Blackness, Sin, and Evil: European Religious Perceptions in Albert Eckhout’s Depictions of Africans, Dutch Brazil Series
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.62327/ytinyjb2t2Keywords:
Albert Eckhout, visual representation, Blackness, sin, biblical interpretationAbstract
Albert Eckhout’s Series of Eight Figures (c. 1641–1643), painted for Johan Maurits of Nassau-Siegen in Dutch Brazil, visualizes colonized subjects as distinct racial “types” and contributed to emerging hierarchies of difference. Focusing on African Man and African Woman and Child, this article argues that Eckhout adapts Christian discourses on the Curse of Ham and the opposition of light and darkness to construct African Blackness as marked by sin, hypersexuality, and spiritual lack. Exaggerated skin tones, eroticized bodies, and the display of cowrie shells, ivory tusks, and tropical fruits detach these materials from African ritual contexts and recode them as emblems of commercial value and extractive potential. Reading Eckhout’s paintings alongside early modern visual culture, biblical exegesis, and the Atlantic slave trade, the study shows how they operate not as neutral ethnographic images but as colonial instruments that naturalize racial hierarchy and help legitimize the enslavement and commodification of African peoples and resources.
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