Personification of Africa

This pastel drawing by Venetian painter Rosalba Carriera is part of a popular 18th-century genre personifying the “four continents” of Africa, Asia, and the Americas as women. Ancient peoples in what is now Europe noted physical differences between themselves and people from surrounding geographical areas. But race as we know it today solidified in the early modern period, as Europeans sought to justify imperial expansion and transatlantic slavery. European artists increasingly fetishized skin color as a fundamental marker of difference. In Carriera’s series, Africa is the only continent smiling with her teeth exposed, a trope familiar from earlier representations of African people. In early modern Europe, a woman smiling with her teeth exposed would have likely been perceived as sexually audacious. This points to European propaganda depicting African people, and particularly women, as erotically available to the colonial gaze.

Bust length figure of a black woman, her right breast exposed and holding a scorpion in her right hand. She wears a turban decorated with feathers and jewels, pearl pendant earrings and a close-fitting pearl necklace. Her body is tilted forward and her gaze is directed to the left.