Darker Shades

Victor Stoichita begins his new book – Darker Shades: The Racial Other in Early Modern Art – with the premise that underlies it: "Difference exists, otherness is constructed". It is a powerful, and deceptively simple, opening line. He continues by observing that otherness is dependent on the "self"; in short, that one cannot exist without the other, neither otherness nor the "self". Again, the idea is simple enough, self-evident even. That all is not as straightforward as it might seem, however, is revealed in the statement that follows: "[...] the Self is the Other of the Other, just as the Other is the Other of the Self". The issue is as convoluted as the prose is beautiful. It would seem that a book on the "racial other" needs first to address the "self". * Art History *
an ambitious, thought-provoking book that offers a new contribution to the question of how ethnic difference functioned in the formation of the Western artistic tradition in early modern Europe . . . Stoichita’s eminently readable prose, as translated into English by Samuel Trainor, belies its intellectual complexity. His analysis of otherness has far-reaching implications for a structural history of Western identity. Stoichita’s approach has anthropological and philosophical dimensions, but he remains committed to the interventions that art history can provide, with its in-depth exploration of visual complexity. . . . the publication of the English translation is a welcome development. Darker Shades is an intriguing interdisciplinary contribution that will inspire further conversations about cross-cultural interaction, theories of otherness, and canonicity. * Journal of British Studies *
Victor Stoichita’s wide-ranging book shows that although difference exists, otherness is constructed. This is elegantly illustrated by European images of Blacks, Jews, Turks and Gypsies from the early modern period. * Professor Jean Michel Massing, King’s College, Cambridge *
With impeccable historical scholarship, a subtle attention to minute pictorial details and acute anthropological insight, Victor Stoichita shows how Otherness is portrayed in the images of the early European modernity; not the conspicuous monsters and exotic figures brought back from the first colonial encounters, but the internal Otherness, that of Jews, Gypsies, Blacks and Muslims, whose discreet presence in the midst, or at the immediate periphery, of Western societies became a foil to emphasize by contrast the virtues of Christian identity. A major contribution to the historical anthropology of Europe in the making. * Professor Philippe Descola, Chair in Anthropology of Nature, Collège de France *
A remarkable and highly original book that manages to be both rich in ideas and closely analytical of the paintings, while staking out a completely new field of studies. * David Bindman, Emeritus Professor of the History of Art, University College London *