were based on a white Western sensibility ofbeauty and color. He writes, "It has long been a vogue of contemporary art to focus on social issues at the expense of classical ideals ofbeauty.,,142 It seems ridiculous to criticize a contemporary work because it diverges from historical conceptions ofbeauty.

Furthermore, lets not be mistaken that 'classical', beauty in a Western art historical context has always been white. The vogue for classical sculpture from the Renaissance, to its rejuvenation in nineteenth century's Neo-classicism and its continuing privileging is firmly imbedded in ideals ofwhiteness and the Aryan body. 143

Classical beauty and profiles have long been contrasted against African beauty and profiles in order to sustain white primacy and to de grade the black body. Madoffs pining for classical beauty in the context of an African Virgin Mary echoes this history. Byexample, one 1868 illustration by the anthropologists Nott and Golden created a hierarchy of species

(fig. 23). In the image Apollo Belvedere is placed at the top, while in the middle is the profile of an African, which exaggerates a 'muzzle', and lastly there is the profile of an ape. This illustration's claim is clear; whites are classical and ideal, a 'superior' form ofbeauty, while blacks are more similar to animaIs than they are to whites. In Nott and Golden's illustration, the classical body of antiquity is conflated with the ideal white body. These are ideals that

141 Coco Fusco, "Captain Shit and Other Allegories of Black Stardom: The Work of Chris Ofili," The Bodies that were not ours and other writings (London and New York: Routledge, 2001) 41. 142 Steven Henry Madoff, "Shock for shock's sake?" Time Magazine (Oct Il, 1999. vol. 154, Iss. 15) 80-82. 143 See Partha Mitter, "Reflections of the construction ofbeauty in the West", Cultural Encounters: Representing 'otherness " eds. Elizabeth Hallman and Brian V. Street (London and New York: Routledge, 2000) 35-50.

56 persist today, and are evident in Madoff lamenting the decline of classical beauty while referencing an explicitly Africanized Mary. Madoff goes on to complain that in The Holy

Virgin Mary "there is no real depth, no great feeling in the line." His preference for line over colour, and his desire for perspective exemplifies David Batchelor's argument in

Chromophobia that in Western art the line has been privileged over and above colour.

Batchelor writes that "colour has been the object of extreme prejudice in Western culture" to the extent that "since Aristotle's time, the discrimination against colour has taken a number offorms, sorne technical, sorne moral, sorne racial, sorne sexual, sorne social.,,144 Madoffs lack ofappreciation for Ofili's dot-technique (adapted form cave paintings found in

Zimbabwe), his wish for a 'feeling in the line' and his lack ofacknowledgment ofOfili's stunning use of colour is the product of a critic's analysis based on standards which privilege tradition Western painting over innovative and outside sources.

Protests against The Holy Virgin Mary overwhelmingly focused on the dung, over and above the cutouts. While reporters typically described this Virgin as either black or

African, this was never mentioned as problematic.145 That being said, the nature of the reporting almost always made it clear to the public that this Virgin had African features. In fact, in most reproductions of The Holy Virgin Mary the only visibly legible difference between Ofili's Virgin and a traditional Virgin was race. That this Virgin was black was important, not to be ignored. 146 While reporters named and marked this Mary's blackness, they did not mark the whiteness of the traditional Mary against which she was implicitly compared. This exemplifies the nature ofwhiteness, that as race that aspires to universality, it

144 David Batchelor, Chromophobia (London: Reaktion Books, 2000) 22. 145 Madoff, "Shock for shock's sake?" 80-82. 146 Madoffwrites of "Chris Ofili's black madonna festooned with elephant dung(82-85)", while Peter Plagens of Newsweek describes the work as "a semiabstract, Africanized image (71)."

57 does not want to be marked, and thus particularized. It was the tension and anxiety around race that resulted in the strategie maneuverings around the issue of The Holy Virgin Mary's race. This, combined with the media's obsessive focus on the dung, demonstrated the racist anxiety surrounding the re-making of a white icon.

Throughout this entire controversy, race simmered under the surface, never being directlyaddressed. As Jesuit Fr. George Wilson wrote about the controversy in The National

Catho/ic Reporter,

Do we Catholics really believe that dung and genitalia are dirty? ... Honest self-criticism should make us consider at least the possibility that unacknowledged racial chauvinism could be lurking at the edges. It would not be the first time that deep plague came on stage dressed in lofty religious garb. 147

This racial chauvinism came to bear on Ofili's work six days after Wilson's article was printed. On December 16th 72-year-old Dennis Heiner went to the Brooklyn Museum.

Feigning illness to distract the guards, Heiner slipped behind the protective plexiglass in front of the painting and smeared slow-drying white paint over the Virgin Mary's black body, entirely ignoring the dung and genitalia (fig. 25).148 When asked why he did it Heiner simply said, "it was blasphemous.,,149 A photographer from the Post named Philip Jones Griffiths was there to capture the event. Whether or not Griffiths was tipped offby Heiner is up for debate. Heiner claimed it was fate, but the museum staffbelieved it was no such thing. 150

Nonetheless, the picture captured the disturbing moment when the racism underlying this entire controversy erupted into an act of violence against the body, not the dung or genitalia, of The Holy Virgin Mary.

147 George Wilson, "Furor over painting reveals conflicted attitude towards the body," National Catho/ic Reporter (December 10, 1999: vol. 36, Iss. 7) 21. 148 "Vandal attacks Ofili Madonna," Art in America (February 2000, vol. 88, Iss. 2) 31. 149 Ibid, 31. 150 Dubin, Displays o/Power, 266-267.

58 In later interviews, Heiner's wife said that her husband simply wanted to "clean it

[the painting].,,151 This likely informed Heiner's decision to choose white paint, rather than a paint of another colour. Heiner's wife insinuates that cleanliness is white. This reveals

Heiner's act as one bound up in the ideals of Christian whiteness and a white Virgin. In the

Heiner's eyes, the white paint seemingly became a means to cleanse Mary's black body, to wash away her blackness. In "Offending Images", W.J.T. Mitchell demonstrates that "instead of violent defacement or destruction, Heiner chose a strategy that might be called 'veiling' or

'effacement' ofthe image, a gesture of protection and modesty.,,152 1 agree with Mitchell that

Heiner was 'protecting' the Virgin Mary, but what was Heiner protecting her from? Heiner's act was primarily a racist act of de-Africanizing the Virgin Mary. It was, in all senses, a white baptism. That is why Heiner focused his attention on the Virgin's black body. Slow drying, the paint was not intended to permanently harm the painting. Rather, once it was washed away, the paint created a living memory ofwhiteness on this black body. Heiner did not destroy the image because in his mind the Virgin Mary could continue on with the dung and the genitalia. The purity ofher newfound symbolic whiteness would elevate her beyond them.

Idealized white femininity: The intersection of race and gender in the Virgin Mary

The body of the Virgin Mary is a site of contention, negotiation and compromise. Her image proliferates in multiple forms, and is carefully regulated by the Catholic Church.153

However, more thanjust a religious icon, she is an icon offemininity, one which didactically lays out the terms of appropriate femininity to her devotees. Like the classical female nude,

151 Ibid, 266-267. 152 Mitchell, "Offending Images," 124. 153 Ena Campbell, "The Virgin of Guadalupe and the Female Self-Image: A Mexican Case History", Mother Worship: Theme and Variations (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982) fil 1.

59 representations of the Virgin Mary seek to control female sexuality. Unlike the nude, representations of the Virgin Mary do so through a complete effacement ofher body. Chris

Ofili's Holy Virgin Mary broke all the rules: rather than containing the female body, he fragmented it, proliferating her orifices across the surface of the painting, opening her body and allowing it to seep out. Rather than enforcing astringent view offemininity, he turned notions of purity, beauty and their connection to race on its head.

Ofili's work directly countered chaste, pious and white Virgin Marys that proliferate throughout Western Europe and North America. Diego Velazquez's Immaculate Conception

(1614) (fig. 26) is a fitting example ofthis type. In it, the Virgin Mary is young and innocent.

Age has not made her worldly or knowledgeable. 154 Her hands modestly clasped, and head bowed, her body is lost beneath the folds ofher dress. The pale skin ofher wrists, neck and ear stand for the whole ofher body, and our eyes ripple over the surface ofher gown.

Velazquez's Mary has been an enduring icon in the West. Her demureness, her passivity, her youth, her refined features, and the pallor ofher skin: these are the qualities that should be reflected in her worshipers. She is typical of the Virgin Mary reproduced in many schools, chapels and Catholic Churches in the West.

Marina Wamer demonstrates how Marys like Velazquez's Immaculate Conception function to indoctrinate white femininity. In her recounting ofher childhood at a Catholic girls school, Marina Wamer describes the feast of Purification. In a procession little girls wear stiff white tulle veils, and medals of the Solidarity of Our Lady tied to their necks with blue ribbons. Wamer writes,

The blue ribbons ... signified that the wearer was a child of Mary, and had dedicated herselfto the Virgin and promised to emulate her in thought

154 This Virgin literally iIlustrates verse from Apocalypse 12, "And a great sign appeared in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, and a moon under her feet, and on her head a crown oftwelve stars."

60 word and deed: her chastity, her humility, her gentleness. She was the culmination of womanhood. As my agnostic father maintained, it was a good religion for a girl. 155

Warner demonstrates how the Virgin Mary acts as a powerful role model for white femininity. She exhibits how the Virgin Mary appeals to those in and outside ofCatholicism for her quarantining of sexuality and the maintenance of purity in young white females. 156

As a model ofwhite femininity, the Virgin Mary's image must be carefully regulated.

In the United States news magazines provided an interesting example of the self-regulation ofMary's image. Consider two December 2004 issues of Time Magazine (fig. 27) and

Newsweek (fig. 28), whose co vers both featured articles on the Birth of Christ. Time put

Adoration oJthe Shepherd (no date) by Camillo Pracaccini (bI555-dI629) and Newsweek put Madonna and Child (c. 1650) by Sassoferrato on theirs. Both works are from the West and the Renaissance. They both emphasize a vision of a strictly maternaI Mary. Both magazines are strongly invested in the body of the Christ child, and depict a radiating light that reflects the whiteness of Mary and Jesus' skin. The editors of Newsweek and Time limited themselves to conservative European paintings of the Virgin. They refrained from

European works which depict her as less than white, such as the brownish Madonna and

Child (1460-68) by the Italian Vincenzo Foppa (fig. 29). They also refrained from works that imply the Virgin's sexuality seen in the many works that show the Virgin's bared breast, such as Robert Campin's The Virgin Mary and Christ Child beJore a Fire Screen (c. 1425-

30) (fig. 30). The contents ofboth articles struggle between literaI and historical Christian theology, but nonetheless the covers visually present the Virgin Mary within certain

155 Marina Warner, Alone ofaU her Sex: The My th and the Cult ofthe Virgin Mary (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1976) 1-2. 156 For more on the experience of sexuality by white women through the Virgin Mary see Julia Kristeva, "Stabat Mater," The Female Body in Western Culture: Contemporary Perspectives, ed. Susan Rubin Suleiman (Cambridge London: Harvard University Press, 1985) 99-118.

61 strictures: pre-modem images, she is white, she is fully covered, and she is never sexual.

While Time depicts a variety of Christian images within its covers, such as Paul Gauguin' s

Tahitian Nativity (1897-98), it is the whitest and the most traditional Mary who gets the coyer. Newsweek limits itself entirely to hyper-whitened Renaissance image of the Virgin

Mary and Christ Child. This exemplifies the need to visually appeal to white Christian ideals even as the text subtly questioned them. These two covers demonstrate that mainstream

American visual culture, privileges Marian artworks that play into a certain mythology of whiteness. This mythology depends on a repression of sexuality, and a disavowal of the

Virgin's body.

While the Virgin Mary is predominantly associated with white femininity, she is also well known for adopting dark skin colours. Leonard W. Moss and Stephan C. Cappannari divide the Black Virgin into three types: first, the dark skinned Madonnas whose skin match those of the local population. Second, Virgins who have tumed dark over time due to environmental conditions (on occasion, when being restored sorne Virgin's who have become darkened due to smoke and age have been mistakenly painted black). Lastly, the

Black Madonnas of Europe who are renowned as miracle workers. 157 Before embarking on a deeper examination ofthese types ofVirgin Marys l want to make clear that while these

Madonnas are very popular amongst pilgrims they are also very contentious. Moss and

Cappannari report that at the first oral presentation of their work, which was at the American

Association for the Advancement on Science (December 28, 1952, St. Louis), every priest and nun walked out of the room. Soon after a chaplain at Wayne State University fumed in a sermon against such atheists who would defile the Virgin Mary. Clearly to these priests and

157 Leonard W. Moss and Stephen C. Cappanari, "In Quest of the Black Virgin: She is Black Because She is Black," Mother Worship: Theme and Variations (Chapel Hill: The University of North Caroline Press) 55-56.

62 nuns the Virgin Mary is synonymous with whiteness: to suggest an altemate colour and thereby race is to dishonor her. Furthermore, there are several documented cases in Europe of the church painting Black Madonnas white. 158 It is clear that these Madonnas do not match the church's idea ofwhat the Virgin should be.

How do Black Virgins, in particular those who reflect the local population in colonized countries and the magical Black Virgins in Europe, function in relationship to the Virgin

Mary of white femininity? Black Virgins that reflect the physiognomy and colour of the local population illustrate the anthropological concept of anthropomorphism, which proposes that people worship gods who look like themselves. 159 These dark Virgins are thus accepted by the Roman Catholic Church as a means of appealing to the local population. The widely reproduced Virgin of Guadalupe is a member ofthis category. Her story is one that bridges the colonial institution of the church (the Spanish expansion was marked by the zeal of conversion) to local populations. In fact, her image was held up by a young Catholic girl at the protest outside the Brooklyn Museum. 160 Thus, l am particularly interested in how this

Virgin Mary fits into the hegemonic ideal of the white Virgin Mary. The Virgin of

Guadalupe's widespread distribution is symptomatic of the strength ofCatholicism amongst

Latin Americans. However, a closer examination ofher story reveals the terms ofher acceptance by white North Americans.

The story surrounding the Virgin of Guadalupe's coming into being has long entered the realm ofmyth. The Virgin Mary appeared to a po or aboriginal Juan Diego as he was crossing Tepeyac Hill on his way to receive religious instruction. Mary kindly addressed

158 Lucia Chiavola Bimbaum, Black Madonnas: feminism, religion and politics in Italy (Boston: Northeastem University Press, 1993) 3, 45,108,131. 159 Moss and Cappanari, "In Quest of the Black Virgin," 55. 160 Steven C. Dubin, "How Sensation became a ScandaI," Art in America 88 no. 1 (January 2000) 53-55.

63 him, telling him that she wanted a temple built on top of the hill (where one for an Aztec goddess once stood). Juan Diego went to the Bishop to tell him ofhis vision, but the Bishop could not believe him and sent him on his way. Juan returned to the Virgin telling her ofhis failure, she gently told him to try again. So Juan went back to the Bishop, who this time told

Juan to return with a token from the Virgin. The next day Juan's uncle was near death, so

Juan avoided the Virgin as he went in search of a priest to give the last rites. The Virgin found him anyway, and told Juan to go to the top of the hill where he had first seen her. He went and to his great surprise discovered roses growing where there were once cactuses. He gathered the roses in his cape and went to the Bishop. Kneeling in front of the him Juan opened his cape and to his surprise and to those around him the Virgin of Guadalupe appeared on his cape. The cape was enshrined at the botlom of T epeyac Hill, in what is now a large domed basilica. 161

How is it that the Virgin of Guadalupe was so readily accepted by the church and the local populations? First, the church immediately identified this Virgin with the dark Virgin

(also called Guadalupe) who was the patron of west central Spain. Meanwhile, the aboriginal population accepted her as the incarnation of the Aztec and fertility goddess Tonantsi, who was also identified with the moon and whose temple once stood where the Virgin appeared.

Lastly, her petite size and darker skin would have appealed to the aboriginals who looked similar. 162 Thus this Virgin, who does not conform to Eurocentric skin colour, but does not diverge too sharply from it, was accepted by the Catholic Church as a tool of conversion, and was accepted by the aboriginal population as an alternative goddess altogether. Over time the

Virgin of Guadalupe became associated with numerous miracles and important moments in

161 Built between 1974 and 1976 and designed by the Mexican architect Pedro Ramirez Vasquez, the basilica is located in the northem neighborhood of Villa de Guadalupe Hidalgo of Mexico City, Mexico. 162 Campbell, Mother Worship, 7-9.

64 Mexican history; thus she became of symbol of Mexican nationalism, and in 1945 she was crowned the "Queen of the Wisdom of the Americas." She has been instrumental in the formation of a Mexican national identity separate from Spain. In the words of Eric Wolf, she is "a symbol that seems to enshrine the major hopes and aspirations of an entire society.,,163

Eva Campbell casts the Virgin of Guadalupe as a chaste Virgin mother who is a dominant gender model for a significant number of Mexicans. 164 As a regulator of pure femininity the

Virgin of Guadalupe is compatible with the Virgin Mary ofWestem Europe.

The Virgin of Guadalupe, although dark, is a widely accepted image in the West.

However, while the Virgin of Guadalupe is typically cast as the 'dark Virgin' she is not that dark. Indeed, she is often whitened in re-representations ofher image. Take the 1743 Juan

Diego Opening the Ti/ma by Juan de Ibarra (fig. 31). In this painting the Virgin is significantly whiter than Diego. One could imagine that she stands as an intercessor between the dark skinned Diego and the likely whiter Bishop, to whom he opened his cloak. Thus, the success of the Virgin of Guadalupe and the use of her image at the Brooklyn Museum prote st can be explained on numerous fronts. Not only is she likely a figure of great importance to the girl who holds her, but she is acceptable within the context of this prote st because she signifies the success of Catholicism as a universal project. She is appropriately chaste and pure, and thus compatible with a hegemonic vision of the Virgin Mary. Lastly, she is an important intercessor between a centric white Christianity and peripheral non-white

Christianity.

Believed to have magical and special properties the Black Madonnas of Europe attract pilgrims by the thousands. Though their skin is black, these Madonnas do not have African

163 Eric R. Wolf, Pathways ofPower: Building an Anthropology ofthe Modern World (Berkeley: University of Califomia Press, 2001) 139. 164 Campbell, Mother Worship, 14.

65 features. The most common explanation of these Black Madonnas cornes from a passage from the Song of Songs associated with the Virgin:

Yes, 1 am black! And radiant - o city watching me - As black as Keder's goathair tents Or Solomon's fine tapestry's (Song of Songs)

Others explain that the Virgin became black when she traveled through Egypt with Joseph and the Christ Child. She was likely not the product of artistic license as, in the words

Leonard W. Moss and Stephen C. Cappanari, it is "highly unlikely that the church would grant the artist the right to depict the Madonna in any way that whim or caprice might ordain.,,165 These two authors, who were the first to tackle analyze the European black Virgin

Mary as a category, conclude that the Black Virgin can only be found in areas once occupied by the Roman Empire. They create links between the pagan idols such as Diana of Ephesus, with her black skin and plethora ofbreasts (fig. 32), and Madonna of the Hermit in

Switzerland (fig. 33). Moss and Cappanari argue that the Black Madonnas, like the Virgin of

Guadalupe, "exemplify a reinterpretation of pagan customs." These black Virgins, they argue, enabled a continuity between paganism and Roman Catholicism, facilitating the conversion of local populations. 166

In this way these Black Virgins are very similar to the Virgin of Guadalupe: they are transition figures from one system ofbeliefs to another. Though hugely popular, the Black

Madonnas do not function as female role models in the same way as the 'white' and 'pure'

Virgin Marys. Rather, their popularity stems from the powers pilgrims ascribe to them. In a

165 Leonard W. Moss and Stephen C. Cappanari, "In Quest of the Black Virgin: She is Black Because She is Black," Mother Worship: Theme and Variations (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1982) 56. 166 Ibid, 71.

66 contemporary context Wamer interprets the meaning of their skin,

In Catholic countries, where blackness is the climate of the devils, not the angels, and is associated with magic and the oc cult, Black Madonnas are considered especially wonder-working, as the possessors of hermetic knowledge and power. 167

Despite their popularity, these images have had no profound influence on the fine arts. They remain firmly at the margins of artistic appreciation, and are rarely reproduced in mainstream popular culture, particularly in the United States. 1 would also suggest that these figures, although having black skin, are read as representations of white people, whose magical properties are manifested through a blackening of their skin. They even at times have blonde hair, such as in one Black Madonna at Montserrat in Spain. 168

Wamer's A/one of ail her Sex is a crucial book in revealing the Virgin Mary as a cultural construction. She draws from Roland Barthes to argue that in the cult of Virgin

Mary,

the interlocking of myth and ideology is camouflaged. Without any duplicity or malevolence on the painter's part, myriad assumptions are limpidly and luminously made. Assumptions about role satisfaction, sexual difference, beauty, and goodness are all wondrously compressed in this one icon, just as theyare in every artifact produced by the cult of Mary. 169

What is the relationship of the Virgin Mary to femininity? The answer is this: the Virgin

Mary is femininity purified which ultimately manifests itself in, and is dependent on, skin colour. In contrast to the Virgin Mary, in the West the female body is a highly problematic and dangerous site, one that must constantly be controlled. So writes Elizabeth Grosz,

Can it be that in the West, in our time, the female body has been construed not only as lack or absence but with more complexity, as a leaking, uncontrollable, seeping liquid; as a formless flow; as viscosity, entrapping, secreting; as lacking not so much or simply the phallus but self-containment

167 Warner, A/one ofal/ her Sex, 275. 168 Marina Warner, From the Beast to the Blond: On Fairy Ta/es and their Tel/ers (London: Vintage, 1994) 366. 169 Warner, A/one ofAl/ her Sex, 336.

67 not a cracked or porous vessel, like a leaking shifc' but a formlessness that 1 engulfs all form, a disorder that threatens all order. 0

The Virgin Mary is the disorderly female body constrained and bound. Her leaky body has been erased. The disavowal ofher fluidity (the exchange of the abject for the pure) allows women to imagine their place within Western society. This conceptualization of the Virgin's non-embodiment is marked as white. It expels as its Other the material, the bodily, and the dark.

Despite all the effort to control and limit her, the chaste and pure Virgin Mary slips and slides out ofher categorization. This is particularly in evidence in the Virgin Marys with one breast bared. A precedent begun in medieval art, this bared breast was originally intended as a sign of Mary's humility and both her and Christ's humanity 171 but slowly succeeded in sexualizing Mary. It is this sexuality that Ofili's Holy Virgin Mary speaks to. l72 Margaret

Holmes demonstrates how, when representing the Virgin's breast, artists used a formula of both revealing the breast, to designate the Virgin as the nurturer of Christ, and concealing the breast, to demonstrate the Virgin's decorum. 173 Botticelli's 1484 altarpiece of the Virgin

Mary, Christ Child and saints clearly exemplifies this (fig. 34). In it the Virgin's hand

170 Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Towards a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994) 2-3. 171 This type ofVirgin illustrated the Franciscan text Mediations on the Life of Christ: "How readily she nursed Him, feeling a great and unknown sweetness in nursing this Child, such as could never be felt by another woman." Quoted in Margaret Holmes, "Disrobing the Virgin: the Madonna Lactans in 15th c. Florentine Art," Picturing Women in Renaissance and Baroque ltaly, eds. Geraldine Johnstone and Sara F. Matthews Grieco (Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997) 171. For more on the Madonna Lactans see Margaret. R. Miles, "The Virgin's One Bare Breast: Female Nudity and Religious Meaning in Tuscan Early Renaissance Culture," The Female Body in Western Culture: Contemporary Perspectives, ed. Susan Rubin Suleiman (Cambridge London: Harvard University Press, 1985) 193-208. 172 These images were originally devotional images, though they might weIl have had an educational role as weIl. Margaret R. Miles argues that 14 th c. depictions of the Madonna breastfeeding was a sort of edict to mothers to breast feed their own children, rather than giving them to wet nurses, a perceived health risk (193- 208). Likewise, Margaret Holmes shows that by the 15th c. wet nurses were such a common practice in Florence that images ofthe Madonna Lactans played a more complicated role: serving to provide an appropriate model of morality for the wet nurses. Furthermore, such images could have provided a visual substitute for parents whose offspring had been sent to the countryside to breastfeed (190). 173 Ibid, 179.

68 delicately parts her dress to breastfeed her child and also blocks our full view of that breast. ln Madonna Lactans works, ofwhich Botticeli's is an exemplar, the breast was further desexualized by representing it slightly separate from the Virgin's body. It is pushed up and away from its anatomical place. However, as artistic conventions began to demand naturalism, the Madonna Lactans was complicated by the potential "slippage between sacred and profane," no doubt aided by the abundance of secular and sexual Renaissance images of women with their breasts bared. 174 This dilemma was described by Leonardo da Vinci in his

Paragone,

It once happened to me that 1 made a picture representing a sacred subject which was bought by those that loved it - and then wished to remove the symbol of divinity in order that he might kiss her without misgivings. Finally his conscience prevailed over his lust and he felt constrained to remove the picture from his house. 175

Given da Vinci's artistic production it is not impossible that this female 'sacred subject' he refers to is the Virgin Mary herself. One cannot help but wonder if this patron once owned a piece such as da Vinci's Madonna Lippi (c. 1490s) (fig. 35). Far from the traditionally chaste

Virgin Mary and Christ Child, Madonna Lippi's awkward baby and enticing and sexual Mary make this a rarity amongst Marian imagery. Here is an image which has loosened the reigns on the regulation of the Virgin Mary's body. Nicholas Royle writes of the uncanniness ofthis picture, arguing that it is the suggestion ofChrist's interiority that elicits the return of the repressed. 176 1 would like to add, pointing to the disturbing expression on her face and the fleshiness and accessibility ofher breast, that the uncanniness ofthis work stems from the sexualization of the Virgin as she is nursing. This picture suggests the embodiment of the

Virgin, and a relationship to her child that extends beyond the maternaI, both taboo subjects

174 Ibid, 182. 175 Quoted in Holmes, "Disrobing the Virgin," 182. 176 Nicholas Royle, The Uncanny (New York: Routledge, 2003) 289-306.

69 in the field of Western art. This highly problematic suggestion of perverse sexuality in this white icon of pure femininity is a primary reason why the Madonna Lactans fell out of favor after the fifteenth century. Representations of the Virgin Mary soon retumed to fully covering Mary's body. In letting Mary's one bared breast to come through, the Virgin Mary's sexuality became too 'dangerous' for her viewers.

Comprehending The Holy Virgin Mary: Blackness, elephant dung and pornography

While The Holy Virgin Mary might have the distinction ofbeing the most weIl known contemporary artwork in North America it is also the most widely misunderstood. The media's hysterical and repetitive focus on the dung essentially shut down this piece in the public sphere. The general media attention granted to Ofili's work stemmed from the perception that The Holy Virgin Mary had no respect for boundaries of sacredness, race or sexuality. Under The Holy Virgin Mary any concept of 'purity' was unsustainable. The sexualization of the Virgin, marked by the genitalia, the vaginal shapes ofher red lips and dress and her exposed breast, is a response to Ofili's encounters with the Madonna Lactans at the National Gallery in London. Ofthese works, he describes the Virgin's breast as "hinting at motherhood," and being "very sexually charged.,,177 One such piece is Robert Campin's

The Virgin Mary and Christ Child before a Fire Screen (fig. 30). Campin's breast is exquisitely rendered, it takes front and centre stage depicting both Mary's humanity and her desirable body. There is no formula ofboth revealing and concealing the breast as in

Botticelli's 1484 alterpiece (fig. 34). Rather, Mary's fingers provocatively press into her nipple drawing the viewer' s attention to it. The Holy Virgin Mary responds to what is already evident in canonical works, like Campin's Virgin Mary, but is never addressed in a

177 Ibid, 87.

70 contemporary setting. It doing so Ofili subverts a long tradition of ignoring the sexuality of the Virgin Mary.

In The Holy Virgin Mary the pornographic cutouts surrounding Mary bring out her sexuality, placing it front and centre. The bared breast, the genitalia, the vaginal shapes all recognize the Virgin's sexuality, a sexuality we saw slip through in the Madonna Lactans. 178

However, the cutouts primarily feature black women. While the cutouts signify the Virgin's sexuality they also signify the racist view of black female sexuality in the West. Ofili explained,

l wanted to juxtapose the profanity of the porn clips with something that's considered quite sacred. It's quite important that it's a Black Madonna. l concentrated more on bumshots and rear crotch shots in a way, playing with the sexuality of the Holy Virgin Mary, wanting to really pull it right up to the forefront. Actually, what l noticed in a lot of black porn mags is that there were quite a lot of rear shots. Everything's really on display. 179

Ofili confirms that the blackness ofthis Virgin is integral to the piece. 180 The blackness of the Virgin can be accounted for on three fronts: it responds to a black vernacular tradition of painting the Virgin as black, rescuing such images from marginalization and placing them front and centre in such high art institutions as the Royal Academy of Art in London, and the

Brooklyn Art Museum. It also situates The Holy Virgin Mary within Ofili's larger body of work that regularly takes up stereotypes of black figures, problematizing their consumption within the viewer's eyes (Fig. 17-20). Finally, it responds to the overwhelmingly whiteness of the Virgin Mary, ofwhich Ofili would be inundated with upon visiting the National

Gallery. Controversially Ofili capitalized upon the viewers racist views of black women as

178 The Madonna Lactans are a point of reference for Ofili who is quoted in his catalogue as saying that Renaissance Madonnas acted as "an excuse for pomography in the homes ofholy priests and Godfearers (Eshun, 87-88)." 179 Kodo Eshun, "Flung into Ofili," Chris Ofili (Southampton City Art Gallery: Serpentine Gallery, 1998) 87. 180 Ibid, 87.

71 overtly sexual to challenge their view of the Virgin Mary. As a result, the capacity of The

Roly Virgin Mary to challenge racist understandings of black and white femininity depended largely on the viewer's willingness to engage their own complicity with racial stereotypes.

Ofili called upon the personal responsibility of the viewer. Those who strongly objected to

Ofili's piece, Giuliani and Donohue inc1uded, never saw it. Their angry comments depended on the words dung and Virgin, labia and Mary, African and Madonna, rather than any detailed description of the piece. Their self-righteousness negated any honest engagement with Ofili' s piece, and allowed them to enforce their own racist misunderstandings of black and white female sexuality.

In the midst of the Brooklyn Museum controversy Ofili's use of dung was defended by highlighting the artist's connection to Africa and the supposed positive associations of dung in that context. 181 Ofili c1aims he began using elephant shit subsequent to an epiphany he had on a trip to Zimbabwe, the result of winning a scholarship while completing his Masters degree. In an interview with The New York Times Ofili described his experience in Africa,

I was struck by the beauty of the landscape and the animaIs in their natural surroundings ... When a giraffe taller than the average house in Britain would walk by, it gave me that particular feeling of being shocked and simultaneously finding something beautiful. It gave me an excitement and a fear of the new ... 182

Ofili disturbingly slipped into exoticizing Africa, for the bene fit ofhis New York Times audience, masking his use of elephant dung through a romantacization of that continent. His comment also reveals how Westem Ofili is. For him, at this time and even though his parents

181 Detractors questioned the validity ofthat claim. However, Donald J. Cosentino amusingly noted that anyone who would want to verify the use of dung in African art would merely have had to go to the African Gallery in the Brooklyn Museum. There, at the gallery entrance, is a boli, a piece of African art that incorporates mud, blood, urine, and cow dung. See Donald J. Cosentino, "Hip-hop assemblage: The Chris Ofili Affair," The A[[ican Arts (Spring 2000, vol. 22, Iss. 1) 40-54. 1 2 Ofili quoted in Carol Vogel, "Chris Ofili: British Artist Holds Fast to His Inspiration," The New York Times th (September 28 , 1999) RI.

72 are from Nigeria, Africa is exciting and new. In this line, Ofili emphasized the fertile/regenerative associations of the dung. While animal feces might be considered abject it is universally used as a fertilizer for agricultural purposes. Historically, animal feces has fuelled much of the food we eat. Hence, Ofili explained resting his works on the dung as follows, "It's a way ofraising the paintings up from the ground and giving them a feeling that they've come from the earth rather than simply being hung on the wall [emphasis mine ].,,183 However, Ofili did open up the dung for meanings outside of an African context.

He described the dung as having "something incredibly simple and incredibly basic about it.

It attracts a multiple ofmeanings and interpretations.,,184 Ofili was well aware of the diverse meanings and reactions the dung would solicit. Thus, we must question the epiphany that induced Ofili to use elephant dung, not only because in the past he has joked it was made up,

185 but because the dung functions in his work as so much more than a marker of 'beauty' 186.

Cosentino reads the dung as 'adding an element of 'funk'" to Ofili's work, relating it directly to African-American artist David Hammons who incorporated shit into his sculptures in the 1970s. Critics Cosentino and Coco Fusco firmly imbed Ofili' s work in a larger body of

Western black artistic discourses. 187 Whether Ofili knew about African art that incorporated elephant dung when he began using the material is up for debate, but we do know he was well aware of Hammons whom he explicitly references in his early works. Ofili's 1993 Shit

Sale, where he put balls of shit for sale in Brick Lane in London and observed passer-by's response, is directly inspired by Hammons's Bliz-aard Bali Sale (fig. 36) (1983), where

183 Ibid, RI. 184 Ibid, RI. 185 Godfrey Worsdale, "The Stereo Type," Chris Ofili (Southampton, England: Southampton City Art Gallery, Serpentine Gallery, 1998) 1. 186 Coco Fusco, "Captain Shit and Other Allegories of Black Stardom,"37. Fusco comments that Ofili often defends his works (or avoids questioning) by saying he is primarily interested in beauty. 187 Coco Fusco, "Captain Shit," 37-42.

73 Hammons similarly sold snowballs to an unsuspecting public. Ofili's substitution of shit for snow relates to the equation of blacks with shit in Western society. Tellingly, one person thought Ofili's Shit Sale was a coyer for a drug operation, this conclusion likely based on the artist's race (fig. 37). Ofili countered this reaction by creating Shit Joints (1995), in which he rolled elephant dung in cigarette papers. 188 The use of dung has a political purpose: it is a means of confronting racism against blacks in Western society.

In his psychoanalytic reading ofwhite racism, Joe Kovel argues that in an American context, blackness is equated with feces. 189 Drawing from Kovel, Coco Fusco has demonstrated that Ofili's incorporation of dung stems from his identification with it, due to his experience ofracism in Britain, and the frequent equation in the West of blacks with shit.

She writes that Ofili's dung symbolizes,

the utter dehumanization of black people ... that Ofili unsettles his viewers by teasing out this connection ... he composes an extended allegory about the place of blacks, and about his own place in the contemporary art world. 190

This is exemplified by the piece Shithead (1993), where Ofili cut offhis own dreads and applied it to a pile of dung to create a new sort of potato head (fig. 24). A work that is both humorous and discomforting, Ofili' s used shit to create a self-portrait of sorts. Through modeling his own head in dung, Ofili makes explicit the West's equation ofblackness with feces, thus carlcaturizing and subverting Western stereotypes against blacks.

As a native of Manchester, England Ofili is weIl acquainted with the abject status of dung within Western culture. In the West the use of excrement on any icon is an act of defilement. In Western society, as Julia Kristeva necessarily articulates, defilement "takes the

188 Worsdale, "The Stereo Type," 4. 189 Jack Kovel, White Racism: A Psychohistory (New York: Pantheon Books, 1970) 89-91. 190 Coco Fusco, "Captain Shit," 42.

74 place of supreme danger and absolute evil..." Furthermore,

excrement and its equivalents (decay, infections, disease, corpse, etc.) stand for the danger to identity that cornes from without: the ego threatened by the non-ego, society threatened by its outside, life by death. 191

Through decorous Western eyes, the identity of the Virgin is unsustainable when her representation incorporates excrement, something Ofili is not blind to. By using elephant dung in The Holy Virgin Mary Ofili extended the use of this multifarious symbol one step further. By applying dung to this pure white icon he engaged the perversity ofthe abject

"because it neither assumes a prohibition, a rule or a law; but turns them aside, misleads, corruptS.,,192 He literally brought the pure law of the Virgin, into contact with her Other (the material, the body, the dark) collapsing her primacy as a white icon, and the ideals of whiteness that she marks. That was Ofili's transgression, one that became dangerous in the

United States where whiteness repeatedly refers back to a Christian tradition in order to sustain its primacy.193 It is the fear of the Other of "society threatened by its outside, life by death" that accounts for the strength of oppositions facing Ofili's The Holy Virgin Mary.

The Virgin Mary in contact with feces is, however, compatible with a metaphysical view of the body: that contentious strain of Christianity that periodically emerges and is regularly pushed aside. Metaphysical works, exemplified by Andreas Serrano Piss Christ, recall "for us that Jesus' body was a real body, a functioning human body, and it was

Christianity's own code of atonement that required that his body be physically degraded on the cross.,,194 Piss Christ is a photograph of the immersion of a crucifix in a plexiglas

191 Julia Kristeva, Powers ofHorror: An Essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982) 70. 192 Ibid, 15. 193 For more on the racism and Christianity in the United States see George D. Kelsey, Racism and the Christian understandingofman. New York: Scribner, 1965. 194 Rambuss, "Sacred Subjects and the Aversive Metaphysical Conceit," 497.

75 container ofSerrano's urine (fig. 1). In it the crucifix seemingly floats in mass ofshimmering gold. Richard Rambuss argues that Piss Christ "can be received as an unusually intrepid affirmation of Christianity' s central tenant: the Incarnation ... that Jesus can redeem us ... because he is God in human form, fully human form.,,195 Rambuss argues in the same line of St. Thomas Aquinas in Summa Theologica, where Aquinas argues that Christ, Mary and the prelapsarian Adam, were "subject to human infirmities and defects.,,196 These sacred people ate, drank, sweat, urinated and defecated and Mary, despite every attempt to erase her body, menstruated. Through the art of Serrano and afili the realm of the sacred is revealed as being bound up with, not separate from, the realm of the profane. The bodies of the Virgin

Mary and Jesus Christ were living bodies that produced the substances (urine, feces, menstrual blood) we deem abject: they are the embodiment of the profane and sacred existing together. Within their bodies there is no separation between one or the other. As Richard

Rambuss writes, "there are places within the sacred ... that beauty, serenity and pacific reverence will never get us." Devotion need not be sanitized for it can "encompass veneration and repugnance, dread and desire, shock and bliss, in ever shifting and unequal measures." 197 Hence, by merging the sacred and the profane afili does not create blasphemy. Rather, he disables the purification of Christianity and creates an experience of the sacred that is no longer sanitized.

The use of dung in afili's figurative work of the Virgin enabled a turning inside out of the body, for the abjected status ofbodily waste to be dismantled, and for a conception of devotion that encompasses the profane. The Holy Virgin Mary counters the erasure of Mary's body seen in so many Western images of Mary's body. It does away with Mary's whiteness

195 Ibid, 497. 196 Quoted in Rambuss, "Sacred Subjects and the Aversive Metaphysical Conceit," 497. 197 Rambuss, "Sacred Subjects and the Aversive Metaphysical Conceit," 497.

76 and demands that the viewer recognize the objectification of black female sexuality within the West. By placing Mary outside of the maternaI sphere, by sexualizing her and depicting her as black, Ofili threatened hegemonic images of the white Virgin Mary. He opened the ideal of Mary to col our, sexuality and to a dynamism rarely seen in her representation. This threat was what made The Holy Virgin Mary vulnerable to attacks from the likes ofDonahue and Giuliani. It also made The Holy Virgin Mary a good news story. It is unfortunate that public perception of this piece is one of defilement of a scared icon rather that what The Holy

Virgin Mary achieves. Specifically, it indelibly does away with an equation ofholiness with whiteness. Ofili succeeded in creating a new sort of icon, one that evokes the realm of sacred which encompasses, rather than disavows, the human body.

77 Chapter Three Race and Christianity in cinema: Encounters with the white holy body

Our popular conceptions of black and white are based upon deeply engrained notions of good and evil, which have had direct implications for race and racism. The strength of this colour symbolism is seen most c1early in religious imagery, discussed thus far in Venetian

Renaissance painting and Chris Ofili's The Holy Virgin Mary (1996).1 have argued that this dichotomy first became prevalent in Renaissance Europe as a means for the white population's self-definition and differentiation from blacks. This Manichean dichotomy has subsequently infected popular conceptions of race, and continues to have a significant hold on white imagination; this was c1early demonstrated by the controversy surrounding The

Holy Virgin Mary, as well as a general Western defensiveness around the colour of religious icons. The following chapter demonstrates the influence of cinema in perpetuating this

Manichean dualism. The resonance ofthis colour symbolism, 1 will show, is particularly felt in films that are based on biblical narrative, and can also be seen in films with Christian allegorical characters. 198

In representing Christian allegory and biblical narrative, cinema has drawn from imitation, inspiration and parody from Western painting. At a quick glance, the influence of art on religious cinema is demonstrated by biblical scenes that mimic canonical works, and the frequent portrayal ofthemes favored by art, though not emphasized in scripture. To a large degree the racial hierarchies found in religious art are transposed into cinema. In film, this hierarchy is effectively achieved by the language of light, first utilized in Renaissance

198 1 will analyze both biblical films, and films which make use of Christian allegory. 1 define Christian allegory as the use of characters as Christ or Marian figures. By example, in the film Uncle Tom 's Cab in (1903) Eva is a Christ figure, while Simon Legree is the anti-Christ.

78 art, that conflates whiteness and holiness. The severe white skin of Mary and Jesus that emanates light, symptomatic of the colonial success of the racialization ofChristianity, becomes a motif that marks goodness and whiteness. Rence we frequently see angels, good ghosts and other saintly characters bathed in it. The language of white light has become so pervasive that non-white yet saintlY characters obtain white virtues through white light. 199

Furthermore, in biblical films the language of light is compounded with the prevalent casting of Christ as Aryan.

ln the following chapter, 1 recount the influence of canonical works on biblical films.

The first part demonstrates the various ways motifs of Christianity are used to support a mythology of white goodness. First, 1 demonstrate the racialization of Christianity that occurs through the symbolism oflight as a marker ofboth Christianity and whiteness. To illustrate the use of this motif! draw from the silent film Uncle Tom 's Cabin (1903), as a moment when racial stereotypes of whites and blacks were transposed from popular culture and theatre into film, facilitating their wide dissemination. Second, to illustrate the deployment of

Jesus to create racial hierarchies, with whiteness at the apex, 1 analyze the appearance of

Jesus in the final moments of The Birth ofa Nation (1915). The Aryan Jesus in The Birth ofa

Nation was one of the first in a long line of Aryan Christs. 1 demonstrate the systematic aryanizations of Christ and relate this phenomena to the success of 'white' popular religious imagery, in particular Warner Sallman's Head of Christ (1940) (fig. 45). Lastly, 1 map the enforcement of racial hierarchies through Judas. 1 broach the casting of a black Judas in Jesus

Christ Superstar, as a literaI acknowledgement ofthis racial hierarchy.

199 Dyer, White, 101-102. Dyer makes this point in regards to the character of Lance Corporal Dawson (Wolfgang Bodison) inA Few Good Men (1992).

79 The second part of this chapter returns to the Virgin Mary as a site for the regulation of white femininity. As a case study l analyze the portrayal ofthe Virgin Mary in Jean-Luc

Godard's Hail Mary (1984) and Mel Gibson's The Passion ofJesus Christ (2004) as films where she is both humanized and contained as a symbol ofwhite feminine purity. Hail Mary is a French film that was released in the United States to great controversy because Godard

(in the only artistic image l have found) showed Mary in the nude. Both Godard and Gibson are distinguished as filmmakers that engage the character of the Mary beyond her iconic status. However, they are both, l will argue, limited in their portrayals of Mary because they do not step outside of a narrow conception of white femininity.

Biblical films and the canon of Art History

In cinema, themes, motifs and the organization of scenes are often directly pulled from canonical pre-modem paintings. In interviews about The Passion ofthe Christ, director Mel

Gibson and cinematographer Caleb Deschanel continually referenced the influence of

Christian art, citing specifically the work of Caravaggio and Rembrandt. 200 Moving back in time, Cecil B. Demille incorporated roughly 270 replications ofbiblical paintings in The

King ofKings (1927) and 200 in The Ten Commandments (1956).201 The Last Supper has long been subject to the 'da Vinci syndrome.' In Quo Vadis? (1951) a still from the film could be mistaken on first glance for da Vinci's Last Supper (1498). Films that portray the bible tend to draw as much from popularized themes as from scripture. The frequent depiction ofthe 'Road to Cavalry' can be attributed to its popularity in Western art,

200 Diane Apostolos-Cappadona, "On Seeing the Passion," Mel Gibson's Film and Its Critics: Re-viewing the Passion, ed. S. Brent Plate (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004) 102. 201 William R. Telford, "The Depiction of Jesus in the Cinema," Explorations in Theology and Film: Movies and Meaning, ed. Clive Marsh and Gaye Ortiz (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers, 1997) 126.

80 illustrated by Hieronymus Bosch's Procession to Cavalry (c. 1488) (fig. 38).202 Christ carrying his cross, through taunting and anguished crowds, has no mention in the bible but occupies a large portion of Gibson's The Passion ofthe Christ, and makes appearances in

William Wyler's Ben Hur (1959), Nicholas Ray's King ofKings (1961) (fig. 44) and Martin

Scorsese's The Last Temptation ofChrist (1988), by example. The pietà, a motifthat developed in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, inspired by Franciscan piety and

Rhineland mysticism,203 is a dramatic final moment in Gibson's film. It has no scriptural antecedent, but is endlessly repeated in Western visual culture. In The Passion ofthe Christ,

Gibson fulfills the audience's desire for a pre-ordained moment and slowly moves his players into position, freezing them into a tableau to satisfy the viewer's anticipation. In contemporary North America the general population's conception of the Bible is more likely to be informed by popular culture than by scripture. The use of Western painting to inspire biblical narrative is but one example of the extent to which canonical works have influenced our popular conceptions of Christianity. It is as if directors and viewers read Renaissance art like it is a window onto biblical times, rather than as art works that are the product of a culture over a millennia after the death of Christ.

Shining light in film: A motif of Christian 'goodness' and spiritual transcendence

One can perhaps understand why film directors rely on canonical works to portray biblical scenes. Drawing from Western paintings that portray Christianity has the effect of naturalizing the story in the viewer's eyes. However, that does not negate the fact that representations of Christianity allow for the regulation of whiteness. In cinema we often see

Christianity and whiteness through the language oflight. For example, the bright illumination

202 Jon Solomon, The Ancien! World in Cinema (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001) 209. 203 Apostolos-Cappadona, "On Seeing the Passion," 105.

81 of bodies is often used to symbolize spiritual transcendence as well as saintly goodness.

Bright light cornes to signify a soul which has been released from its body, or a body whose goodness enables the suppression of bodily desires. This is a motif that has its roots in

Western painting. Garafolo's Ascension of Christ (1510-20) is one such example (fig. 39). In it Christ ascends to the heavens, his skin and the space around him is a severe white. The absolving of the soul from bodily demands is the perfect embodiment of whiteness, and is manifested in the light surrounding him. As Richard Dyer argues, bright lights are part of a language ofwhiteness that privileges the soul over the body. We see this in G. Feher's

Barabbas (1977). In this film we do not see Jesus, the ultimate figure ofidealized whiteness, directly. Rather he is seen, as William R. Telford describes, in a "dazzling burst of light." 204

The language of light is prevalent enough that viewer' s understand that this man, whom we cannot see, must be Jesus by virtue of the light. But white light is not solely reserved for

Jesus; rather, white light marks those who are exemplary models of goodness and thus whiteness. This finds its expression in the character Eva St. Clair in the twelve minute silent movie Uncle Tom 's Cabin (1903).

Based on Harriet Beecher Stowe's 1852 bestselling novel of the same name, Uncle

Tom 's Cabin was an anti-slavery narrative. The book was incredibly popular in its time,205 and was in many ways responsible for the rise of abolitionist feeling following its publication in 1852. As 1 demonstrated in Chapter One, pro-slavery discourse utilized the bible to paint the institution of slavery as the justified outcome of the sin and subsequent curse of Ham.

Directly countering this discourse, Stowe depicted Africans as God's new chosen and persecuted people, flipping the pro-slavery arguments to paint slavery as an evil institution,

204 Telford, "The Depiction of Jesus in the Cinema," 131. 205 In the first year of its publication Uncle Tom 's Cabin sold 300, 000 copies in the US, and one million in Britain. By 1976 it had been translated into 51 languages, Afrikaans and Yiddish included.

82 rather than the justified result of Harn's sin. Stowe thus displaces popular conceptions of white Arnericans as the new chosen people, replacing whites with blacks. In the novel Torn, a black slave, becomes a redemptive Christ figure who is unwilling to fight against or escape slavery. Torn's owners sell him, separating him from his wife and family. After encountering the angelic white child Eva on a riverboat, Tom ends up at her father's St. Clair plantation.

When Eva, and then her father dies, Tom is sold to plantation and slave owner Simon Legree.

Tom's new owner is a non-Christian who believes in the supematural, and whom Stowe depicts as the antichrist ofthe book. Tom, ultirnately tortured to death by Legree, becomes a sacrificiallamb in Stowe's narrative. In this novel the child Eva symbolizes an ideal, pure and feminine whiteness. Legree, on the other hand, is the underside of whiteness symbolizing whites as bringers of death, or even whiteness as death.206

At least five silent movies were made ofthis novel before 1915. The popular 1903 production directed by Edwin S. Porter was the first to transfer what had become the most popular play of the nineteenth century onto the screen. The play and likewise the film satirized Stowe's novel. Instead ofportraying Tom as a Christ figure, Porter portrays him as a faithful old slave loyal to his white owners.207 Because audiences were familiar with the narrative, Porter was able to focus on highly charged moments in the play: the character Eliza pleading with Tom to escape, Eva's death, the sale of Torn on the auction block, and the death of Tom. This was both the first film to make use ofblackface actors, and subtitles. Tom was played by a slightly overweight white actor (unnamed), who was covered in black face paint. Meanwhile, Porter populated the film with African Americans, who Porter cast as

206 See Richard Dyer, "White Death," White (New York: Routledge, 1997) 207-223. 207 Gerald R. Butters, Ir., Black Manhood on the Si/ent Screen (Lawrence, Kansas: University of Kansas Press, 2002) 53.

83 black stereotypes so white viewers could 'identify' with them,z°8 While this silent film did depict the evils of slavery, embodied by Tom's murderer Simon Legree, it also depicted

African American men as needing to be controlled. Rather than an anti-slavery narrative, the film was symptomatic of white nostalgia for a time when blacks knew 'their place'.

Furthermore, it portrayed whites as both the perpetuators of slavery, and as the saviors of blacks, negating any agency on behalf of black slaves.

In both the novel and in the film, it is the young white chi Id Eva who embodies the goodness ofwhiteness and Christianity. She is a "purely good, uncorrupt person ... the embodiment of a beatific vision.,,209 Josephine Donovan argues that Eva should be read as an allegoricai figure, who is in essence a 'feminine Christ,' the Calvinist answer to the Catholic

Virgin Mary. It is telling that Donovan makes this argument while accentuating Eva's whiteness and her association with whiteness. Citing Stowe, "always dressed in white, she seemed to move like a shadow through aIl sorts of places, without contacting spot or stain,,,210 Donovan argues that

Eva is beyond hackneyed formula, reflecting a profound religious sensibility ... [her pure white appearance] symbolically suggesting her incorruptible nature and indicating that she is one of the blessed, one of the elect, a redemptive figure.211

In the film, this becomes clear in the scene where Tom is dying. Eva appears as a white angel. She is actually painted onto the backdrop of the scene, rays of light emanating from her form, blinding those beneath her (fig. 40). Shining light is used to both underscore Eva's

"profound religious sensibility" and her role as white femininity purified. Dyer aptly writes

208 Ibid, 54, Porter showed blacks playing crabs before the auction, a black man actually arranging the auction block, slaves dressed in refined 19th c. clothing, and black couples dancing by during the slave auction. 209 Ibid, 77. 210 Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom 's Cabin: Our Life Among the Low/y, ed. Ann Douglas (New York: penguin, 1981) 238. 2ll Butters, Black Manhood, 77-76.

84 that "Eva is the last word in white purity even before she joins the angels, themselves figures of central importance in the construction of ideal white womanhood.,,212 White light marks both the freeing of Eva from her body (if she ever reached puberty, could she still be pure?) and her idealized white goodness.

The use ofwhite light to (dis)embody whiteness is a presumption that continues today.

In Jerry Zucker's Ghost (1990) Sam, played by Patrick Swayze, is murdered when walking home with his girlfriend (Demi Moore). Sam becomes a ghost, whose purpose it is to seek revenge for his death and to protect his girlfriend. Oda Mae Brown, played by Whoopi

Goldberg, is Sam's unwilling black psychic sidekick, and eventually allows him to take over her body. In the film's conclusion the immoral villains ofthe film, one Hispanie, the other

Jewish, are killed and terrifying (or comical depending on your point ofview) dark, shrieking demons emerge to drag them to hell?13 Once absolved of earthly duties Patrick Swayze (the white male hero) ascended to the heavens, with a glowing white light blocking out everything else on the screen (fig. 41). Ghost is emblematic of the early 1990s phenomena of

'the Everyman movie.' These filmsjoined by The Fisher King (1991) and Regarding Henry

(1991) "dramatized the vulnerability of the sociological type most likely to succeed in

America - the white, heterosexual man of the professional class - at a time when even he was in danger oflosing his grasp on prosperity.,,214 The white light ofSwayze's ascension makes use of the cinematic language oflight to rehabilitate Swayze's Everyman from the weakness (financial, romantic) he suffered in life. Reconstituting 'the white, heterosexual man of the professional class' as a primary and integral harbinger ofwhiteness, white light

212 Dyer, White, 119. 213 For a psychoanalytic and racial critique of Ghost see Molly Anne Rothemberg, "The "newer angels" and the living dead: the ethics ofscreening obsessional desire," Camera Obscura (May 1997, No. 40/41) 16-41. 214 Richard L. Homan, "The Everyman Movie, circa 1991," The Journal ofPopular Film and Television (Spring 1997, vol. 25, Iss. 1) 24.

85 safely transports him to the afterlife. However, such effusive ascensions are rare in more recent films?15 The white light has become c1ichéd: its overuse and the lagging of sincere

Christian beliefs by many whites, signaled by the wide success of satirical religious films such as Monty Python 's Life ofBrian (1979) and Dogma (1999), suggests its disfavor.

While whites may be increasingly cynical about Christian symbolism, white light is still a powerful motif, seen by its frequent use to bequeath "white virtues" on non-white people. Whiteness is not always expressed by skin colour. Its symbolism is more fluid. Dyer points to Bastide's insight that "In America, when a Negro is accepted one often says, in order to separate him from the rest ofhis race, 'He is a Negro, of course, but his soul is white. ",216 In film, the exceptional black person is granted white license and authority by being lit from above, or being placed in a overwhelmingly white space. Whiteness is often embodied, as Dyer shows, by shining light in film: white characters are regularly lit from above and behind to mark their centrality and importance, while such illumination is reserved for the unusually moral black man, as Dyer argues in the case of Lance Corporal Bonson

(Wolfgang Bodison) inA Few Good Men (1992).217 The language oflight becomes explicitly important when the holy body is not white. In the Jim Carey comedy Bruce Almighty (2003)

Morgan Freeman plays God. Freeman's God is calm and reserved. However, the actor's blackness is overcompensated for by placing him in an infinite warehouse-like space that has the sterile whiteness of a surgery room. A severe white light is thus used to counteract the dark skin ofthe actor.

215 Dyer, White, 209. 216 Bastide, "Color, Racism and Christianity," 315. 217 Dyer, White, 101-102.

86 Whiteness as a sign of evil

The trope of light, divinity and whiteness also has its opposite - terrifying whiteness is often heralded by a backlight that instead of illuminating the subject, plunges them into darkness. This is a classic shot of Horror movies, a popular genre geared towards white audiences. Dyer argues that Horror movies create "a cultural space that makes bearable for whites the exploration of the association ofwhiteness with death,,,218 already discussed here in the character of Simon Legree in Uncle Tom 's Cabin. Perhaps this is the inspiration for the devil as a deathly white figure: seen in the flashing of a white devil's face, Captain Howey, in William Peter Blatty's The Exorcist (1973)219 (fig. 42), and the feminized deathly-white

Satan in The Passion ofthe Christ (fig. 53-54), to which 1 will return later. These hyper- white Satans reflect the association of whiteness with death. This association stems first from the yearning for death by whites. This is seen in the marble-like whiteness of Renaissance art, in the apotheosis of the white death exemplified by Eva's demi se in Uncle Tom 's Cabin, and Sam's ascension in Ghost. Whites are also associated with death because they are overwhelmingly characterized as the bringers of death.220 The leading role whites took in the crusades, colonialism, the Transatlantic Slave Trade and the Holocaust, aIl enterprises that victimized non-white s, justly eams whites their reputation as bringers of death. The despotic power claimed by whiteness can only result in the casting of whites as death.

218 Ibid, 210. 219 In The Exorcist pure white femininity cornes under attack from the devil. Reagan, the young girl who becomes possessed, is the inversion of the trope ofthe angelic young white female well-represented by Eva in Uncle Tom 's Cabin. An ivory white statue of the Virgin Mary is also desecrated by the devil. 220 Dyer, White, 210.

87 Aryan Christs and the creation of racial hierarchies

In biblical films, and in films where Jesus and Mary make an appearance, the racialization of Christianity is clearly in evidence. The hugely successful 1915 film The Birth ofa Nation (D.W. Griffiths) used the new medium of American cinema as a public space in which American national identity was negotiated and transformed, shifting the balance of power from pulpits and Bibles to the stories and pictures of Hollywood.221 Based on Thomas

M. Dixon's The Clansman (1906), described as an historical romance of the Ku Klux Klan,

The Birth ofa Nation tells the story oftwo families, the Stoneman family from the North and the Camerons from the South. Spanning a period from the arrivaI of African slaves in the

Americas, through the civil war to Reconstruction, Griffiths constructed a world where blacks took control of the State of North Carolina's government, legalized interracial marriage and threatened white womanhood. The rise of the Ku Klux Klan is depicted as a heroic and successful white male endeavor to protect white women and by extension the entire nation.

The Birth ofa Nation was an incredibly popular (it was the first film screened at the

White House) because of its appeal to and sympathetic portrayal of white supremacism. This film portrays blacks as unfit for full citizenship and wallows in the threat of miscegenation to

American national identity. Thus, in the wake of post-Civil War disenfranchisement The

Birth ofa Nation constituted white Southem Americans as "the chosen people" or the "New

Israel,,222 (providing the ultimate antithesis to Stowe's Uncle Tom 's Cabin where black slaves are depicted as the chosen people). By relying on a Christian rhetoric, The Birth ofa

221 Kris Jovajtis, " 'The Eyes of AIl People Are Upon Us': American Civil Religion and the Birth of Hollywood," Representing Religion in World Cinema: Filmmaking, Mythmaking, Culture Making, ed. S. Brent Plate (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 246. 222 Ibid, 249.

88 Nation strengthened the influence of its message. In one scene Ben Cameron (Henry B.

Walthall) preached to Klan members by holding up the cross and saying, "Here 1 raise the ancient symbol of the unconquered race ofmen." In the final moments of the film, when the blacks have been disposed, and the conquering whites crowd into the street, Christ appears to main characters Ben Cameron and Elsie Stoneman (Lillian Gish). This conclusion established the white body of Christ as a signifier of the maintenance ofwhite racial purity, and thus American identity (fig. 43). The appearance of Christ signaled the successful control of the black body, and protection of the white 'core' ofChristianity. The white body of Christ is thus utilized to create a racial hierarchy with whites at the apex, and blacks at the bottom.

The harnessing of Christianity to retain white dominance occurs in a more subtle fashion in later biblical films. Directors will often avoid providing a full view of Christ: in

The Robe (1953) we see only his hand, in Ben Hur (1959) the side ofhis face, in The Life of

Brian (1979) only from a distance, and in Barabbas (1962) as a shining light. When Christ has a leading role, directors typically cast him with the "same stereotypical blue-eyes, soft- spoken Jesus moviegoers [have] come to expect,,,223 seen in Cecil B. DeMille's King of

Kings (1927), Nicholas Ray's King ofKings (1961) (fig. 44) and Franco Zeffrelli's Jesus of

Nazareth (1977). William R. Telford de scribes the Christ of film as "the icon of the blond, bearded, long-haired, blue-eyed, white robed Aryan.,,224 He attributes this Aryan Christ to the reliance of directors on art and painting to envision what Christ looks like. He suggests that the Jesus 'we have come to expect' derives from Early Christian art which borrows from

223 Solomon, The Ancient World in Cinema, 192. 224 Telford, "The Depiction of Jesus in the Cinema," 132.

89 images of the sun-god Apollo, and later Byzantine images which inc1ude a beard?25 What

Telford and other scholars do not directly address is that the selection by a director of an

Euro-American Christ, ones that reflect a certain vision of Christ that is structured around his masculine whiteness, creates a racial hierarchy that privileges whiteness.

The masculine whiteness of Christ depicts him as stronger than the demands his body places on him, in terms of both pain and sexual desire?26 In film, temptation and sex are frequently embodied by Mary Magdalene. Although this woman was likely a wealthy patron of Jesus and a witness to his resurrection, she is typically cast, from the 1927 King ofKings to the 2004 The Passion ofthe Christ, into the role ofreformed prostitute.227 Mary

Magdalene is a possible romantic partner of Christ, a currently popular theory thanks to the widely successful Da Vinci Code (2003) by Dan Brown. Christ's potential desire for Mary

Magdalene is rarely acknowledged and never fulfilled. He is, of course, strong enough to resist it.228 A sexual Christ, like a sexual Virgin Mary, would negate his role as improbable white male ideal. 229

The Aryan typecasting of Christ can be attributed to the influence of painting on popular culture, combined with a contemporary unwillingness to portray Christ as Jewish.

Although scholars can without a doubt affirm that Christ was Jewish, many feel they 'know' what he looks like. This is reflected in the ubiquitous popular painting Head ofChrist (1940)

225 Ibid, 132. 226 For more on this subject see Leo Steinberg, The Sexuality ofChrist in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1996. 227 Gaye W. Ortiz, '''Passion'-ate Women: The Female Presence in The Passion ofthe Christ," Mel Gibson's Film and Its Critics: Re-viewing the Passion, ed. S. Brent Plate (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004) 112- 114. For more on Mary Magdalene see Marjorie M. Malvem, Venus in a sackcloth: the Magdalene's origins and metamorphoses. Carbondale: Southem Illinois University Press, 1975. Aiso see Susan Haskin, Mary Magdalene: My th and Metaphor. New York, San Diego and London: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1993. 228 Christ's capacity to resist sex and women is the 'last temptation' in Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation ofChrist (1987). 229 Dyer, White, 17.

90 by Warner Sallman. Reproduced more than 500 million times, this image of a fair-haired and light-skinned Christ, with a glowing backlight, demonstrates the influence ofhigh painting's racialization of Christ on popular conceptions of his body. Sallman' s Christ adheres to Euro-

American visions of Christ, which are predicated around his whiteness and a masculine strength of character that enables him to suppress his bodily desires.

David Morgan argues that The Head ofChrist is successful because it satisfies viewer's preconceived notions ofwhat Christ looks like (fig. 45). Morgan attributes this to the psychology of recognition. That is, Christ's likeness looks like and imitates his (white) viewers. Hence, Morgan points to images like Fred Carter's Jesus Praying in the Garden

(1987) (fig. 46) for an African-American audience and Hsu San Ch'un's Christ, the

Universal Saviar (no date) for a Chinese audience (fig. 47).230 However, while Carter's image and Hsu's image are solely reproduced for audiences that 'recognize' them, Sallman's

Head ofChrist is distributed and venerated well beyond a white North American audience.

Morgan refers to the use of Sallman's image by southern African American Baptists in the

1950s and 1960s. He includes a picture of a Hispanic family with The Head ofChrist, and cites letters, the product of a survey he did of this image, from the Philippines, Hong Kong,

England, New Guinea, Japan, South Africa and Tanzania (despite never soliciting responses from these areas).231 This points to the global and cross-racial success ofSallman's Euro-

American Christ. For many non-white viewers Sallman's Christ, although white and blue- eyed, this image is what they have been indoctrinated with. The colonial success of the racialization ofChristianity, achieved in large part by Western painting's whitening ofhis image, is seen in the common sense notion that this (an Aryan man) is what Christ looked

230 David Morgan, Visual Piety: A History and Theory ofPopular Religious Images (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University ofCalifomia Press, 1998) 34-38. 231 Ibid, 211.

91 like. In fact Christ's appearance in The Head ofChrist, is a composite ofhis image in

Western art (exc1uding, of course, dark or less than 'white' Christs). According to Morgan such composites were "in fact a search for secure racial definitions, a sense of static racial homogeneity.,,232 This composite Western Christ equally applies to the Aryan Christ of film, whose narrow casting, reveals our preconceived notions of what Christ' s body should be, and further indoctrinates Christian whiteness.

Mel Gibson's Christ in The Passion ofthe Christ is a definite exception to this rule. His

Christ is darker and does have the features associated with Jews from that area and period.

Furthermore, the language of the film, Aramaic and Latin, as opposed to the expected

English, distance Christ from white Western and English sensibilities. Unfortunately,

Gibson's visual accuracy, and seeming sensitivity to the racialization ofChristianity, is undermined by the focusing ofblame ofChrist's crucifixion on the Jewish populations and the linking of Satan with the Jews. This is achieved by having Satan walk in amongst the

Jewish crowds and by having young Jewish boys morph into little demons that taunt Judas.

Yaakov Ariel argues that Gibson avoided the more feasible logic that Pontius Pilate and the

Roman Empire persecuted Jesus because he was a popular leader of the people. Rome, he points out, was ruled with an iron fist and would rarely have been influenced by the thoughts the local populations. Rather, Ariel points out, Pontius Pilate was known as a cruel leader who crucified any "messianic groups and preachers who announced the coming kingdom. ,,233

The sympathetic portrayal ofPontius by Gibson, deflects Pontius' responsibility for Christ's crucifixion onto the Jewish populations. In the end The Passion ofthe Christ is remarkably insensitive to the potential anti-Semitic response to this story. While this film demonstrates

232 Ibid, 41. 233 Yaakov Ariel, "The Passion ofthe Christ and the Passion of the Jews," Mel Gibson 's Film and Its Critics: Re-viewing the Passion, ed. S. Brent Plate (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004) 36.

92 the recent need for racial accuracy (the influence 1 would argue of identity politics and political correctness), it is also indicative of the persistence ofracist perceptions at the root of the West's story ofChristianity.

Judas: The race of a traitor

While Christ has become increasingly aryanized over the centuries, Judas has consistently been marked as explicitly Jewish. Traditional depictions of Judas show him with darker skin, a red beard, a hooked nose, or disabled body?34 Dark skin or red hair emerge as the other of blondness, blond being typically associated with the holy body and red hair with

Jewish bodies. Note that, blond hair is almost never called yellow hair. Marina Warner argues that "the category ofblondness demarcates the fair-haired human from the perilous and even devilish associations ofyellow.,,235 If blond were called yellow, its white properties would be negated. The explicit Jewish portrayal of Judas enables a hierarchy ofwhiteness, which privileges white aryans.

The portrayal of Judas in cinema in the later part of the twentieth century is surprisingly sympathetic given his status as of one of the greatest traitors off all time.

Norman Jewison's Jesus Christ Superstar (1973), the film that portrays Judas with the greatest sympathy and complexity, cast black actor Carl Anderson in the role of Judas.236 An

Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice musical, Jesus Christ Superstar focused on the last days of Jesus' life, and unusually portrayed Judas and Mary Magdalene as primary characters in this story. Kim Paffenroth argues that Jewison's provocative casting of Judas undermined

234 Diane Wolfthal, "Imaging the Self: Ritual and Representation in a Yiddish Book ofCustoms," Race-ing Art History: Critical Readings in Race and Art History, ed. Kimberly N. Pinder (New York and London: RoutIedge, 2002) 21. 235 Ibid, 366. 236 Kim Paffenroth, "Film Depictions of Judas", Journal ofReligion and Film (October 2001, vol. 5, no. 2,) 1- 29.

93 societal bigotry against blacks and our preconceptions of race, by offering a black actor a typicaIly 'white' role, and by highlighting our inherent prejudices against blacks. She argues that J ewison' s Judas is,

a character we are 'supposed' to hate, but who is quickly shown to be the most appealing and powerful character of the story. In a raciaIly charged context, the simultaneity ofboth hating and admiring a black man has to calI into question the whole idea of race, as weIl as the whole idea of Judas' villainy?37

However, just as Jewison undermines racial stereotypes he enforces them by fulfilling silent expectations that Judas should be black. The racial critique Jewison makes is limited at best, and incredibly dangerous at worst. Not only does Jewison place far too much responsibility onto the viewers, to recognize their own complicity in sustaining racism amidst an Andrew

Lloyd Webber musical, but by casting Judas as black he leaves intact, even props up, the despotic whiteness at the core ofChristianity. Casting Jesus, Peter, John, the Virgin Mary, or

Mary Magdalene as black, would have been provocative. That would have reached to the heart of the machinery that plays a central role in perpetuating racism in the West - the accruement and sustainment of white centrality and hegemony through manipulations of

Christian ideals.

Engagement with an icon: the Virgin Mary in Hail, Mary and The Passion o[the Christ

ln cinema the Virgin Mary typicaIly receives scant attention. Often hustled to the side,

Hollywood is more interested in what she reveals about Jesus than providing her character with any real depth. The truncation of Mary disaIlows a successful engagement with notions offeminine purity and maternity. Here 1 discuss two exceptions to this rule, the films Hail

237 Ibid, 16-17.

94 Mary (1985) and The Passion ofthe Christ (2004). Both films take up the character of the

Virgin Mary, implicating her as a central or important actor in their plot. In this last section 1 will attempt to show how Western art has influenced the representation of the Virgin Mary as white femininity purified. In Hait Mary Godard restaged the Immaculate Conception and the birth of Jesus in modem day Switzerland. It tells a story of Mary and Joseph coming to terms with Mary's immaculate pregnancy in twentieth century Europe. The film begins with Mary playing basketball. She is seen with her boyfriend Joseph with whom she refuses to have sex.

The angel Gabriel arrives by plane to tell her what will happen to her. Mary goes to the gynecologist, and the doctor confirms that she is a virgin and pregnant. We see Mary naked in her bed distraught about what is happening to her. Afterward Joseph reluctantly pledges his loyalty. She gives birth to Jesus, although we do not see the actual delivery. As a child, we see Jesus naming his apostles and when he is still young he leaves. The last scene is of

Mary getting into her car, lighting a cigarette and applying red lipstick, her mouth forming an

'0'. 1 will argue that in Hait Mary, Godard presented purity and impurity as two diametrically opposed states and in doing so he essentialized white womanhood. Purity also becomes essentialized in The Passion ofthe Christ, which is a graphie portrayal of the fourteen stages of the Cross. It begins with Christ in the garden and ends with his crucifixion, followed by a brief scene of his resurrection. In this film, Mary emerges as a full and complex character. However, as we become acquainted with Mary's person, we also meet the character of Satan who is cast as an anti-Mary through similar costume and staging. The inversion of Mary into the form of Satan plays off a Western assumption that women are more susceptible to evil then men (the story of Adam and Eve is emblematic ofthis bias).

Gibson's portrayal of Satan as the anti-Mary reinforces the notion that white femininity must

95 be protected. The anxiety created around Mary's fonu has racial implications. These implications stem from the extreme paleness ofher skin, coupled with the laying ofblame of

Christ's death on the Jewish population rather than Pontius Pilate. This further imbeds Mary as a white 'gentile'.

Hait Mary tells the story of Mary's conflict between her spiritual and bodily self. An incredibly contentious film, Godard's offence in the public's eyes was to show Mary in the nude?38 While Mary struggled to defy the pressures ofher body on her soul, Godard returned again and again to shots that objectify the female body. In a scene where Mary bathes in a small bathroom Godard evoked the 'key-hole' gaze, sharply cutting from a shot of Joseph staring intently into the distance to a nude shot of Mary with a 'deer in the headlights' look as she climbs into the tub and closes the door. In the same scene the awkward angle of the camera recording Mary bathing evokes the physical presence of a person looking down and desiring Mary's body (fig. 49). The desiring gaze of the camera is an apt metaphor for the natural demands on the Virgin's body. From the male subject position Godard sexualized

Mary, though this sexuality is only witnessed by the viewer through Godard's objectification ofher body. For the first time, Mary appears like Jesus as possessing a sexuality, but being stronger than it. However, her purity is not sustainable, as at the end of the film she severs this purity and embraces her sexuality.

The moment of resolution for the spiritual versus bodily conflict came when Mary teaches Joseph to say '1 love you', their spiritual love overriding their bodily desire. In the scene Joseph reaches for her saying the words, but Mary evades him, saying 'no, no' directing him until Joseph hovers his splayed hand over Mary's fiat belly. This shot, of

238 For a recounting of the controversy surrounding Hait, Mary see Maryel Locke, "A History of the Public controversy," Jean-Luc Godard's Hait Mary: Woman and the Sacred in Fi/m, eds. Maryel Locke and Charles Warren (Carbonale and Edwardsville: Southem Illinois University Press, 1993) 1-9.

96 Mary's stomach exposed, the genitals cut out of the frame, and the wide male hand nearing but not touching her stomach, has become the most circulated image of the movie (fig. 49). It is an image that Laura Mulvey argues 'sanitized the female body.' The image "separates female sexuality, the female genitalia that represent the wound, from reproduction, the space of the womb.,,239 For Godard, this is the Immaculate Conception, the womb freed from the taint of sexuality, which he solicits and then represses. The suppression of Mary' s sexuality is entirely consistent with traditional representation of Mary's body, where her iconic status is dependant on her purity.240 Godard's film differed from traditional representations of

Mary, and was so contentious because he depicted the bodily possibilities of Mary's existence. However, as l will show, Godard firmly remained within the paradigm that equates holiness with purity, and purity with whiteness.

Whiteness and colour play a subtle but important role in the film. Mary is tortured by her body, by her soul trapped in her body. Godard's eye returns again and again to her skin, prying from all angles, seeking to enter but remaining on the surface. The elusiveness of

Mary's body is accented by the formlessness of the whiteness that surrounds her: her white knee socks, the white doctor's office, the white nightgown that shields her body, the white sheets she writhes in (fig. 50). Godard enlisted the trope ofwhite clothing and a white setting to hyperbolize Mary's purity. In doing so Godard makes use of a not uncommon strategy in representations of the Virgin, exemplified by Dante Rossetti's Annunciation (1849-51) (fig.

52). Both Rossetti and Godard have whiteness encompass the Virgin because, in the words of

Richard Dyer, "whiteness ... shows the dirt of the body. That is why it has such a privileged

239 Laura Mulvey, "Godard's Iconography ofWomen," Jean-Luc Godard's Hail Mary: Woman and the Sacred in Film, ed. Maryel Locke and Charles Warren (Carbonale and Edwardsville: Southem Illinois University Press) 50. 240 For more on Mary's sexuality see Maurice Hamington, Hail Mary?: the strugglefor ultimate womanhood in Catholicism. New York: Routledge, 1995.

97 place in relation to things which are kept close to the body,,,241 to ensure purity. Surrounded by white we are assured of the cleanliness ofMary's body. When she gives birth to Jesus

(which we do not see) and he grows up, the colours change. Having given birth, Mary's innocence at the time of the annunciation is no longer feasible. Her nightgown becomes blue, a classic Marian colour. It is also a co Id colour, one which avoids bodily associations. When

Jesus leaves Mary her pure status is no longer ofimport. She encounters the angel Gabriel who hails her, "Je vous salue, Marie". She gets into her car, lights a cigarette and applies red lipstick. The red circle of Mary's mouth is the last shot of the film.

In Hait, Mary, colour, especially the non-colour white, achieves its end, without our noticing. White marks Mary as pure and keeps her pure. When Mary immaculately conceives, the biggest threat to her is her body, and Joseph's desire for it. White reminds her, white protects her, shields her, and loosens her body from any material demands. When purity is no longer necessary, when Jesus grew up, her white nightgown becomes blue, which functions here as a transitional colour. When Jesus leaves, the colour oniofMary's body inverses itself; white becomes red, marked by the final shot of Mary' s lipstick-red lips. The pure is now camaI. Red, the colour of vice, marks Mary's mouth as a sign of sexual pleasure, and her self-knowledge of that sexuality. The switch from pure to camaI is necessary in Godard's eyes for, as Vlada Petric and Geraldine Bard write, the red "suggests the unmatched power of the nature to which

Godard's heroine must adjust to if she is to survive. Otherwise, she is doomed either to complete her self-destruction or to rise to sainthood - either option incompatible with Godard's view of women.,,242 Godard essentializes womanhood. For him purity is a totality that is unsustainable. In painting Mary's lips red, Godard created a fissure in the absolutely pure conceptualization of the

241 Dyer, White, 76. 242 Vlada Petrie and Geraldine Bard, "Godard's vision of the new Eve," Jean-Luc Godard's HaU Mary: Woman and the Sacred in Film, ed. Maryel Locke and Charles Warren (Carbonale and Edwardsville: Southem Illinois University Press, 1993) 104.

98 Virgin Mary. In doing so he invalidated the Virgin Mary's status as an ideal gender model for white femininity; this is Godard's true offence in the eyes ofhegemonic white society.

From the beginning, Godard's vision of Mary was incompatible with mainstream representations ofher body. His articulation of Mary's body as something she must overcome brings Mary's sexuality out of the shadows. This accounts for the vitriolic response to Hait Mary's release. In viewing Mary's body, Godard capitalized upon her whiteness and purity to create tension around her sexuality and her purity. Two decades later, in The Passion ofthe Christ (2004) Gibson also hamessed whiteness to create dramatic tension around the Virgin Mary.

Catholic piety understands Mary as a perpetuaI virgin, her virginity keeping her perpetually young. Not so with Gibson's Mary who is appropriately aged. She is described by one critic as looking "like she has lived a life close to the earth and lived it to the full and withjoy.,,243 However, Gibson's Virgin Mary is typical in other ways. She has very pale skin. Her skin is not deathly white like Gibson's Satan, but is definitely not olive toned, like another female character Veronica. Gibson's Virgin Mary wears a black robe and a slim white headdress. The black robe grounds Mary as a mother who will soon experience grave loss, but it also accentuates the bloodlessness ofher pallor (fig. 52). The slim white headdress is typical of Marian clothing; its whiteness assures us of the cleanliness ofher body.

One of Mary's few lines is given when she stands at the base of Jesus' cross, where she says, "Flesh ofmy flesh, heart ofmy heart." Not taken from the bible this line mirrors what Adam says when he firsts sees Eve, "This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh (Genesis 2:22)." Whether intended by Gibson or not, this parallel is informed from

243 Sister Rose Pacette, "The Passion of the Christ: A Female Critic's Perspective", quoted in Gaye W. Ortiz, '''Passion'-ate Women: The Female Presence in The Passion ofthe Christ," Mel Gibson 's Film and lts Critics: Re-viewing the Passion, ed. S. Brent Plate (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004) Ill.

99 classical Marian devotion that constitutes Mary as the new Eve.244 The Church has long taught that, as a representative of women, Mary renounced the evil unleashed on the world thanks to Eve. As Maurice Hamington argues "the association of Mary with Eve creates a moral contrast that forces women to be categorized with Eve because of Mary's unattainable

'goodness' .,,245 In the Virgin Mary the female body atones for the sins of Eve, further enforcing the need to keep Mary pure and suitably white.

The portrayal of Mary as the new Eve opens the connection between femininity and evil. Indeed, "the notion of Eve as the gateway of the devil so undergirds the paradigm of a

Christian womanhood that imagining a different Eve and a different Mary requires a fundamental shift in theological reflection.,,246 In The Passion ofthe Christ, Satan is depicted as a deathly white androgynous figure, swathed in a black robe. By portraying Satan's zombie like pallor as a mutation of Mary's (the underside ofwhiteness) and by dressing both

Mary and Satan in similar clothing, Gibson fashions Satan as the anti-Mary (fig. 53). Though on first glance Satan appears to be androgynous, the actor cast as Satan, Rosalinda

Celentano, is female and dark-skinned. Her femininity seeps through in the movie?47 This explicitly occurs when Satan mimi cs Mary by cradling a demon-baby, and it is compounded by the unavoidable femininity of the actress who is cast in this role (fig. 51). Like Scorsese who casts a young white girl angel as the devil in The Last Temptation ofChrist (in this film evil masquerades as white and good), Gibson capitalizes upon the long associations of females with evil. 248

244 Ortiz, "'Passion' -ate Women," 112. 245 Hamington, Hai/ Mary?: the struggle for ultimate womanhood in Catholicism, 138. 246 Ibid, 140. 247 The deathly pallor painted onto her face is an interesting inversion of early Hollywood movies such as Birth ofthe Nation that use blackface: the painting of white actors so that they mimic blacks. 248 For more on the association ofwomen with evil see Nel Noddings, Women and Evil. Berkeley: University of Califomia Press, 1989.

100 In two scenes, Mary and Satan are overtly polarized against each other. First, during the flagellation, Christ is lying on the ground surrounded by a taunting crowd. Satan weaves in and amongst the crowd cradling an automaton baby, a wee demon, and the two together provide the terrifying antithesis to the many images ofVirgin Mary and Christ Child (fig.

54). In a second scene, Christ, soaked in his own blood and bare1y alive, is almost incapable of carrying his cross up the road, lined by crowds on either side. On one side of the road

Satan weaves through the crowd, and on the other side the Virgin Mary does the same. The camera flips in between Mary and Satan, repeatedly juxtaposing these two visually similar, but antithetical, figures. The Virgin Mary is marked as 'aIl that is good', which is polarized against 'aIl that is bad', embodied by Satan. This suggests an either-or-mentality of good versus evil. However, this time we do not witness the Manichean dichotomy of black versus white. Rather, the dichotomy is structured around the opposition of pure, good whiteness and mutated, evil whiteness. Despite this evolution in The Passion ofthe Christ, Mary is still maintained as an ideal of whiteness. This occurs because her extreme paleness divides Mary from the rest of Jerusalem's Jewish population, on whose feet Gibson lays the blame for

Christ's death.

While both Hai/ Mary and The Passion ofthe Christ flesh out the character of the

Virgin Mary, finally enabling an engagement with an icon, whiteness stills retains its seat.

This occurs because both directors remain within a rhetoric that intertwines feminine whiteness with purity. Thus Godard utilized color symbolism to fashion his Mary, while

Gibson played off of the diametric opposition ofwhiteness as purity and whiteness and death. Both Godard and Gibson cannot conceive of Mary without capitalizing upon and reinforcing her whiteness. Here are the lasting effects of the West's use of the Virgin Mary as

101 an ideal offeminine whiteness: an ideal that has been developed and disseminated through

Western painting and whose lasting effects we see in cinema.

Conclusion

The racialization of Christianity is visualized and perpetuated by images, the visualization of which has enabled a symbolism based on skin colour where whiteness becomes the embodiment of a Christian ethic, and blackness its antithesis. Because canonical painting has a large role in filtering popular conceptions of the bible, contemporary interpretations of the bible inherently summon the racialization ofChristianity. Particularly influential is the conflation of whiteness, light and holiness found in Western painting, which is well suited to the medium of cinema. While the Aryan Christ might lose favor, the language oflight as a marker ofwhiteness continues to hold sway. Here is the insidious nature of whiteness; because we often do not recognize how it functions, it holds power without our realizing it. Purity predicated on whiteness is silently persistent: this is a powerful conflation that saps vitality from the Virgin Mary reinforcing her iconic status rather than her humanity. To destabilize the racialization of Christianity we need an honest engagement of Mary's sexuality and a simultaneous dis-engagement of the language of whiteness, light and holiness. Only in visualizing Christianity without privileging whiteness will we be able to address the Christian body in an ethical way.

102 Conclusion Western society is infected with a Manichean delirium that effects the production and reception of Christian imagery in the West. Within this thesis 1 have argued that a pervasive colour symbolism that privileges whiteness and degrades blackness has direct implications for race and racism. Having shown how notions of purity in religious imagery are predicated on both a containment of the body and degrees of whiteness, 1 argue that the deployment of

'purity' is a strategy to enforce a Manichean dichotomy of black from white. By using a historical approach to contextualize the rise of the Manichean delirium, within the rise of the

Transatlantic Slave Trade in Europe, 1 attempted to show the constructed nature of the symbolism ofblack and white. 1 posit that this symbolism resonates throughout twentieth century visual representations of Christianity. The controversy surrounding Ofili's The Holy

Virgin Mary (1996), and the deployment of conceptions of purity around Mary in Jean-Luc

Godard's Hai! Mary (1985) and Mel Gibson's The Passion ofthe Christ (2004) demonstrate how whiteness retains hegemony through conceptions of Christianity. Above aH, 1 have attempted to show how our perceptions of black and white are specious, and have attempted to open up a space for alternative readings ofthese colours in a Western sphere. As a feminist and critical race analysis of Christian imagery, my research contributes to the fields of art history and film studies by elucidating the terms around which the holy and good body is represented, and the subsequent ramifications for both race and gender. In particular, 1 mark the legacy ofwhiteness in Christian imagery, working to displace its centrality.

While this thesis highlights the deathly impossibility of a purified, whitened existence, further work remains to be done on the relationship ofblackness to spirituality.

Andres Serrano's Black Jesus (1989), Chris Ofili's The Holy Virgin Mary and the many

Black Madonnas found throughout the world, are only the tip of the iceberg. For too long, the

103 discipline of art history has remained impervious to the role of canonical works in privileging the white body. Through their prominent position within Western culture these works have played an important role in popular conceptions of race, gender and Christianity. For that reason, my work has focused on the colour symbolism ofblack and white, attempting to demonstrate how motifs of light and darkness have direct implications for race and racism. In elucidating how these colours function, l enable an engagement with white and black beyond the age-old good and evil.

In concluding this project l will review the primary means through which whiteness is constituted in Christian imagery. l understand them to be, first, a conception of purity that contains the body and marks it as white. Second, the dichotomy ofblack and white, where black is marked as evil and white as good, has infected 'common sense' perceptions ofrace and is maintained through the cult of whiteness, and a consistent degradation of the black body. Third, whiteness retains primacy through a language ofholiness that is expressed in the hyper white body of Jesus and Mary, and the pervasive depiction ofholy light as white.

Lastly, the perversion of the above emerges as the perception ofwhiteness as death and evil.

This perversion suggests the capacity of the Manichean delirium to faH in on itself, further highlighting the potential of black to be perceived in the West as not a marker ofwhat is bad, but as a marker of what is good.

The word purity suggests that which is untainted. If we ask ourselves what is the pure body untainted from, the answer is clear: the pure body is untainted from sin and dirt, both of which are aligned with literaI and symbolic darkness. The understanding of sin as inclusive of sexuality, the fear of darkness and the disassociation from dirt, which is of the earth and nature, reveals to us the extent to which purity is a dangerous notion. In particular the

104 representation of the pure body, se en in the Virgin Mary, as never leaking more than tears or milk, demonstrates that the ideal of the pure body is an impossible one. What is revealing to the project of critical whiteness studies is that purity is consistently depicted as white. We saw this in the first chapter in Titian's Madonna with Saints and Members ofthe Pesaro family (1519-26) and Giovanni Bellini's S. Zaccharia Altarpiece (1505) where the purest (i.e. the Virgin Mary and Christ Child) are the whitest, to the extent that they themselves radiate light. This provides the basis for the constructed conflation of holiness, light and whiteness.

This conflation is heavily guarded in the West, so much so that the depiction of a Christian icon as black is immediately controversial within a public realm, seen, of course, in the outcry surrounding Christ Ofili's The Holy Virgin Mary. What is also interesting is that this conflation, of whiteness and light, becomes a means to represent the pure godly body, or the white soul that has been released from the demands of the body. Hence, when Eva, in the

1903 silent movie Uncle Tom 's Cabin, reappears as an angel the white light emanating from her body blinds those below her. When Patrick Swayze's character in Ghost ascends to the heavens he ascends into a sublime white light, and when the black actor Morgan Freeman plays God in Bruce Almighty he does so in an infinitely white space: the extreme light counteracting the darkness of his skin.

The bodies of Jesus and Mary provide a site where the ideals ofwhiteness and

Christianity are compressed together. Their deployment within visual culture enables a hierarchy ofholiness and whiteness. Thus in Titian's altarpiece, the Virgin Mary and Christ

Child sit at a pinnac1e of whiteness and holiness, while the prisoner who is furthest away from them, is cast as both unworthy of salvation and decidedly outside of the boundaries of whiteness. In The Healer (1957) from Christ in the Fine Arts the un-enlightened blacks can

105 only receive the grace of a Christian god through a white colonizer. Similarly, in The Birth of a Nation (1915) the appearance of Christ marks the successful control ofblacks in the south: it is his white body that marks the successful maintenance of American national identity as white.

The use of Jesus and Mary to mark the boundaries and degrees ofwhiteness is coupled with their status as improbable and ambiguous gender models. They are what whites should but cannot be. Both Marina Wamer and Julia Kristeva articulate how the white

Virgin Mary denies a positive experience of sexuality in her female worshipers. As in

Velazquez's Immaculate Conception (1614) any hint ofher body is effaced by the all­ encompassing robe she wears. The trauma Wamer and Kristeva suggest is recognized in

Godard's Mary who is tortured by the desires she feels, but will not give into. Nonetheless,

Godard's conception ofpurity rests on an absolute suppression ofthat sexuality. When Mary finally does engage that sexuality, after her son leaves her, her purity is completely severed.

The pervasiveness of a white, pious Mary whose body is hidden from view, has long entered a collective consciousness of what the Virgin should be. This has direct implications for race, though this is rarely recognized. Purity and whiteness emerge as endlessly intertwined with each other, where one is dependent on the other. To compromise the purity of these figures becomes a dangerous task. Chris Ofili, like Andres Serrano, came under vehement attack for his The Holy Virgin Mary: we saw how, in this case, racist anxiety about a white icon painted as black, was expressed not by focusing on the genitalia incorporated into the work but by focusing on elephant dung, which became equated with blackness. The obsessive focus on the dung revealed how deeply ideals of whiteness and purity run in

Western society. It also revealed the automatic assumptions that are held about the race of the

106 Virgin Mary, the stakes that are held in maintaining the Virgin's purity and whiteness, and the continued relegation of female genitalia and dung to the status of abjection.

The extent to which Renaissance art has influenced our perception of Jesus and Mary is seen in reproductions and citations of these works in media and film. That Time and

th Newsweek put incredibly similar paintings of the nativity on their December 13 , 2004 covers displays the primacy hegemonic society attributes to religious Renaissance art. It is nothing short of tragic that what is often considered the apotheosis of Western painting cornes from a critical period of white self-definition, combined with an escalation of negative stereotyping of blacks. White a wide variety of images of Jesus and Mary exist in 'high art' from Medieval art to the present day, it is those works that conflate whiteness with holiness that continue to be privileged. This exemplifies both how inherent the privileging of whiteness is in the West, and the means by which whites continue to function as the universal referent for Western society by claiming the central point of focus for themselves. A tokenistic inclusion of a non-white Jesus or Mary within the pages of Time only served to buttress the continued primacy of these white icons. Upon showing the covers of these magazines to friends and colleagues their reactions was one ofboredom. "WeIl, yes of course," their general response was, "what else do you expect?" This exemplified to me how our conceptions of race are taken for granted, how they have infected our common sense notions of the white and Christian body and the pervasive invisibility of whiteness. 1 would contend that what stands at the bottom of this common sense notion is the Manichean dualism of black and white. Of course the Virgin Mary is white on the cover of Newsweek and Time, because white is the colour ofholiness. Of course, Newsweek and Time do not put a black Virgin Mary on the cover as her blackness would be read a sign of evil. To have a

107 black Virgin Mary would upset Time and Newsweek's core readers who are presumably white. In order to undo the power of whiteness we must recognize when we capitalize upon, or become complicit with the Manichean dualism. We must cease to accept the privileging of whiteness, in particular, in the figures of Jesus and Mary, in order to push whiteness out of the centre.

Mel Gibson's The Passion ofthe Christ is a fascinating example ofa moment when the purification ofwhiteness is reconstituted as its antithesis. Satan, as a deathly white anti­

Mary, capitalizes upon the association ofwhiteness with death. This associations cornes about through the sharp separation of white purity from a living and active body. In Gibson's

Satan the lifelessness of white purity (seen in Mario Equicola warning in the late sixteenth century that painters should not let the skin oftheir subjects appear too marble like) combines with the violence white purity enacts on non-white subjects (seen in Dennis

Heiner's act of cleansing the black body ofOfili's The Holy Virgin Mary with white paint).

Gibson's Satan thus truly does embody evil, in its hyperbolic re-enacting ofwhiteness.

The constitution of whiteness through Christianity both informs its embodiment and makes Christianity complicit in sustaining white hegemony. The opposition ofblack and white, the Manichean dichotomy, is a primary means through which whiteness activates a

Christian rhetoric. Hence, the continued Western deployment of white as good and black as evil in cultural productions, no matter ifthey draw upon the colour of bodies or not, feeds into a rhetoric of whiteness that retains power for whites and degrades blacks. Thus, an ethical art historical analysis, as well as artistic production, must disengage from this dichotomy. It must, at least, mark the 'holy' deployment ofwhiteness for the viewer so they can recognize how it functions. Chris Ofili's The Holy Virgin Mary brings us one step further

108 in disabling the Manichean dichotomy by repositioning blackness as a positive spiritual force. The capacity of black to take on this meaning is both a threat to whiteness, a spur for the outrage surrounding The Holy Virgin Mary, and evidence of the extent to which the dichotomy must be continually propped up and reproduced. The volatile reception of

Christian images demonstrates both the stakes we have in perpetuating the dichotomy of black and white, and the reality that this dichotomy is not entrenched or an inherent mode of perception, but one which can be dismantled.

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118 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Fig. 1. Andres Serrano, Piss Christ, 1987. Cibachrome, silicone, perspex and wood frame~ 165.1 x 114.6 x 1.9 cm. Location unknown ...... 120

Fig. 2. Andres Serrano, White Christ, 1989. Cibachrome, silicone, perspex and wood frame~ 165.1 x 114.6 x 1.9 cm. Paula Cooper Gallery, New York ...... 121

Fig. 3. Andres Serrano, Black Jesus, 1989. Cibachrome, silicone, perspex and wood frame,165.1 x 114.6 x 1.9 cm. Location unknown ...... 121

Fig. 4. Titian, Madonna with Saints and Members of the Pesaro family, 1519-26. Altar- painting. Oil on canvas, 478 x 266 cm. Church ofSta Maria dei Frari, Venice ...... 122

Fig. 5. Harold Coppings, The Healer, no date. Location unknown. Reproduced in Cythia Pearl Mauss, Christ and the Fine Arts (New York: Harper & Row, 1959) 756 ...... 123

Fig. 6. "Eve and her Tempter." Illustration from Charles CarroI, The Tempter of Eve: A book ofAbsorbing Interest and Profound Concernfor Everyone (1902) ...... 123

Fig. 7. Unknown, The Transfiguration of Christ, c. 560. Apse mosaic, Monastery of St. Catherine, Sinai ...... 124

Fig. 8. Jean-Léon Gérôme, Jérusalem, 1867. Oil on canvas, 63.5 x 98 cm. Musée d'Orsay, Paris ...... 124

Fig. 9. Unknown, The separation of light from darkness, 13 th c. Atrium mosaic, S. Marco, Venice ...... 125

Fig. 10. Unknown, The Annunciation, c. 1080. Mosaic. Daphni, Greece ...... , ...... 125

Fig. 11. Giovanni Bellini, Madonna with Saints, 1505. Altar painting, oil on wood, transferred to canvas, 402 x 273 cm. Church ofS. Zaccaria, Venice ...... 126

Fig. 12. Giovanni Bellini, Madonna and Child with John the Baptist and Ste. Elizabeth, C. 1490-5. Staedelsches Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt-am-Main ...... 127

Fig. 13. Giovanni Bellini, Miracle of the Cross at the Bridge of S. Lorenzo, 1500. Tempera on canvas, 323 x 430 cm. Gallerie dell'Accademia, Venice ...... 127

Fig. 14. Andrea Mantegna, Adoration of the Magi, 1464. Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence .. 128

Fig. 15. Jacopo Bassano, The Adoration ofthe Magi, c. 1560-65. Oil on canvas, 92.3 x 117.5 cm. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna ...... 128

119 Fig. 16. Chris Ofili, The Holy Virgin Mary, 1996. Acrylic, oil, paper collage, glitter, map pins and elephant dung on canvas, 243.8 x 182.8 cm. The Saatchi Gallery, London ...... 129

Fig. 17. Chris Ofili, Foxy Roxy, 1997. Acrylic, oil, resin, glitter, map pins and elephant dung on canvas, 243.8 x 182.8 cm. Private Collection, Berlin ...... 130

Fig. 18. Chris Ofili, Blossom, 1997. Acrylic, oil, resin, glitter, map pins and elephant dung on canvas, 243.8 x 182.8 cm. Collection Ole Farrup, Copenhagen ...... 130

Fig. 19. Chris Ofili, Rodin, 1997-1998. Acrylic, oil, resin, glitter, map pins and elephant dung on canvas, 243.8 x 182.8 cm. The collection of Dakis Joannou, Athens ...... 130 Fig. 20. Chris Ofili, The Adoration of Captain Shit and the Legend of Blackstars, 1998. Acrylic, oil, resin, glitter, map pins and elephant dung on canvas, 243.8 x 182.8 cm. The collection of Dakis Joannou, Athens ...... 130

Fig. 23. The unilinear scale of human races and lower relatives according to Noft and Gliddon, 1868. Reproduced in Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure ofMan, New York and London: W.W. Norton, 1981 ...... 131 Fig. 24. Chris Ofili, Shithead, 1993. Hair and elephant dung. Jedermann Collection, N.A. Photographed by Chris Ofili ...... 131

t Fig. 25. Dennis Heiner defacing Chris Ofili's The Holy Virgin Mary, December 19 \ 1998, Brooklyn Museum of Art ...... 132 Fig. 26. Diego Velazquez, Immaculate Conception, 1614. Oil on canvas, 135 x 101.6 cm. National Gallery, London ...... 132 Fig. 27. Coyer, Time Magazine, December 13,2004 ...... 133 Fig. 28. Coyer, Newsweek, December 13,2004 ...... , ...... 133 Fig. 29. Vincenzo Foppa, Madonna of the Book, 1460-68. Wood panel. Castello Sforzesco, Milan ...... , ...... 133 Fig. 30. Robert Campin, The Virgin and Child Before a Fire Screen, c.1425-30. National Gallery, London ...... 133 Fig. 31 Juan de Ibarra, Juan Diego Opening the Ti/ma, 1743. Location Unknown ...... 134 Fig. 32. Diana of Ephesus. Location Unknown. Reproduced in Leonard W. Moss and Stephen C. Cappanari. "In Quest of the Black Virgin: She is Black Because She is Black." Mother Worship: Theme and Variations. Chapel Hill: The University of North Caroline Press, 1982 ...... 134

Fig. 33. Our Lady ofHermits, Einsiedeln, Switzerland ...... 134 Fig. 34. Sandro Botticelli, Madonna with John the Baptist and St. John the Evangelist, c. 1485. Wood. Staatliche Museen Preussicher Kulturbesitz, Gemaldegalerie, Berlin ... 135 Fig. 35. Leonardo da Vinci, Madonna Lippi, c. 1490. The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg ...... 135 Fig. 36. David Hammons, Bliz-aard Bail Sale, 1983. Location unknown ...... 136 Fig. 37. Chris Ofili, Shit Sale, 1993. London. Photographed by Franco Ofili ...... 136 Fig. 38. Hieronymus Bosch, Christ Carrying the Cross, 1515-16. Oil on panel, 74 x 81 cm. Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Ghent ...... 136 Fig. 39. Garafolo, Ascension of Christ, 1510-20. Oil on panel, 314 x 204.5 cm. Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Antica, Rome ...... 137

Fig. 40. Film still, The death of Tom and the appearance of Eva as an angel, Uncle Tom 's Cab in, 1903 ...... 137 Fig. 41. Film still, Sam ascending to heaven, Ghost, 1991 ...... 138 Fig. 42. Film still, Captain Howdy, The Exorcist, 1973 ...... 138 Fig. 43. Film still, The appearance of Christ, The Birth ofthe Nation, 1915 ...... 139 Fig. 44. Film still, The Road to Cavalry, King ofKings, 1961 ...... 139 Fig. 45. Wamer Sallman, The Head ofChrist, 1940. Location unknown ...... 139 Fig. 46. Fred Carter, Jesus Praying in the Garden, 1987. Ink and pencil, 10.5 x 20 cm. Location Unknown ...... , ...... 140 Fig. 47. Hsu San Ch'un, Christ, the Universal Saviour, no date. Location unknown. Reproduced in Cynthia Pearl Mauss, Christ and the Fine Arts (New York: Harper & Row, 1959) 757 ...... 140 Fig. 48. Film still, Mary bathing, Hai/ Mary, 1985 ...... 141 Fig. 49. Film still, Mary teaches Joseph to say 1 love you, Hai/ Mary, 1985 ...... 141 Fig. 50. Film still, Mary getting dressed, Hail Mary, 1985 ...... 142 Fig. 51. Dante Rossetti, Annunciation, 1849-50. Oil on canvas, 72 x 42 cm. Tate Gallery, London ...... 142 Fig. 52. Film still, the Virgin Mary, The Passion ofthe Christ, 2004 ...... 143

Fig. 53. Film still, Satan, The Passion afthe Christ, 2004 ...... 143

Fig. 54. Film still, Satan and baby-demon, The Passion of the Christ, 2004 ...... 143 Fig. 1. Andres Serrano, Piss Christ, 1987. Cibachrome, silicone, perspex and wood frame, 165.1 x 114.6 x 1.9 cm. Location unknown.

120 Fig. 2. Andres Serrano, White Christ, 1989. Cibachrome, silicone, perspex and wood frame, 165.1 x 114.6 x 1.9 cm. Paula Cooper Gallery, New York. In situ in a 2001 exhibit entitled 'Give and Take' at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

Fig. 3. Andres Serrano, Black Jesus, 1989. Cibachrome print, 60" x 40". Location unknown.

121 Fig. 4. Titian, Madonna with Saints and Members ofthe Pesaro family, 1519-26. Altar­ painting. Oil on canvas, 478 x 266 cm. Church ofSta Maria dei Frari, Venice.

122 Fig. 5. Harold Coppings, The Healer, no date. Location unknown. Reproduced in Cythia Pearl Mauss, Christ and the Fine Arts (New York: Harper & Row, 1959) 756.

Fig. 6. "Eve and her Tempter." Illustration from Charles CarroI, The Tempter ofEve: A book ofAbsorbing Interest and Profound Concernfor Everyone (1902).

123 Fig. 7. Unknown, The Transfiguration ofChrist, c. 560. Apse mosaic, Monastery of St. Catherine, Sinai.

Fig. 8. Jean-Léon Gérôme, Jerusalem, 1867. Oil on canvas. 63.5 x 98 cm. Musée d'Orsay, Paris.

124 Fig. 9. Unknown, The separation oflightfrom darkness, 13 Atrium mosaic, S. Marco,Venice.

• > • ',...... ' !,..~<., ~ .'~.,., h .I{~~""~<'3% •. I,I-~! ~ __ Fig. 10. Unknown, The Annunciaiton, c. 1080. Mosaic. Daphni. In this mosaic the holy spirit comes in the form of shimmering gold.

125 Fig. Il. Giovanni Bellini, Madonna with Saints, 1505. Altar painting, oil on wood, transferred to canvas, 402 x 273 cm. Church of S. Zaccaria, Venice

126 Fig. 12. Giovanni Bellini, Madonna and Child with John the Baptist and Ste. Elizabeth, c. 1490-5. Staede1sches Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt-am-Main.

Fig. 13. Giovanni Bellini, Miracle ofthe Cross at the Bridge ofS. Lorenzo, 1500. Tempera on canvas, 323 x 430 cm. Gallerie dell'Accademia, Venice. Detail on right.

127 Fig. 14. Andrea Mantegna, Adoration of the Magi, 1464. Galleria deg1i Uffizi, Florence.

Fig. 15. Jacopo Bassano, The Adoration ofthe Magi, c. 1560-65. Oil on canvas, 92.3 x 117.5 CID. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.

128 Fig. 16. Chris Ofi1i, The Holy Virgin Mary, 1996. Acry1ic, oi1, paper collage, glitter, map pins and e1ephant dung on canvas, 243.8 x 182.8 cm. The Saatchi Gallery, London.

129 Fig. 17. Chris Ofi1i, Foxy Roxy, 1997. Fig. 18. Chris Ofili, Blossom, 1997. Acrylic, oil, resin, glitter, map pins and Acrylic, oH, resin, glitter, map pins and elephant dung on canvas, 243.8 x 182.8 elephant dung on canvas, 243.8 x 182.8 cm. Private Collection, Berlin. cm. Collection Ole Farrup, Copenhagen.

Fig, 19. Chris Ofili, Rodin, 1997-1998. Fig. 20. Chris Ofili, The Adoration of Acrylic, oH, resin, glitter, map pins and Captain Shit and the Legend ofBlackstars, e1ephant dung on canvas, 243.8 x 182.8 cm. 1998. Acrylic, oil, resin, glitter, map pins The collection of Dakis Joannou, Athens. and elephant dung on canvas, 243.8 x 182.8 cm. The collection of Dakis Joannou, Athens.

130 .. ' - --...... ~\

::.S' . ~V"

~;~

~'\ '­ ~"",

Fig. 23. The unilinear scale ofhuman races and lower relatives according to Noft and Gliddon, 1868. Reproduced in Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure ofMan, New York and London: W.W. Norton, 1981. The skull ofthe chimpanzee is exaggerated, as is thejaw ofthe black man, thus insinuating that blacks could even rank lower than apes.

Fig. 24.Chris Ofili, Shithead, 1993. Hair and elephant dung. Jedermann Collection, N.A. Photo by Chris Ofili.

131 th Fig. 25. Dennis Reiner defacing Chris Ofili's The Holy Virgin Mary, December 19 , 1998, Brooklyn Museum of Art.

Fig. 26. Diego Velazquez, Immaculate Conception, 1614. Oil on canvas, 135 x 101.6 cm. National Gallery, London.

132 Fig. 27. Coyer, Time Magazine, December Fig. 28. Coyer, Newsweek, December 13, 13,2004. 2004.

Fig. 29. Vincenzo Foppa, Madonna ofthe Fig. 30. Robert Campin, The Virgin and Book, 1460-68. Wood panel. Castello Child Before a Fire Screen, c.1425-30. Sforzesco, Milan. National Gallery, London.

133 Fig. 31 Juan de Ibarra, Juan Diego Opening the Ti/ma, 1743. Location UnknOWll.

Fig. 32. Diana of Ephesus Fig. 33. Madonna ofHennits, Einsiedeln, Switzerland.

134 Fig. 34. Sandro Botticelli, Madonna with John the Baptist and St. John the Evangelist, c. 1485. Wood. Staatliche Museen Preussicher Kulturbesitz, Gemaldegalerie, Berlin.

Fig. 35. Leonardo da Vinci, Madonna Lippi, c. 1490s. The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg.

135 Fig. 36. David Hammons, Bliz-aard Bali Sale, 1983. Location unknown.

Chris Ofili, Shi! Sale, 1993. London. Photo: Franco Ofili.

Fig. 38. Hieronymus Bosch, Christ Carrying the Cross, 1515-16. Oil on panel, 74 x 81 cm. Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Ghent.

136 Fig. 39. Garafolo, Ascension ofChrist, 1510-20. Oil on panel, 314 x 204,5 cm. Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Antica, Rome

Fig. 40. Film still, The death of Tom and the appearance of Eva as an angel, Uncle Tom 's Cabin, 1903.

137 Fig. 41. Film still, Sam ascending to heaven, Ghost, 1991.

Fig. 42. Film still, Captain Howdy, The Exorcist, 1973.

138 · Fig. 43. Film still, The appearance of Christ, The Birth ofthe Nation, 1915.

Fig. 44. Film still, The Road to Cavalry, King ofKings, 1961.

Fig. 45. Wamer Sallman, The Head ofChrist, 1940. Location unlmown.

139 Fig. 46. Fred Carter, Jesus Praying in the Garden, 1987. Ink and pencil, 10.5 x 20Cffi. Location Unknown.

Fig. 47. Hsu San Ch'un, Christ, the Universal Saviour, no date. Location unknown. Cynthia Pearl Mauss, Christ and the Fine Arts (New York: Harper & Row, 1959) 757.

140 Fig. 48. Film still, Mary bathing, Hait, Mary, 1985.

Fig. 49. Film still, Mary teaches Joseph to say 1 love you, Hail, Mary, 1985.

141 Fig. 50. Film still, Mary getting dressed, Hail, Mary, 1985.

Fig. 51. Dante Rossetti, Annunciation, 1849-50. Oil on canvas, 72 x 42 CID. Tate Gallery, London.

142 Fig. 52. Film still, the Virgin Mary, The Passion ofthe Christ, 2004.

Fig. 53. Film still, Satan, The Passion of Fig. 54. Film still, Satan and baby-demon, the Christ, 2004. The Passion ofthe Christ, 2004.

143