## PATTERNS OF SYMBOLIC VIOLENCE

The Motif of 'Gypsy' Child-theft across Visual Media

Radmila Mladenova

1

Patterns of Symbolic Violence

#### **Interdisciplinary Studies in Antigypsyism**

Book Series of the Research Centre on Antigypsyism Series Editors: Edgar Wolfrum, Frank Reuter and Daniela Gress Volume 1

#### **Antiziganismusforschung interdisziplinär**

Schriftenreihe der Forschungsstelle Antiziganismus Herausgegeben von Edgar Wolfrum, Frank Reuter und Daniela Gress Band 1

# PATTERNS OF SYMBOLIC VIOLENCE

The Motif of 'Gypsy' Child-theft across Visual Media

Radmila Mladenova

Finanziert vom **Ministerium für Wissenschaft, Forschung und Kunst Baden-Württemberg** sowie **Research Council Field of Focus 3 Cultural Dynamics in Globalised Worlds**

#### **Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek**

The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie. Detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de.

This book is published under the Creative Commons License 4.0 (CC BY-SA 4.0). The cover is subject to the Creative Commons License CC-BY-ND 4.0.

The electronic, open access version of this work is permanently available on Heidelberg University Publishing's website: http://heiup.uni-heidelberg.de. urn: urn:nbn:de:bsz:16-heiup-book-483-9 doi: https://doi.org/10.17885/heiup.483

Cover image: Zigeuneren Raphael (1914, Dir. unknown). Film still courtesy of the Danish Film Institute

ISBN 978-3-947732-48-7 (Softcover) ISBN 978-3-947732-47-0 (PDF)

## Table of Contents

Table of Contents

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## Foreword by the Series Editors

Foreword by the Series Editors

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The book series initiated by the Research Centre on Antigypsyism (RCA) and entitled *Interdisciplinary Studies on Antigypsyism* will offer insights into a young and dynamic research field that calls for different methodological approaches. Both acclaimed scholars and junior researchers will have the opportunity to publish new research findings in English or German. The spectrum is broad: monograph titles will alternate with anthologies and source editions. The aim of the series is to firmly anchor Antigypsyism Studies in the academic discourse and to establish a network of institutions and scholars. In short, it will serve as a source of impetus for further foundation work.

As the first specialised institution of its kind, the RCA has been based at Heidelberg University's Department of History since July 2017, with long-term funding provided by the State of Baden-Württemberg. The researchers working at the Centre examine the diverse manifestations of antigypsyism, which is understood as a specific form of racism against Sinti, Roma and other groups or individuals stigmatised as 'gypsies'. The focus of our research interest is directed towards the mechanisms of antigypsy stereotyping and its different functions in European societies from the early modern period to the present day.

Given the virulence of antigypsy attitudes in the increasingly polarised public space in Europe, the series is intended not only for scholars but for all interested in the topic. It is to be hoped that the published results will also feed into the ongoing anti-discrimination work. We are therefore delighted that we could win Heidelberg University Publishing (heiUP) as a publisher where the book series will be freely accessible Foreword by the Series Editors

online. We would like to thank the heiUP team for the trusting and fruitful cooperation.

Rooted in European history, antigypsyism still shapes public perceptions of the largest and probably most marginalised minority groups in Europe, the Sinti and Roma. This not only underscores the need for an intensified scientific debate, but also points to the high socio-political relevance of the book series, and we wish it many interested readers.

Heidelberg, May 2019

Prof. Dr. Edgar Wolfrum Dr. Frank Reuter Daniela Gress

## Vorwort der Reihenherausgeber

Vorwort der Reihenherausgeber

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Die Schriftenreihe der Forschungsstelle Antiziganismus (FSA) "Antiziganismusforschung interdisziplinär" gibt Einblicke in ein noch junges, aber dynamisches Forschungsfeld, das unterschiedliche methodische Zugänge erfordert. Sowohl bereits etablierte Forscherinnen und Forscher wie Nachwuchswissenschaftlerinnen und -wissenschaftler erhalten die Möglichkeit, neue Forschungsergebnisse in englischer oder deutscher Sprache zu publizieren. Das Spektrum ist weit gefasst: Abwechselnd sollen monografisch ausgerichtete Titel, Sammelbände oder Quelleneditionen erscheinen.

Als erste Fachinstitution ihrer Art ist die FSA seit Juli 2017 am Historischen Seminar der Universität Heidelberg angesiedelt; sie wird dauerhaft vom Land Baden-Württemberg gefördert. Die dort tätigen Wissenschaftlerinnen und Wissenschaftler setzen sich mit den vielfältigen Erscheinungsformen des Antiziganismus – verstanden als eine spezifische Form des Rassismus gegen Sinti, Roma und andere als "Zigeuner" stigmatisierte Gruppen oder Individuen – auseinander. Das Erkenntnisinteresse gilt insbesondere den Mechanismen der antiziganistischen Vorurteilsbildung und deren unterschiedlichen Funktionen in den europäischen Gesellschaften von der Frühen Neuzeit bis in die Gegenwart.

Angesichts der Virulenz antiziganistischer Einstellungen in einer europaweit zunehmend polarisierten Öffentlichkeit richtet sich die Vorwort der Reihenherausgeber

Reihe nicht nur an Wissenschaftlerinnen und Wissenschaftler, sondern an alle Interessierte.  Wir freuen uns deshalb, dass wir mit Heidelberg University Publishing (heiUP) einen Verlag gewinnen konnten, in dem die Bände der Schriftenreihe online frei zugänglich sind.

Der in der europäischen Geschichte verwurzelte Antiziganismus hat bis heute wesentlichen Einfluss auf die Wahrnehmung der größten und am stärksten marginalisierten Minderheitengruppen Europas, der Sinti und Roma.

Heidelberg, im Mai 2019

Prof. Dr. Edgar Wolfrum Dr. Frank Reuter Daniela Gress

## Author's Note

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The current book presents the findings of a case study that I carried out over the course of twelve months as part of the pilot research project *The Stigma 'Gypsy'. Visual Dimensions of Antigypsyism*. The project was implemented in the year 2018 by the Research Centre on Antigypsyism at Heidelberg University's Department of History, and it was funded by Research Council Field of Focus 3: Cultural Dynamics in Globalised Worlds. Given the short time-span of the project, it is inevitable that the resulting case study should be marked by a certain incompleteness – the last two chapters provide primarily listings of images and films that remain unstudied. The book itself is complete, though, in fulfilling my main goal – namely, to open up new and uncharted territories in Antigypsyism Studies, to emphasise interdisciplinary ways of viewing diverse visual works of art, and thus give an impulse for further research in the field. A comprehensive study of Antigypsyism in the medium of film is offered in my forthcoming dissertation *The White Mask and the Gypsy Mask in Film*.

## Acknowledgements

Acknowledgements

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The book and I owe a debt of gratitude to precious colleagues and friends. The text would not have materialised without the generous support, professional advice and kindness of Prof. Dr. Edgar Wolfrum, Dr. Frank Reuter and Daniela Gress who designed the project und stood by me through thick and thin during its implementation; of Valentina Christova, Paris, and Sandra Rudman, University of Konstanz, who helped me grapple with material in French and Dutch; of Anna Traykova, Kennesaw State University, who procured hard-to-find publications; of Prof. Dr. Peter Bell, University of Erlangen-Nürnberg, who offered valuable suggestions to the chapter on Dutch history painting; of Eva Orbanz, Deutsche Kinemathek/FIAF, Hans-Michael Bock and the CineGraph team in Hamburg who enhanced the chapter on early film with their exceedingly helpful feedback; of Prof. Dr. Korneliya Slavova, University of Sofia, who stepped in at short notice as a language editor and meticulously worked through the entire manuscript, and of Herbert Heuss who had the patience to read over and over again the numerous drafts of the text and come up with comments. Thank you all!

As to the illustrations, I am thankful to the following persons and institutions for allowing me to use the visual material, and also for providing the high-resolution image files. I owe special thanks to Dr. David de Witt, Senior Curator at Museum Het Rembrandthuis in Amsterdam, who scoured through his personal archive to find an ektachrome with an excellent colour rendition of Jan van Noordt's painting *Pretioze and Don Jan* (1660).

#### Acknowledgements

Emile Askey Museum Photo Service Princeton University Art Museum

Michela Bonardi Collections Picture Researcher British Museum Images

Drs. Huub Breuer RKD – Netherlands Institute for Art History, The Hague

Angélica Dass Humanae Work in Progress

Ingrid Knauf Museumslandschaft Hessen Kassel

Frederik Markusse Image Department Centraal Museum Utrecht

Marie McFeely Images & Licensing Officer National Gallery of Ireland

Madeleine Schlawitz Collection Manager/Archivist Danish Film Institute

Sabine Schmidt Digitales MdbK

Beate Weingartner and Astrid Winde Bildrecherche/Dokumentation bpk-Bildagentur

Documentation Centre of German Sinti and Roma Heidelberg

Lucerna Magic Lantern Web Resource

Rijksmuseum Amsterdam

Wellcome Collection London

My heartfelt thank you goes out to the heiUP team – Dr. Maria Effinger, Anja Konopka, David Westley, Benjamin Schnepp and Daniela Jakob – who cared for the book at the various stages of its conception, production and distribution.

## Illustrations

Illustrations

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Illustrations

#### Illustrations

# 1

## Introduction

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*I was stolen by the gypsies. My parents stole me right back. Then the gypsies stole me again. This went on for some time. One minute I was in the caravan suckling the dark teat of my new mother, the next I sat at the long dining room table eating my breakfast with a silver spoon. It was the first day of spring. One of my fathers was singing in the bathtub; the other one was painting a live sparrow the colors of a tropical bird.* Introduction

Charles Simic, *The World Doesn't End*, 1989

On September 8th, 2016, the children's film *Nellys Abenteuer* (*Nelly's Adventure*) was released in Germany, receiving, in the months to come, an appreciative welcome in professional film circles. The fact that it revives the age-old scare story of 'gypsies'1 who steal children seems to have slipped under almost everybody's racism-awareness radar during all the stages of the film production process – from its conception,

1 The designation 'gypsy' is used here to refer to the cultural construct as elaborated by Klaus-Michael Bogdal and Hans Richard Brittnacher (*Leben*), hence the omitted initial capital letter in 'gypsy'. Subsequently, when it appears in the titles of artworks, such as *Gipsey's Stealing a Child*, I have adhered to the original spelling of the word. The term 'Roma', conversely, is used here on the occasions when I refer to real people.

through the fundraising campaign and up to its distribution.2 This is all the more remarkable when we consider that the motif of 'gypsy' child-theft was extraordinarily popular in European literature during the nineteenth century; it counted as one of the stock plots in the silent film period, i.e. in the first three decades of the twentieth century, but its commercial success in the sound period was short-lived. There are few sound films in which the story of 'gypsies' who kidnap children is treated seriously in a realistic mode. In the light of these developments, *Nellys Abenteuer* presents a symptomatic case and warrants attention. Not only does the film revive a story pattern that has long been obsolete in sound cinema, but it also blends the story with hard-hitting realism, in so far as the genre of children's film allows.

In the film, blond, blue-eyed and sweet-looking Nelly (Fig. 1), a German teenager, is kidnapped by the shady criminal Hokus, a Romanian Roma, stylised as a typical 'gypsy' figure. Sporting a black felt hat over his long curly black hair, Hokus has a dark-skinned face overgrown with a black, bristly beard, flashing now and again his one golden tooth.3 In fact, throughout the film, the 'gypsy'-looking thug kidnaps Nelly not once but twice: the first time, he lures her into his car when she is in the company of two Roma kids from his gang, and, using the cover of the night, takes her to a 'real' Roma settlement.4 The second time, in the midst of a forest, Hokus places a handkerchief soaked in chloroform on

Fig. 1. Screenshots from the film *Nellys Abenteuer* (2016, Dir. Dominik Wessely): The thirteen-year-old Nelly Klabund (Flora Li Thiemann) and her kidnapper Hokus (Marcel Costea)

Nelly's mouth, and when the girl collapses unconscious in his hands, he throws her over his shoulder and carries her away.

The film provoked a heated public discussion in the autumn of 2017, and since then, a series of official statements have been released by organisations and scholars on both sides of the debate.5 I shall not engage here in the exchange of arguments. A lot has been written already on the antigypsy content of the film that, in addition to the child-theft motif, exploits a whole series of 'gypsy' stereotypes. However, I wish to point to *Nellys Abenteuer* as the most recent example of a racialised representation of protagonists framed by the 'gypsy' child-theft narrative. The colour coding of bodies in black and white in the film follows a representational pattern that goes all the way back to seventeenth-century European arts and even much earlier.

The main object of my inquiry here, as the title suggests, is the age-old motif of 'gypsies' who steal children. In the following chapters, together with the reader, we shall consider the motif's literary origins, its metamorphoses across time and space in a number of different visual media – from history paintings, through prints and book illustrations to

5 For statements and other publications written in defence of the film, see Becker; INDI Film; and Götz. For statements criticising the film, see Brunßen; Heftrich; and Josting.

silent films – trying to throw light on the disparate layers of meaning and the multiple functions that the motif has acquired over the course of time. But in doing so, we shall keep a vigilant eye on one specific feature that is generally brushed aside, regarded as self-evident or too banal to be worth even mentioning, and that is the colour coding of human bodies, both in texts and images. Under colour coding, we should understand not only verbal or pictorial references to skin colour and/or other phenotypical features (such as hair colour and shape or eye colour) but also the additional emphasis on colour in relation to bodies, achieved through the use of light and shadow, through styling and costumes or by the choice of setting in which bodies are placed.

In *Nellys Abenteuer*, for instance, it is not only that the casting director has chosen the blond and blue-eyed Flora Li Thiemann to play the role of Nelly Klabund, the identification figure in the film, representing a typical German teenager. The film also shows us that Nelly has fair-skinned and fair-haired parents who live in a house with a blindingly white interior located in a sunny and impressively tidy neighbourhood, where white and its adjacent colours ostensibly predominate. In sharp contrast, Hokus and his people are associated with dark skin, with dark objects, with the time of night, and with the space of unlit, poverty-stricken settlements. The screen images of Nelly and Hokus, victim and perpetrator of childtheft, are thus stylised to create a clear line of separation between 'white' Europeans (in this case Germans) and 'non-white' 'gypsy' figures. The same considerations hold for the poem by Charles Simic, quoted in the epigraph. In just a few lines, it succeeds in evoking a dyadic world that is defined and divided along colour lines: the "dark teat" of the 'gypsy' mother is set against the "silver spoon" of the 'non-gypsy', a direct reference to the noble, blue-blooded descent of the lyrical "I"; the bathtub of one father, a space connoting whiteness and cleanliness, is opposed to the tropically colourful canvas of the other father. It is not even necessary to specify who is the 'gypsy' and who is the birth parent.

Against the backdrop of these two artworks – a full-length children's film, a short poem, and the images they conjure up – I can formulate the driving questions of my research as follows: why are 'gypsies' almost universally perceived as 'non-white'? In his significant work *Leben auf der Grenze*, the German literary scholar Hans Brittnacher pertinently observes that the 'blackness' of 'gypsy' skin is factually as false as it is aesthetically obligatory (cf. 230). Why is a minority group whose members range from blond to darker brunettes perceived only in the following ways: as bronzed, swarthy, "tawny as Havana cigars" to quote the nineteenth-century French poet and art critic Théophile Gautier (Brown 1); as "dark brown, or olive coloured" in the words of the eighteenth-century German scholar Grellmann (8); or as black and "of the devil's body colour" if we refer to the seventeenth-century German writer Grimmelshausen (143) – i.e. perceptions spanning the whole gamut of 'non-white' tones, and why are Roma never or hardly ever perceived as 'white'? This question hinges on a major and again seemingly redundant question that concerns the representation of national majorities in Europe, namely: why are present-day Europeans (i.e. representatives of the ethnic majorities in European nation-states) universally perceived and self-perceived, regardless of their social status, as 'white' when in the times of feudalism 'white' skin, this highly cherished attribute, was a monopoly of the royals and the aristocrats?

In the following chapters, I shall demonstrate the need for a critical approach to antigypsy texts and images that takes into consideration and articulates, no matter how banal and self-evident the descriptions may seem, the colour coding of bodies simply because colour coding lays the basis for racialised representations. Racialisation is one of the key concepts employed in the ensuing analysis, drawing on the definition elaborated by the British sociologist Robert Miles. He posits that 'racialisation' (and its synonymous term 'racial categorisation') is "a process of delineation of group boundaries and of allocation of persons within those boundaries by primary reference to (supposedly) inherent and/or biological (usually phenotypical) characteristics. It is therefore an ideological process" (74–75). Adopting Miles' understanding of racialisation is fruitful for my undertaking because, in his definition, the application of the term is not limited to historical contexts where the idea of biological 'race' is already present; for, as Miles demonstrates, from the fifteenth century onwards, skin colour was signified as a means of collective representation. There is one further point to be made here. According to Miles, it is important that racialisation should be understood as a dialectical process of signification: by defining Africans as 'black', Europeans have implicitly defined themselves as occupying the opposite end of a common continuum of skin colour, that is, as being 'white' (74–75).

Focusing on the opposition of Europeans versus Africans, Miles reconstructs the black-and-white matrix of European racism in his book, outlining its historical development, inner dynamics, and modern forms of expression. The thought pattern he describes in the following quote, though, is just as applicable to the black-and-white mind-set that underpins antigypsyism:

(…) various human physical features (some imaginary) were signified as monstrous, one of which was skin colour. Western Christianity associated certain colours with a range of additional meanings, with the result that it embodied a colour symbolism mirroring that of the preceding classical world. A white/black contrast expressed a complex of additional meanings, similarly dichotomous, such as good/evil, pure/diabolical, spiritual/carnal, and Christ/Satan … Thus colour expressed a hierarchical religious evaluation which attained a more widespread secular content within Western culture…, parallels with which can be drawn with the Islamic world… Where distinctions between human beings were designate by reference to skin colour, this colour symbolism had a powerful evaluative implication. Monstrousness, sin and blackness therefore constituted a rather different form of Trinity in European Christian culture in this period. (16–17)

(…) the scientific discourse of 'race' did not replace earlier conceptions of the Other. Ideas as savagery, barbarism, and civilisation both predetermined the space that the idea of 'race' occupied but were then themselves reconstituted by it. (33)

In the artworks under discussion here, it is often the case that the aesthetic juxtaposition of 'white' Europeans versus 'gypsies' is complemented and enhanced by a parallel juxtaposition with 'black' Africans. Such contrastive oppositions should be viewed as aesthetic tools developed for the purpose of producing and instituting 'white' European identity; their practical purpose is to calibrate the eyesight, metaphorically speaking, informing the perception of white and non-white colour in relation to human skin. In this context, antigypsy aesthetics represents one of the many tools for conferring or disavowing 'whiteness', each tool having a different social and geographic scope.

Also, a few words need to be said about the phrases commonly used to designate the motif in question: the motif of children-stealing 'gypsies' or the motif of 'gypsy' child-theft6 refers to a recurrent story pattern that rests on two pivotal events: a child is first stolen and then rescued or, years later, recognised and recovered. Thus, the motif of

6 Other common formulations in English include "child/baby-snatching gypsies", "Gypsies as child stealers", or "the stereotype of the Gypsy baby thief" while in German, there are only two widespread formulations: "Kindesraubmotiv" or "Kinderraubmotiv".

child-theft comprises both events – the theft and the rescue/recognition,7 even though it is named after the first event. Bearing in mind this two-event structure, I can already shed light, albeit in very broad terms, on three major developments in the history of the motif's visualisations that will become a focal point of my analysis. To begin with, during the seventeenth century, the story of the child that was stolen at birth by 'gypsies' enjoyed great popularity among Dutch history painters who were drawn almost without exception to the climactic moment of recognition. These artists, who catered for the tastes of the Dutch high nobility, showed interest exclusively in the second event of the story, the moment when the stolen child's true identity is revealed. To my knowledge, there are only two images of the period that depict the scene of child-abduction.8 So, one is bound to ask, why? Why this marked preference for the scene of anagnorisis? This is an important question with far-reaching implications and we shall delve into it by engaging with Cervantes' tale "La gitanilla", written in 1613, to highlight the profound impact this text has exerted on the European imaginary. Also, it has to be added here that the chapters dedicated to Cervantes' *novela* and its influence on Dutch history painting form the main part of my exegesis: being fairly comprehensive, they lay out the framework that should provide the reader with interpretive coordinates for the bulk of material presented in Chapters 6 and 7.

If the vogue during the Dutch Golden Age counts as the first stage in the motif's development, the second major stage could be assigned to a period that stretches from the late eighteenth century, through the entire nineteenth century and up to the early twentieth century. With the rise of popular culture and the printed mass media, the motif of 'gypsy' child-theft regained its virulence, but it was accompanied by

a total reversal of emphasis. The sample of prints here evidences that during this period, it was the first event – the moment of child-theft – that grew in importance and came to the foreground. This is yet another point where one needs to ask why? The widely-circulated images – engravings, etchings, lithographs, broadsheets, children's book illustrations, magic lantern slides and later silent films – were, notably, targeted at and consumed by representatives of the lower-ranking social strata, not the aristocracy. There is also a third development I wish to draw scholarly attention to: during the silent film era, the story of 'gypsy' child-theft counted as one of the lucrative stock plots. Being an overly familiar motif that provided excellent material for melodrama, it was exploited with broad variations in dozens of films produced in the USA, England, France, Denmark, Italy, and Spain. With the introduction of sound, however, the motif disappeared almost entirely from the silver screen. Again, we need to ask why and I shall present a plausible explanation.

Outlining the trajectory of the child-theft motif (its textual and pictorial forms and their semantic transformations across space-time and media) allows us to trace antigypsyism/European racism back to its archetypal origin and primary literary sources, to gain understanding of its evolving black-and-white aesthetics in its materiality and signification, and to untangle the multiple layers of meaning that have coagulated over time, infusing the colours black and white with astonishing complexity – the two most crucial colours when it comes to the hierarchical categorisation of human bodies. The selection of images and texts represents, so to say, an excavation of the earlier material expressions of antigypsyism, a chronology of proto-racist artworks that have paved the way for modern racism, instituting its modes of seeing and acting as a shared norm and an everyday normality. In the context of my research topic, i.e. not in all contexts but in visualisations of the motif of 'gypsy' child-theft, the colour white has established itself as the colour of invisible privilege and this is one of the main theses presented here. White operates simultaneously as the colour of unmarked normality (the neutral background colour) as well as the colour of privilege (the colour of light, of social/biological superiority and of realist visibility). To understand what the implications and consequences of white as the tacitly privileged colour are, we need to account for it simultaneously in a number of different dimensions: in relation to the respective medium, in relation to light and its visual rendition, in relation to realist visibility of human bodies and faces, and last but not least, in relation to the cultural models that code female sexuality.

Firstly, white is the colour of the medium. Not one medium but a series of media that are pivotal in the development of European culture and arts: the white sheet of paper in sketching, drawing, print-making and photography; the white page in books or other printed publications, in Word documents; the white canvas in painting; the white screen onto which magic lantern shows and films are projected. As the colour of the medium, white has the status of a non-colour (together with black, it is also generally excluded from colour charts) and is commonly perceived as a neutral (pure) background. This supposedly neutral background carries an inherent binarity that comes to the fore in the case of black-and-white pictorial techniques: when bodies and human skin (faces) are represented, they can either be identical with the white backdrop or have a colour that differs from it. There is always a choice to be made when visualising bodies, and many artists use the binarity of the medium to juxtapose and thus racialise their subjects. One direct consequence is that black as well as the rest of the spectrum colours, when contrasted to white, are almost automatically perceived as an addition to a neutral background, as a deviation from a pure white surface. Consider, for instance, the Dutch broadsheet *The Gypsies* (*De Zigeuners*) (1894–1959) (Fig. 25) in which the mother, whose face shares the background colour of the white paper, is set against the 'gypsy' child-abductors whose faces have an added brown tone.

Secondly, white is the colour used to depict light and so, if we go back through the history of Western art, we shall see that it is the colour traditionally employed to associate human bodies with light: with the divine light as the highest spiritual attainment; with the enlightened nobility as the dominant position in feudal classist societies, and with the superior 'white' 'ethno-racial' identity of European nationalist (colonialist) societies. In religious contexts, white/light is a sign for the sacred deity; in feudal classist contexts, white/light is the colour of the ruling elite and of its civilised Europeanness, whereas in secular modern contexts, white/light signifies not only enlightenment and rationality but also biological 'ethno-racial' purity. It is also interesting to consider how bodies are associated with the colour of light, and I shall do so by closely examining some works of the seventeenth-century Dutch masters. If I were to venture a generalisation here, I could say that whiteness is ascribed to bodies not only on the level of skin colour but also with recourse to clothes, accessories, and settings. Bodies, and especially the

female body, are often adorned or entirely wrapped in white. Dutch painters, for instance, demonstrate their dexterity by producing strikingly realistic depictions of fine and very expensive materials – white silk, satin, linen, and lace. Thus, light/white has also become a visual signifier for wealth, both spiritual and material, in direct opposition to the shadow/non-white colours that stand, by implication, for absence and poverty, spiritual and material. Moreover, the shadow/non-white spectrum of colours, that is colourfulness and blackness, are, again in the contexts under scrutiny here, relegated to an inferior position, exoticised, orientalised, Balkanised, etc., and commonly given the status of non-Europeanness.

Thirdly, white, being the colour of light, naturally ensures the highest visibility to human faces and bodies. A face that deviates from the white background through addition of colour is both less visible from a distance and marked in comparison to a face that shares the whiteness of the medium, and is thus both luminous and unmarked. Also, a face depicted in a diminished light is harder to distinguish, whereas the colour of human skin rendered in a shadow inevitably appears 'nonwhite'. I must note here that the aesthetic colour boundary erected between the nobility/national majority and 'gypsy' figures is permiable only in one direction. The self-appointed 'whites' can easily claim the aesthetic realm of the shadow for themselves: there is a long tradition of artists who identify with 'gypsies' or even declare themselves to be ones.9 Yet for the Roma, it is hardly possible to claim 'whiteness' (read: visibility, normality, and affiliation to the 'white' body of the nation) for themselves. Symbolically, by the power of the 'gypsy' image projected onto them, they stay bannished in the realm of the shadow, reduced to ghostly silhouettes of human beings.

Fourthly, the image of the 'white' woman and her body wrapped from head to toe in white fabric does not present simply an aspirational beauty ideal but is, in effect, an aesthetic codification of female sexuality. As we shall see in the chapters to come, in seventeenth-century literary texts, whiteness refers in the first place to virginity; it is an asset, a cultural capital that Cervantes' literary heroines pledge to value more than their own lives. As the research material evidences, the fair-skinned female, preferably a blonde, in a full-length white dress is a recurrent visual trope across time-space and media, the 'white' woman being an epitome

9 See Brown's insightful and well-researched book *Gypsies and Other Bohemians. The Myth of the Artist in Nineteenth-century France* (1985).

of the imagined collective. It is worth noting here that the ideology of classism and the ideology of racism – the intrinsic aim of both being to naturalise social hierarchies – are poised on a physiological state as questionable and vague as female virginity.10 Both ideologies spawn social systems whose reproduction in time requires a vigilant control over female sexuality, practically proclaiming asexuality for its ideal. In the light of this, it is necessary to regard the artworks under scrutiny here not simply and not only as historical documents that carry the imprint of a bygone social reality but also as ideational products outside of time, as fruits of human imagination, as forms of mental software whose power manifests itself – today as well – in the ability to chart life paths and life plots, to propose worse or better-fitting roles for human beings within society. The impact of classism and racism on the dominant models of femininity deserves a study of its own, but it suffices to emphasise here the pernicious effect that these ideologies have both on the oppressors and the oppressed, and the specific burden they place on women.

I shall end my introduction to the motif of 'gypsy' child-theft and its journey through visual media with a few words about the theoretical framework of the study. The findings presented here are grounded in the theoretical considerations and research insights advanced by scholars working in the fields of Antigypsyism Studies (Bogdal 2011; Brittncher 2012, 2017; Patrut 2014; Reuter 2011, 2014), Critical 'Race' Studies and Critical Whiteness Studies (Miles 1989; Dyer 1997), Postcolonial Studies (Shohat 1994), Narratology (Lotman 1990; Doležel 1998; Campbell 2008), Art History (Gaskell 1982; Brown 1985; David de Witt 1999, 2007; Belting 2013; Bell 2008, 2015) as well as Film and Media Studies (Nichols 1991; Elsaesser 2015; Vogl-Bienek 2016). With the case study about the age-old motif of 'gypsy' child-theft, it has been my specific intention to open a space of dialogue between and among academic disciplines in order to enable a better understanding of the omniscient yet highly elusive nature of the 'gypsy' phantasm. As such, the adopted methodological approach runs a certain risk: it makes itself vulnerable to criticism coming from scholars, well-versed and conversant with the intricacies of their respective field of study. At the same time, by bringing together diverse perspectives, this case study puts forward novel insights and ideas that are only possible at the precarious intersection of established disciplines.

10 See, for example, the article "Hymen: Facts and Conceptions" by Hegazy and Al-Rukban (2012).

## 2

Humanæ – Work in Progress Objectively about Human Skin Colour

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*Blackness – the black of it, the rust-red of it, the milk and cream of it, the tan and yellow-tan of it, the deep-brown middle-brown high-brown of it, the 'olive' and ochre of it – Blackness marches on the full chromatic spectrum of complexions*  Gwendolyn Brooks, *Primers for blacks*, 1980 Objectively about Human Skin Colour

Our discussion begins with two contemporary art projects – the photographic exhibition *Humanæ* (Fig. 2) and the short campaign video *Yo no soy trapacero* (Fig. 3), and only then it moves on to Cervantes' tale "La gitanilla" generally considered to be the original source that has breathed life into the undying 'gypsy' child-theft motif. I start by focusing first on two contemporary art projects for a reason. Their purpose is to provide the readers with a critical frame of reference, to help them develop a certain distance to the overly familiar masterpieces, painterly styles and representational patterns, and thus to prompt them to take a moment to re-adjust their perception. Or, to put it in other words, these very fresh artworks should serve as a touchstone for the readers to keep at the back of their mind while engaging with my critical assessment of the 'gypsy' child-theft motif and its metamorphoses across visual media.

Fig. 2. © Angélica Dass | *Humanae Work in Progress* (Courtesy of the artist). Artist Angélica Dass rethinks the concept of race by showing the diversity of human skin colours in her global photographic mosaic.

The photographic project *Humanæ* is, in many ways, a ground-breaking work of art. It brings a paradigmatic shift in the manner in which human skin colour is perceived and depicted. Simply put, *Humanæ* represents a gallery of photographic portraits of individual subjects with a backdrop of the Pantone colour corresponding to their skin tone. Its author, the Brazilian artist Angélica Dass, started the project in 2012 and has now photographed more than 4,000 people in eighteen countries spanning five continents (Strochlic 14). Called "work in progress", her project continues to grow. Before taking a closer look at the unique collection of human faces in *Humanæ* and the numerous implications this work has for the representation of humans in general, it is worth considering the concept behind the project as well as some aspects of its technical realisation.

Although an artistic project, *Humanæ* is designed in a manner that can enable anyone to explore and document the diversity of human skin colour with the rigour of a natural scientist. As Angélica Dass explains in her interview for *Der Spiegel*, the process is very simple. The artist always photographs her subjects in the same setting, with the same distance from the camera, with the same lighting set-up and with the same white background. After taking the photo, she selects a square of eleven pixels from the subject's nose, and uses it to colour the background of the portrait. With the help of Photoshop, she matches the strip of pixels to a colour card from Pantone and indicates its alphanumerical code at the bottom of the photograph. The very first portrait in *Humanæ* is a self-portrait of the artist bearing the Pantone code 7522C. (Schulz; see also angelicadass.com). The resulting photo series, as its title *Humanæ* suggests, displays the colour of human skin and facial features in its vast spectrum of tones.

The process is simple, yet it allows Angélica Dass, among other things, to capture and render visible – in a verifiable way – the sheer richness, variety, and individuality but also instability of human skin colour. Indeed, her project can justifiably claim scientific objectivity: it rests on empirical data, working with indexical images of human flesh tones that, thanks to the Pantone colour standardisation system, can be identified by designers and printing devices anywhere in the world. But at the same time, *Humanæ* contains an element of self-subversion and playful fluidity that is more characteristic of art. As the photographer jokingly explains, she has chosen the nose for her reference point because it is the body part with the least stable colour: "it changes when we take in too much sun, when we get the flu, when we've had too much to drink. I want to focus on colour that changes. If I took your portrait, everything else equal, in the summer versus in the winter, your Pantone colour would be different. There is no intrinsic colour. The colour itself has no importance." ("True Colors").

Along these lines, there are a number of important statements that the portrait gallery of *Humanæ* implicitly advances. The project provides tangible visual evidence that the common classification of humans into four 'races', associated with the white, black, yellow or red colour, is more than inadequate. There is much to be said on how the concept of 'race' is further dismantled through the multitudinous combinations of facial features, hair types and skin tones presented in *Humanæ*. But let us focus here on one important visual statement that is of great significance to understanding the traditional racialised representations of Roma (or, indeed, of any other ambivalently 'white' group). The portraits in *Humanæ* evidence that every single human being has some skin pigmentation and a resulting skin hue. To put it in reverse, no human being is colourless. No one has a skin tone that is identical with the white background, commonly used in drawing, print making and painting (white paper or white canvas), in photography (white paper) or in magic lantern shows and films (white screen); no one is white. The portrayal of humans as white or as colourless, i.e. identical with the white backdrop used in the respective art, is an artistic convention. More importantly, it is an artistic convention that ensures marked visibility – let us not forget that white is also the colour of light – and thus it privileges the represented subjects. The effect of facial visibility is especially noticeable in art forms that rely on black-and-white colour contrasts for the illusion of three-dimensional realism, such as chiaroscuro or tenebrism in Renaissance painting, or in black-and-white printmaking, photography, and film. At the same time, as we shall see in the following sections, this convention has only rarely been employed for representations of the Roma minority in any of the traditional or modern fine arts. Hardly ever have Roma individuals been represented in the modus of whiteness and, in that sense, visually privileged.

## 3

## Yo no soy trapacero On the Variety of Human Types among the Roma

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*No author and no reader changes the meaning of words. The struggle of discourses changes their meaning, and so the combinations in which we put words together matters, and the order of propositions matters: through these whatever our intentions, words take on meaning.*  Diane Macdonell, *Theories of Discourse* (51) On the Variety of Human Types among the Roma

Before focusing on the racialisation of 'gypsy' figures in classical works of art, we need to consider the Spanish video clip *Yo no soy trapacero* (2015, Dir. Sebastián Ántico) designed in a similar way to *Humanae*. To my knowledge, this is the only film of documentary value that testifies to the diversity of individuals within the Roma community. It has been commissioned by the Spanish State Council of the Roma People and is part of their campaign aimed at changing the discriminatory definition of the word 'gitano' in the Spanish dictionary11 (Melchor). In the film, ten Roma children, nine of whom are to be seen on Fig. 3, introduce themselves by name, sharing some of their personal interests and thoughts. I will leave the topic of the campaign aside to examine instead the camera work and the casting. It is notable that the children are filmed in the same setting and with the same lighting set-up: one after the other, they take a seat in an armchair placed against a grey background. The camera shows each child in a close-up and in a medium

11 In 2016, a follow-up video called *Telebasura no es realidad* (*Trash TV is not reality*) came out, featuring the same protagonists and campaigning for a dignified treatment of Roma in the media. Both videos are available on *Youtube*.

#### Yo no soy trapacero

Fig. 3. Assembled screenshots from the campaign video *Yo no soy trapacero* (2015, Dir. Sebastián Ántico): nine of the ten children featured in the short film.

shot. Similar to *Humanae*, the film creates through the montage an overall portrait of the Roma, a gallery of individuals with very different combinations of hair type, eye colour and skin tone. There are darker and fairer types, there is also one light-blond girl with pale blue eyes. With its choice of cast, the film is a true exception. There are hardly any other cinematic works of art that place such an emphasis on the variety of human types already in the casting phase, nor are there many films that portray Roma as unique individuals in the modus of normality. By keeping this one collective portrait of the Roma in mind, in the following sections, I shall try to answer the question: Why are 'gypsy' figures, in spite of the variety of human types among the Roma, imagined and characterised as a rule as 'non-white' or 'black'?

## 4

"La gitanilla" ("The Gypsy Girl") by Miguel de Cervantes A Proto-racist Narrative from Today's Point of View

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*It is well known that literature will miss no opportunity to subvert its own foundations.*  Lubomír Doležel, *Heterocosmica* (160) A Proto-racist Narrative from Today's Point of View

The literary motif of the child-stealing 'gypsy' has been traced down to Cervantes' *novela* "La gitanilla", first published in 1613 after it was approved by the censor in 1612 (Charnon-Deutsch 18n7). Cervantes was not the first writer to make use of this motif as it had already been in circulation among his literary predecessors.12 But it was Cervantes' exemplary tale that turned into a source of major influence across Europe, inspiring an astonishingly large number of European writers,13

playwrights, poets, painters, musicians and filmmakers. "La gitanilla" has been the object of countless scholarly studies,14 so I will refrain from a detailed analysis of the text and provide first a short summary.

The story is as follows: Preciosa is an extraordinary young woman, a fair-skinned 'gypsy' with golden hair. Admired by everyone for her wit and beauty, she earns her living by selling her prodigious talents on the streets of Madrid: singing, dancing, reciting poetry, and fortune-telling. A young nobleman, Don Juan, falls in love with her. He is ready to give up his name and social status to be with Preciosa. She agrees to become his 'gypsy' wife but sets one condition: Don Juan has to spend the first two years living as a 'gypsy' among her people. The nobleman agrees. During the test period Don Juan, now dressed as a 'gypsy' and renamed Andrés, is falsely accused of theft and sent to prison. To save him from death, Preciosa's grandmother confesses to the magistrate and his wife that Preciosa is their long-lost daughter whom she stole as a baby. Many proofs are brought out to confirm Preciosa's true identity, her Christian name being Doña Constanza de Azevedo y de Meneses. Andrés, in turn, steps forth as Don Juan de Cárcamo. The parents, astonished by the miraculous nature of these revelations and overwhelmed with happiness, consent to the marriage of the two high-born youths, allowing Preciosa to keep her 'gypsy' name.

Some explanation is in order from the outset about the context of the *novela's* emergence. Cervantes penned his "La gitanilla" in what Ryan Prendergast aptly describes as an "inquisitorial culture" (2). Spanish Golden Age literature was written in the oppressive environment generated by the Spanish Inquisition and the Spanish Crown in their joint effort to shape the nascent nation-state, to construct a unifying citizen identity, and to ensure general support for the empire-building project. Royal and ecclesiastical policies extended beyond mere censorship aiming at the elimination and punishment of cultural, intellectual and religious difference. In order to appraise literary works of this period,

14 See, for example, the English anthology of articles on Cervantes' *Novelas ejemplares* edited by Stephen Boyd or the German anthology edited by Ehrlicher and Poppenberg.

to its stage adaptations in Spanish as well as to its first translations in French, German, English, and Dutch (87–104). On the European literary tradition established by "La gitanilla", see also Brittnacher; Solms; Charnon-Deutsch; Niemandt; Wurzbach; and Schneider. The literary motif of 'gypsy' child-theft, its functions and/or its social ramifications have been discussed by Jago; Patrut; Kugler; Saul; Nord; Hille; Schäffer; Macijewski; Brüggermann; and Meyers.

it is necessary to "read between the lines" or "against the grain" as Prendergast demonstrates with his close text analyses (2). So, bearing in mind the cultural climate in which "La gitanilla" emerged, I will highlight in the following paragraphs some important features of the narrative that are of relevance to the subsequent interpretations and representations of the child-abduction motif in the various visual media.

Cervantes' exemplary *novela* is, in the first place, a very unstable text. The story of the 'gypsy'-turned-aristocrat is told by an omniscient narrator (*Er*-form), whose invisible but all-knowing presence creates, at least on the surface, an illusion of a reliable reality. To better understand how the fictional world of "La gitanilla" is constructed, it is useful to employ the terminology from Doležel's possible-worlds semantics of fictionality, paying special attention to the text's procedure of authentication. Under authentication, we shall understand the text's performative force to construct fictional worlds. In "La gitanilla", there are two opposing forces at work: one of authentication, which is dominant and takes up almost the entire text, and one of disauthentication, which is subtle and generally remains unnoticed.15 The bulk of the *novela* has the form of an authoritative narrative (*Er*-form). Yet, at three different instances, the text's authentication force is undermined hinting at the behind-the-scenes presence of an author-narrator, at his unreliability and also at his ulterior motives for spinning the story. In the first instance, with a series of questions and imperatives (you-narrative) placed in brackets, the text addresses the main heroine Preciosa, giving her advice what to do (53), and in the next scene she acts as instructed. In the second instance, again in a paragraph enclosed in brackets, a first-person narrator (*Ich*-form) comments that he does not know if Preciosa is improvising or not (91). While in the third instance, and this is the *novela's* closing sentence, the omniscient narration switches to a first-person narrator who confesses to having forgotten to tell the story of Carducha, one of the peripheral characters. One sentence earlier, the text gives a name to this author-narrator, calling him Pozo16 (115).

15 On the authentication force of the fictional text and its counterforces, see Doležel, 145–168.

16 Jacob Cats, a Dutch poet, who transposed Cervantes' tale in verse, producing his popular exemplary poem *Het Spaense Heydinnetje* (1637), was, for example, unaware of Cervantes' authorship of the story. In a letter to Van Baerle from November 1633, Cats ascribed the authorship to Pozo. Presumably, he had read the story in a version in which the name of Cervantes was not mentioned; perhaps it was De Rosset's French translation (Gaskell 268n52). In a scholarly article of 1933, Hep-

Gradually and almost imperceptibly, the author's persona emerges from the anonymous void of omniscient narration, gets a name, and then speaks in his own voice admitting to his limited knowledge and forgetfulness. Thus, a good part of the assertions that the text makes with regard to its characters are, in some way or another, destabilised and shown to be personally subjective and market-oriented rather than reliably and verifiably truthful. The notorious opening statement of the *novela*, which appears to frame 'gypsy' men and women as thieves,17 is subverted not only by the words *parece que* "it would seem", as a number of scholars18 have pointed out, but also by a later remark in the text aired by the omniscient narrator: "because a thief thinks everyone is of the same nature as himself" (75). (The remark is dropped when Andrés, overcome with jealousy, interprets the actions of another character, ascribing to him his own feelings towards Preciosa.) Discreetly, the text asserts that 'gypsies' are used as a screen onto which one projects one's own vices. There are a number of indications that allow us to surmise that "La gitanilla" was written in defence of perceived 'gypsies', the author giving expression to his sympathy towards the people in a roundabout way.

Interestingly enough, Cervantes uses the same trope of rascalsappearing-to-be-'gypsies' in *Don Quixote*, in one short but telling scene. In Chapter 30, Part I, Don Quixote, Sancho Panza, Cardenio, Dorothea, the barber and the priest see a man who, upon approaching them, "seemed to be a gipsy" (261).  Hoping to sell the ass for a good price, Gines de Pasamonte, also called "Thief-above-measure" by the commissary (169), "had put himself into the garb of a gipsy, whose language, as well

pner refers to "Pozzo" as the author of the story (79). Such anecdotal examples illustrate the literal reading to which Cervantes' text has been subjected.

as several others, he could speak as readily, as if they were his own native tongues." (262).

A second historical note is called for here. During the Golden Age, contrary to what its name suggests, Spain was in economic decline. The country roads were filled with vagabonds and bands of roving outlaws whom Cervantes was well familiar with. Peripatetic Roma in those days travelled in small close-knit family groups, they rarely associated with the *bandoleros* (a mixed group of returning soldiers, displaced foreigners, underemployed peasants, career bandits, etc.) and were distinguishable from ordinary vagabonds. Yet, in the public imaginary, the perceived 'gypsy' identity was coalesced into that of the other disaffected groups, turning the minority into a symbol for the recalcitrant Other and a handy scapegoat (cf. Charnon-Deutsch 20). In all likelihood, Cervantes had this form of antigypsyism in mind when he asserted indirectly in his *novela* that none other but the hardened villains projected their vices upon 'gypsies' and/or disguised themselves as 'gypsies'. We should also consider the fact that the often-impecunious writer was not indifferent to the revenues coming from his published works. He must have been well aware that he could have passed neither the censorship of the Church, nor that of public taste if he tried to sell a text that was openly favourable towards 'gypsies', so he pulled a clever sleight of hand by penning a two-faced tale, one that – while mimicking the dominant discourses circulated by the Church and the Spanish Crown19 – delivered a blistering social critique.

If we are to describe "La gitanilla" in a nutshell with regard to its authentication procedure, we can say – again referring to Doležel's terminology – that it is both a self-voiding and a self-disclosing text. It ruptures the convention of omniscient narration, undermines the credentials of its first-person narrator, and employs irony alluding to its fiction-making procedures. To put it in another way, the text's instability derives from its affinity to a masquerade: "La gitanilla" bears many similarities to a theatrical exchange of masks or a play of identities in which characters act like ventriloquist puppets, guided by a mostly invisible narrator and his partly undisclosed, partly overtly pecuniary motives. There are many textual clues exposing the figures as figments of imagination, their identity fully dependent on the narrator's decision to give them a name and a costume, or to swap the latter. What is more,

19 In *Phantasma Nation*, Patrut asserts that Cervantes' tale is a poetic work on the discourse of 'limpieza de sangre' (70).

the three main characters in the story have double identities or two faces, one of a 'gypsy' and one of an aristocrat, that are paired with a name and a set of clothes. In one scene heavily loaded with irony, Juan's/Andrés' father praises Preciosa's trustworthy face and promises her a golden doubloon with two faces, the latter faces belonging to two monarchs.20 Later, he gives her the doubloon in exchange for a dance (cf. 51, 55). This parallelism – the two-faced characters and the twofaced golden coin – could be subjected to various interpretations. For the sake of brevity, I shall only suggest that Cervantes either identified the image of nobility and the image of 'gypsyness' as the two poles of symbolic, hence economic power, or that he viewed his protagonists, i.e. the fruits of his imagination, as a highly valuable currency – or both.

It is equally significant to point out that Cervantes' *novela* has the structure of an initiation rite.21 In this rite of initiation, the dimension of time is of crucial importance: the story unfolds over many years and contains two key events that, being significantly removed in time from each other, furnish it with its complication and climax. "La gitanilla" is a story of loss and recovery. Beautiful, green-eyed and golden-haired Preciosa is first lost and then found. As an infant, she is stolen by a 'gypsy' woman and raised among sun-tanned 'gypsies'; then, years later, when she is already an adolescent woman, she is found, recognised as Doña Constanza de Azevedo y de Meneses and restored to her rightful place in society. In schematic terms, her movement in space-time can be represented as a disappearance and re-appearance: an entry into the shady world of 'gypsies' and a return to her own world, that of 'white' Spanish nobility. It should be noted that Cervantes' story takes little interest in the act of child-theft. The incident is just a plot device used to generate the necessary tension that arises from the heroine's dramatic decline in social status (Fallhöhe), but it itself remains in the background and is brought to the reader's attention only in retrospect. The *novela* foregrounds the climactic moment of recognition, the anagnorisis, which takes place on two separate occasions. The first moment

20 As Robert ter Horst points out, the doubloon is the largest and finest gold coin ever struck in Spain (118).

21 For a discussion on the initiation rite structure of "La gitanilla", see also Brittnacher ("Das Märchen") and Wiltrout. For a discussion of rites of passage from an anthropological point of view, see Gennep. Even though I disagree with Gennep's essentialist notions, I find his description of the structure of initiation rites useful. According to him, rites of passage have three distinct phases: a phase of separation, a phase of transition or liminality, and a phase of incorporation (21).

of recognition is instant and as if confirming the miraculous nature of love: guided by his heart, Don Juan recognises Preciosa's true identity – her immutable noble nature (hence her baptismal name Constanza), and succumbs his entire being to her.  The second moment of recognition is staged with the ceremoniousness of a court hearing.22 Preciosa's parents ascertain her true identity based on a number of tangible pieces of evidence: a small coffer containing Preciosa's trinkets from when she was a baby; a folded note with the old 'gypsy's hand-written confession stipulating the full names and the titles of the stolen child and its parents as well as the exact time: "Accession Day, at eight in the morning, in the year fifteen ninety-five"; a white mole below the girl's left breast and her two toes on her right foot joined together by a small membrane (103). It is worth noting that the physical marks are to be found in the 'hidden' parts of the body: not only the bared breasts but also the naked feet23 were erotically loaded taboo zones in Spanish culture.

#### "La gitanilla" ("The Gypsy Girl") by Miguel de Cervantes

In addition to the physical evidence, the noble parents also offer evidence of a spiritual nature, insisting that their souls recognised Preciosa as their long-lost daughter. At the start of the *novela*, the omniscient narrator drops an enigmatic remark that "there are poets who get along with Gypsies and sell them their works, just as there are poets for blind beggars who make up miracles for them and share in their proceeds" (5); close to the end of the *novela*, the topic of miracles24 is taken up again, this time by the governor, who – overjoyed by the recovery of his lost daughter and her indisputable identity – exclaims: "how could there be so many coincidences together without a miracle?" (105). The governor's exclamation is clearly an ironic remark put in the character's mouth by the author-poet who obliquely points to his dominion over the fictional world of the story, i.e. to his performative force to call into existence fictional facts, or as he calls them "miracles" but also to his dependence on the literary market and the commodity status of his work of art. In other words, the text discloses that Preciosa's identity, together with all the evidence that the same text brings to ascertain its truth, should be read as a malleable fictional construct entirely contingent on the author-narrator's goals: at any point, they can undergo a change, if that suits him and his story.

The tension in the story arises from the stark asymmetry between the two worlds Preciosa travels through during her passage into adulthood. The world of 'white' Spanish aristocrats is juxtaposed to the world of sun-tanned 'gypsy' outcasts, the two worlds representing the two ends of the social hierarchy. Something more, the 'gypsy' world is constructed as a mirror inversion of the Spanish nobility. The dramatic tension between these two polar opposites is coded simultaneously along social, protoethnic, and symbolic lines. Stories of paupers-turned-princes are a common literary fare in the Golden Age of Spanish literature where, notably, only the social disparity is foregrounded. Cervantes' text adds what we would call today an ethnic marker to the opposition; 'gypsies' are introduced not only as individuals of lower social standing but as a sovereign

24 Patrut also ponders on the question what exactly constitutes a miracle in the *novela*. Focusing exclusively on the second recognition scene – the ascertainment of Preciosa's true origin on the basis of tangible pieces of evidence – the literary scholar offers textual clues that the story of the abduction could be a figment of the old 'gypsy's imagination, one that resonates with the parents' wishful thinking. Preciosa's identity, Patrut concludes, is but a pure fiction, "an arbitrarily fillable empty space" ["beliebig ausfüllbare Leerstelle"] in a story about the social ascent of a female 'gypsy' which brings the fifteenth-century Spanish law of 'blood purity' and its concomitant virtue *ad absurdum* (68).

group with specific customs and ways of life. The proto-ethnographic description25 in the text (see 59–63) plays an important role in constructing 'gypsies' as a separate people against whom the sovereignty of Spaniards as a people (an ethnic majority, or a modern 'white' nation nowadays) gains a clear outline. Strongly influenced by Cervantes, Prosper Mérimée also describes 'gypsies' in his story "Carmen" in pseudo-ethnographic terms. As we are about to see, the device of pseudo-ethnographicity has since then become a staple feature of 'gypsy' representations not only in literature but across all arts.

Moreover, the opposition between the two groups is colour coded. There is, on the one hand, one oblique mention at the start that the 'gypsies' are sun-tanned (3). On the other hand, there are several descriptions presenting Preciosa as an embodiment of the ideal of whiteness. Her beauty is explicitly equated with light: "Preciosa shone forth among all the rest like the light of a torch among other, fainter lights." (23). We are told that her face and hands are untarnished by the sun (3), that she has "golden hair", "emerald eyes" (23), "a foot of snow and ivory" (103). She is also called "golden girl, silver girl, pearl girl, garnet girl, heavenly girl" (25). Not only is Preciosa fair,26 but her beauty is presented

as a manifestation of her spiritual virtue: the young woman's greatest merit lies in having succeeded to preserve her virginity while growing up among 'gypsies', who do not recognise the sacrament of marriage. It appears that Preciosa's heroism concurs with and naturalises the existing social disparity: aristocrats *seem* to be superior to 'gypsies' by birth. All the while, equating social identity with costume, the story makes a point that noblemen can commit murder and be pardoned on account of their noble origins, while 'gypsies' are punished with the utmost severity only on the grounds of the rumours that surround them. As Thompson points out, through the witty techniques of the creator, the *novelas* constantly draw attention to the gap between what the characters say and what they actually do (cf. 280).

Still, from today's vantage point, the colour symbolism woven into the narrative furnishes a proto-racist layer of signification. The text can be read as an initiation rite *out* of 'gypsyness' and *into* 'whiteness' where 'white' and 'gypsy' can simultaneously denote a social, an 'ethnoracial', and a symbolic attribute. One can hardly fail to recognise that the abduction of a blond girl of aristocratic descent by supposedly 'non-white' 'gypsies' poses a threat to the idea of noble lineage, i.e. to the legitimacy of aristocratic rule in feudal societies and its ideology of classism, in the same manner as it poses a threat to the 'white' nation in European societies underpinned by the ideology of racism (see also Nord; Matthews 2010). Patrut expresses the same idea pointing to the initial religious layer of signification in the narrative:

Für die europäishe Literatur wurde Cervantes' Erzählung jedenfalls zu einem Referenz-Text, zu literarische 'Urszene' 'zigeunerischer' Intervention in christliche, 'nicht-zigeunerische' Familien-Genealogien. Die Brisanz des Kindsraubs besteht darin, dass 'Zigeuner' in die 'Reinheit' der Generationenfolge und eines Selbstentwurfs eingreifen, des sich kostituiert, indem es sie ausschliesst. (71)

In any case, Cervantes' tale has become a reference text for European literature, a literary 'primal scene' of 'Gypsy' intervention

to be two pieces of pure crystal growing among the other pebbles in the brook"; "the whiteness and the beauty of the feet"; "[h]er long golden tresses not only fall on her shoulders, but covered her whole body, excepting her feet"; "her feet in the water seemed to be of crystal, her hands and her hair were like driven snow" (231). Both Dorothea's and Preciosa's whiteness comes across as an eroticised and fetishised fiction, artificial and exaggerated.

in Christian, 'non-Gypsy' family genealogies. The brisance of the child-theft is that 'Gypsies' intervene in the 'purity' of successive generations and in a self-image, that constitutes itself by excluding them. [my translation, R.M.]

Since they are derived from figurative language, the colour-coded categories of 'whiteness' and 'gypsyness' are highly unstable, not to say unpredictable. In their shifting matrix, different social strata within a majority society, as well as different 'ethno-racial' groups, can be imagined along dividing skin colour lines. Needless to say, such a reading of Cervantes' text, which expounds on its proto-racist fabric, is informed by posterior intellectual developments in Western culture: the secularisation of culture, the growth and increasing hegemony of modern science (and especially of racial anthropology), the emergence of ethnocentric nationalism, etc. As Charnon-Deutsch rightly observes:

The discourse of Gypsy difference that evolved in the wake of Cervantes' novella would feed the ethnocentric and scientific racisms of later centuries. … Gypsies played a role in the conceptualisation of contending ideological matrices. … It was during Spain's Golden Age that Gypsies became an important symbolic pretext, a ground-zero platform on which to raise question of difference and to rehearse sacrificial rites of purgation and ostracism. (43–44)

Finally, I need to highlight one more aspect of Cervantes' text that is simply remarkable and that testifies to the genius of his imagination and the perceptiveness of his humanism. My explicit aim here is not only to acquit "La gitanilla" of its subsequent misuses but also of the charges voiced by contemporary scholars who indict both the author and his work for maintaining an antigypsy stance.27 Cervantes' Preciosa is precious in one very significant way. In her figure, the story reconciles two extremes, merging together two mutually exclusive identities: an aristocrat and a 'gypsy', the aspirational ideal of whiteness and its lowly dark shadow, the social norm and the resulting residual anti-norm.

27 Charnon-Deutsch, for example, imputes the negative characterisation of 'gypsies' in the *novela* to events in Cervantes' life (34). The Irish scholar and renowned Hispanist Walter Starkie recounts the same events, albeit with a racist gusto. Both scholars quote as their source the first volume of Luis Astrana Marín's monumental biography: *Vida ejemplar y heroica de Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra*, Madrid: Instituto Editorial Reus, 1948–58.

#### "La gitanilla" ("The Gypsy Girl") by Miguel de Cervantes

The text creates a unity out of these two poles during the years Preciosa lives under a 'gypsy' guise, producing something new and, in my view, here lies its true exemplarity. Cervantes' extraordinary heroine embodies, albeit for a limited stretch of time, a new model of femininity: sharp-witted, worldly-wise, artistically creative, free to move, in charge of her own life and subsistence, i.e. financially independent, and most importantly, in control of her sexuality, for Preciosa is the one who imposes conditions on her potential partner. As Clamurro pertinently observes, Preciosa has the power to "lay down the law" (75). In creating the matrix of what we can recognise today to be the emancipated modern woman, Cervantes imagined the unimaginable, greatly expanding the repertoire of possible roles for women. Little wonder that hardly any of his male contemporaries had eyes for this bold invention. It is rather the clichéd climax of recognition, when Preciosa submits her will to that of her parents, which is celebrated in the literary, theatrical or pictorial spinoffs of "La gitanilla" – a rather boring and disappointing happy end.

In conclusion, the brief survey of "La gitanilla" reveals that Cervantes employs the archetypal structure of an initiation rite to frame his story, furnishing it with a proto-ethnic dimension. The narrative is colour coded and characterised by temporal dynamics: a female child of noble birth ('white') is first stolen by a 'gypsy' outcast ('non-white') and then restored to her due place in the social order where the entire focus falls on the second incident – the recognition of her true ('white') identity. When we point to Cervantes' exemplary *novela* as the origin of the child-stealing motif, "the most menacing facet of the European Gypsy stereotype" (Landon 58), we have to bear in mind that the complexity, subversiveness and self-reflexive irony of the text28 are lost on the majority of its readers. The misreading of the *novela*, or rather its crude instrumentalisation for the needs of the various nation building projects in Europe, is the prevailing tendency in its otherwise widely enthusiastic reception. In the following sections, holding our focus steady on the motif of the child-snatching 'gypsy', we shall trace the transformations, adaptions and re-interpretations of the story across several visual media.

28 In his perceptive article "Enchantment and Irony: Reading *La gitanilla*", Clamurro remarks that Cervantes chose "La gitanilla" to open his entire collection (69). Discussing the ironies and 'loose ends' of "this quintessentially Cervantine text", Clamurro concludes that one should approach it "as a story that is constantly recreating experience, a challenge to our own acts of reading" (83).

## 5

The Fetish of Whiteness and Dutch Realism

## The Motif of 'Gypsy' Child-theft in Dutch History Painting The Fetish of Whiteness and Dutch Realism

— ※ —

After its publication, the fame of the extraordinary Spanish *gitanilla* quickly spread across Europe through translations, stage adaptations or various re-workings, and caught and held the imagination of several generations of Dutch artists for almost a century. Without a claim to exhaustiveness, it can be argued that between 1630 and the first decade of eighteenth century, the literary drama of the noble girl-child stolen and raised by 'gypsies' was interpreted on canvas by Jan Lievens (1607–1674), Paulus Bor (1605–1669), Jan van Noordt (1623–1681) in two almost identical paintings, Leendert van der Cooghen (1632–1681), Abraham van den Tempel (1662–1672), Johannes Voohout (1647–1723), Godfried Schalcken (1643–1706), Willem van Mieris (1662–1747) in possibly four paintings, David Rijckaert III (1636–1661), and Philips Wouwerman (1619–1668) in three paintings. It also features in drawings by Simon de Vlieger (1601–1653), Isaac Isaacsz (1599–1649), Pieter Jansz Quast (1605/06–1647), Leonaert Bramer (1596–1674) and Willem van Mieris; as well as in engravings/etchings by Rembrandt van Rijn (1606–1669), Adriaen van de Venne (1589–1662), Pieter Nolpe (1613–1652), Jacob Folkema (1692–1767), Rienk Keyert (1719–1775) and Pierre-François Basan (1723–1797) (cf. Gaskell; de Witt 1999).

Taking an overall look at the works of these artists, I can highlight two recurrent patterns that require further attention. Firstly, all Dutch painters, except for Leendert van der Cooghen (Fig. 4), have chosen as the main subject of their history paintings the twofold moment of recognition – the climax in Cervantes' tale, depicting either Don Juan's first encounter with Preciosa and the acumen of true love, or the governor and his wife finding out about Preciosa's true identity

#### The Motif of 'Gypsy' Child-theft in Dutch History Painting

and reuniting with their lost daughter. In line with the original story, the moment of child-theft presents little interest and is ignored. Secondly, in almost all of the paintings, the moment of anagnorisis, i.e. the revelation and ascertainment of Preciosa's high birth and nobility, is rendered in strong colour/light contrasts, placing an emphasis on skin colour, where Preciosa's whiteness appears to be not only the work's central message but also the artist's chief artistic achievement.

In the following sections, I focus on three oeuvres by Jan Lievens, Paulus Bor, and Jan van Noordt, based respectively on Cervantes' *novela* and two of its spinoffs – Jacob Cats' poem *Het Spaense Heydinnetje,* and Mattheus Tengnagel's theatre play. Comparing and contrasting them with the other paintings, I consider how colour symbolism works in conjunction with face visibility and realism, on the one hand, and with racialisation, on the other. It should be noted that the process of racialisation, in Robert Miles' definition, takes place on two overlapping levels: a social level, which expresses itself in classism or class racism, and an 'ethno-racial' level. It is hardly surprising that Preciosa's high birth,

Fig. 4. Leendert van der Cooghen, *Constance (Preciosa) Abducted by the Gypsies (J. Cats, Het Spaans heidinnetje)*, 1652–1681, oil on canvas, 131 × 167.5 cm.

*Preciosa and Doña Clara*  (1631) by Jan Lievens

noble self and unsullied body are consistently coded in white that – let us be reminded again – is also the colour of light, while 'gypsy' figures are rendered as a dark, contrastive and sullying background. All these paintings feature deft compositions where figures of varying skin colours are organised within a broader framework of black/shadow-and-white/light contrast, an artistic technique that has hardly been discussed by scholars29 with regard to 'gypsy' figures so far, if at all.

## 5.1 *Preciosa and Doña Clara* (1631) by Jan Lievens

*An object represented in white and black will display stronger relief than in any other way; hence, I would remind you, O Painter! to dress your figures in the lightest colours you can, since, if you put them in dark colours, they will be in too slight relief and inconspicuous from a distance.*

Leonardo da Vinci, *Leonardo's Notebooks* (98)

Variously identified in catalogues as *The Soothsayer* or *The Gypsy Fortune-Teller*, the painting in Fig. 5 is the most ambitious *portrait historié30* made by Jan Lievens for the courts in The Hague. Probably commissioned by Amalia van Solms, the painting catered for the specific interests of Frederick Hendrik, the Prince of Orange; it is documented that already in 1632 the work hung over a fireplace in the Stadhouder's quarters in The Hague (Lloyd de Witt 110). The titles given to it derive from a description in the inventory of the princely collection at Noordeinde,

29 For further reading on the intersection between Art History and Postcolonial Studies or Critical Whiteness Studies, see Schmidt-Linsenhoff; Greve; Peter Bell.

30 This French term refers to portraits featuring the depiction of eminent individuals in the guise of biblical, mythological or literary personages. A synthesis of history painting and portraiture, *portrait historié* originated in the Netherlands in the later sixteenth century. Lloyd de Witt remarks that the face of the seated woman, dressed in black velvet silk trimmed with gold aglets, bears resemblance to that of Amalia van Solms in her portrait by Hornthorn of 1631, and in her Rembrandt's portrait of 1632 (112). David de Witt disputes this resemblance and suggests that the lady's portrait should be interpreted as a celebration of a young woman of talent. It may refer to one of the female luminaries that Constantijn Huygens (Frederik Hendrik's secretary) was in contact with while organizing the commission of the painting under the patronage of the Prince of Orange (2007: 132).

Fig. 5. Jan Lievens, *Preciosa und Doña Clara*, c. 1631, oil on canvas, 161.2 × 142.3 cm. Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Gemäldegalerie.

which reads: "A painting of a soothsayer or a gypsy fortune-telling by palm-reading, by Jan Lievensz of Leiden." (de Witt 1999).

For a long time, Lievens' work posed an iconographical puzzle to art historians, who assigned it to the category of 'gypsy' genre depictions. The latter are standard genre compositions created with the purpose of warning against superstition and gullibility (de Witt 1999: 183). Renaming the painting to *Preciosa and Doña Clara*, David de Witt, however, demonstrates in an article of 1999 that Lievens' work is not a genre-scene of fortune-telling but a history painting31 visualizing a scene from Cervantes' tale "La gitanilla". In fact, it is possibly the first and the only preserved painting32 of the period that is based directly on Cervantes' text,33 and not on the moralizing transformations the story suffered at the hands of the Dutch men of letters – Jacob Cats and Matheus Tengnagel – some years later. Depicting Jan Lievens' first-hand interpretation of Cervantes' story, *Preciosa and Doña Clara* presents a theme "that remains unique in Dutch Baroque painting" (181).

The singularity of the theme lies in the following: unlike most of his contemporaries, Lievens did not go in for the climactic scene of recognition but chose an episode of lesser importance. This is one of the introductory, irony-laden scenes in which Preciosa accepts the magistrate's invitation and visits his family to find out that no one in the household, not even the magistrate and his wife Doña Clara, have even the smallest coin to give her for the ritual of fortune-telling. Eventually, one maid finds a silver thimble, and Preciosa uses it as a lucky coin. Lievens chose to visualise the act of fortune-telling but, taking a departure from the text, depicted the old 'gypsy' as the palm-reader.

Dutch artists were cautious to dissociate Preciosa from palmistry, a point at which Lievens was also compliant (Gaskell 267). Moreover, Lievens culled two standard elements from the genre tradition that are missing in the text, and this is the second distinguishing feature of his work. He placed a golden coin in Doña Clara's hand and a baby child on the back of the old 'gypsy' with his face gazing out at the viewers. By incorporating the coin and the child into the scene, Lievens combined the moralising message of the genre tradition with the particularity of history painting (cf. de Witt 1999: 184).

It is, however, more interesting to consider why Lievens focused on this particular scene. In my view, he was gripped by Doña Clara's description of Preciosa's luminous beauty, a memorable highlight in the text, which would present itself as a challenge to any painter interested both in portraiture and in rendition of light. It is obvious that Lievens subjected Cervantes' *novela* to a careful reading. In his day, there was a new approach to history painting that Rudi Fuchs explains with a new orientation towards texts and the emergence of the Dutch school of realism. Painters of history paintings were expected to have carefully studied and contemplated their source texts and were openly commended for doing so (65–72). "[P]ainting a history meant reading the text scrupulously, but with imagination, providing the moment with the richest significance, and constructing the picture around that moment" (70). Therefore, it is worth quoting the passage that Lievens must have mused over:

As soon as the Gypsies entered, Preciosa shone forth among all the rest like the light of a torch among other, fainter lights. And so, all the women reached up to her: some embraced her, others looked at her, one group blessed her, another group praised her. Doña Clara said:

"Yes, this can really be called golden hair. These really are emerald eyes! (…) Do you tell fortunes, my child?"

"In three or four ways," Preciosa replied.

"That, too?" said Doña Clara. "On the life of my husband the constable, you must tell mine, golden girl, silver girl, pearl girl, garnet girl, heavenly girl [niña del cielo], which is the most I can say. (Cervantes 25)

With his brush, Lievens materialised a fictional ideal of female beauty and the colour symbolism it goes with, turning it into the central subject

of his monumental history painting. In his rendition, broad colour/light contrasts become the main compositional principle as well as a demonstration of his virtuosity. It is not Don Juan who, chancing a glance of Preciosa's whiteness, is invited to recognise her true identity but the viewer. The white colour is a sign of Preciosa's virginity and thus a proof of her virtuous self and noble origin. The illegible note on the forehead of the old 'gypsy', which has occasioned a lot of speculation among art historians,34 is also on display for the viewer to see, being nothing else but the hand-written confession presented by Preciosa's putative grandmother. Along with the many other proofs, it ascertains that *la gitanilla* is the governor's stolen daughter and a noblewoman.

Much more persuasive than the written evidence and truly miraculous is Preciosa's glowing and soaring visual presence. Occupying the upper centre of the painting and emitting a white glow with golden undertones, she is the primary source of light in the dark setting. It is as if this golden light emanates from within her being, illuminating the space, the other figures, and her own body of which we can see only her radiant head and an outstretched left arm covered with drapes of white silk satin with a golden pattern. The impression is of a translucent, almost transparent celestial creature that is more spirit than flesh. To slightly tone down that ghostly effect and assert Preciosa's humanness, Lievens has given some non-white colour to her cheeks, a touch of pink. The evidence of whiteness, which the painting displays for the viewers' discernment, is the outcome of a successfully completed series of trials. Preciosa's purity is verified, growing in value, for she has passed the test of sullying 'gypsyness'. Her white glow is an important result that the painting publicly celebrates, inviting the viewer to also acknowledge it, for the colour of Preciosa's skin has no other purpose than that of legitimating and naturalising social hierarchies. In effect, the rite of passage – a sort of genetics experiment launched in the virtual space of seventeenth-century public imagination, if we rephrase it in modern terms – concludes that aristocrats, by

34 Wurfbain is the first to suggest, in his article of 1997, that Lievens' work is more than a genre painting, grounding his interpretation in an attempt to decipher the inscription on the said note. David de Witt argues in an article of 1999, that the inscription is illegible and it is rather the "radiant, young blond woman, wearing a glowing white robe", "a light form standing out against dark surroundings" that offers the key to the meaning of the scene (181). Lloyd de Witt, in turn, briefly concludes that the note cannot be explained by Cervantes' text (111). As I demonstrate, a piece of paper is a recurrent element in the paintings under scrutiny here, appearing in at least four of them, and pointing directly to the *novela*.

virtue of their blood, are predestined to occupy a superior position in society. Even if they happen to mix with the lowliest of the low, both females and males have the necessary self-control and know how to preserve their purity – in its spiritual (virtue) and corporeal (virginity/ continence) dimension – and thus prove their inborn superiority. De Witt draws the same conclusion, albeit in an acquiescent manner: "In the end, the story confirms the power of blood that sparked a love between these two children of nobility, in the face of an apparent gulf between their social class and religion" (1999: 182). Translated into the practical terms of daily conduct, the fetish of whiteness disavows the corporeality of female existence, and Lievens' painting is a good point of illustration; the beauty ideal of whiteness is the aestheticised form of representing the social imposition of female asexuality.

Indeed, Cervantes deploys the fetish of whiteness in his tale but not without an ironic twist. On a closer inspection, the colour coding woven into the text proves dubious and contradictory. There is only one single mention in the entire *novela*, alluding to the bronzed skin of 'gypsies', and it comes up in the middle of a description appraising the reader of Preciosa's beauty:

Ni los soles, ni los aires, ni toda la inclemencia del cielo, a quien más que otras gentes están sujetos los gitanos, pudieron deslustrar su rostro ni curtir las manos; (2)

Neither the sunshine, nor the wind, nor any inclemency of the weather, to which the Gypsies are exposed more than other peoples, were able to tarnish her face or tan her hands; (3)

While underlining *la gitanilla*'s extraordinary whiteness, the omniscient narrator drops in the comment that 'gypsies', unlike most peoples, are exposed for much longer stretches of time to sunlight, leaving the reader to infer that, as a result, they have sun-tanned *faces* and *hands*. Bronzing is conceived as the skin's natural reaction to sun radiation, a mutable social marker rather than an immutable 'racial' marker, and is thus normalised. (It is instructive here to refer back to Angélica Dass' photographic project and her artistic take on the instability of skin colour). Following this logic, Preciosa's pallor should raise concern rather than admiration because her unchangeable white skin speaks more of a medical condition. The Spanish verb '*des*lustrar' used in the original text deserves attention, too. In this context, its morphological motivation 'quitar el lustre a', that is 'to remove the light of', which is lost in the English or German translations ('tarnish', 'verderben'), comes to the fore. If we are to rephrase the litany of Preciosa's beauty, we would end up with the rather questionable assertion that the light radiated by the sun could not diminish the light radiated by her face. One is bound to wonder what kind of light a noblewoman possesses, having avoided the sun, and how one should think of and hierarchise these two sources of light. In other words, typical of a Cervantes' text, a lofty literary fiction – in this case the fetishised beauty ideal of whiteness – is brought into collision with the reality and common sense of everyday life. Yet, in spite of its pernicious artificiality, the beauty ideal of whiteness underpins a representational regime that dominates the arts till today.35 Lievens' embraced this aesthetic invention and employed it in his next work, *Bathsheba Receiving King David's Letter* (1631). As de Witt points out, "not hitherto drawn to idealized female figures, Lievens was clearly sparked by the image of the young blonde woman he conjured for Preciosa, and he adapted it in quite a number of paintings of this period" (Wheelock 132–133).

As already mentioned, another recurring element in these compositions is the deployment of 'gypsy' figures in the shadowy background or as a shadowy background. In Lievens' work, the two 'gypsy' figures occupy a more prominent position, but they are rendered in the brownish tones of the unlit room interior, their faces reflecting the golden light radiated by Preciosa. The colour coding suggests that there is no inner light (or Christian spirit) to illuminate the presence of the old 'gypsy', so her flesh appears dense, rough, ugly and dark brown. Her roughhewn garment, too, is coarse, dirty and tattered; covered with hay, it has an uneven earthy tone. If Preciosa's soaring whiteness is laced with shining gold and can be decoded simultaneously as a physical, spiritual, and social attribute of superiority, the dull, earthy colour of the 'gypsy' figures placed beneath her is but a signifier of absence. By inference, 'gypsies' are conceived and perceived as lacking physical and spiritual virtue, a circumstance that should also justify and naturalise their lowly social status.

35 On the representation of whiteness in the medium of film, see Dyer.

The Motif of 'Gypsy' Child-theft in Dutch History Painting

## 5.2 *The Spanish Gypsy Girl* (1641) by Paulus Bor *The Spanish Gypsy Girl*

(1641) by Paulus Bor

Fig. 6. Paulus Bor, *The Spanish Gypsy Girl* / *Voorstelling uit het "Spaens Heydinnetje,"* 1641, oil on canvas, 123.8 × 147.8 cm.

The second work in my chronological review of Dutch history paintings which draw directly or indirectly upon Cervantes' text belongs to the Utrecht master Paulus Bor (Fig. 6). Dated 1641, his oeuvre has been discussed under various titles,36 and nowadays there is a general consensus among art historians*37* that Paulus Bor based his work on

36 *Deseuse de bonne aventure* (Bloch 25), *Pretiose, Don Jan and Majombe* (Gaskell 50), *The Spanish Gypsy Girl* (de Witt 1999: 185) and *Don Jan and Mojombe* (de Witt 2006: 111n307).

37 The first scholar who pointed the connection to Cat's poem is Remmet van Luttervelt. Even if it cannot be established with complete certainty that Bor was influenced by Cat's poem, the reception of his painting nowadays is refracted through the poem. See, for example, the note that accompanies Bor's painting on the website of Centraal Museum Utrecht.

the extremely popular exemplary poem *Het Spaens Heydinnetje38* (*The Spanish Gypsy Girl*) penned by the Dordrecht poet Jacob Cats (1577– 1660). Cats, "the arch-moralist of his age", reworked Cervantes' tale, casting it in verses and removing many elements that he considered to be morally dubious, such as Preciosa practicing palmistry (de Witt 1999: 184). He included the poem in his eclectic collection of edifying marriage stories *Trou-ringh*, 39 which was published in 1637. In Cats' version, Don Juan meets the 'gypsies' while out hunting (hunting was one of the privileges accorded to Dutch nobility). As de Witt observes, the quiver and the arrows in Bor's painting, which are absent in the *novela*, are an indication that Bor was led by *Het Spaens Heydinnetje40* and not by "La gitanilla" (1999: 185).

Similar to Lievens' work, Bor's composition features a condensation of motifs: the child-abduction motif is complemented with the motif of palm-reading.41 Again, it is the old 'gypsy' who is associated with palmistry, not Preciosa,42 but this time it is Preciosa's palm that is presented for examination. In comparison with the child-theft motif, the palm-reading motif has an earlier history and enjoyed distinctly greater popularity among visual artists, so I should highlight in passing some of the reasons for this marked preference. The palm-reading motif, to start with, is static, which – pictorially – makes it very economical. It boils down to a single hand gesture and is a universally recognisable marker of 'gypsyness' (= paganism). Secondly, this motif offers a fruitful ground of stark contrasts for artists to explore; most of them use it, as Bor does, to organise their figures in a dyadic-world structure, usually juxtaposing aristocrats vs. 'gypsies'.43 Two worlds which are

perceived as mutually exclusive, or as negating each other, are brought together within a single scene. For example, if we draw a vertical line at Preciosa's opened palm in Bor's painting, we can see that the figure of the old 'gypsy', crouching to the left, occupies less than a third of the canvas, with her back to the main source of light in the composition. A part of her dark-skinned neck and back is on display while her face is overcast by a shadow, devoid of individual features. Opposite the old 'gypsy' is youthful Preciosa sitting with her legs leisurely outstretched, a winged Cupid and Don Juan at her side, behind them, the body of a white horse that dominates the composition. Gazing out towards the viewer, the four white faces (that of the horse, too!) are shown in three-quarters, beautifully illuminated and painstakingly individualised. It is notable that the two worlds are brought together through the gesture of palm-reading, but there is no point of contact – the hands of the two women do not touch.

Again, it is the luminosity of Preciosa's face and bared chest that contains the main message of Bor's painting, while attesting to the artist's virtuosity. The girl's breasts are uncovered to reveal the white mole under her left breast, which is yet another piece of evidence confirming her noble origin. Preciosa's white skin rhymes with the white, lit-up body of the horse behind her; the animal is, notably, adorned with blue reins and a blue blanket. The combination of the white and blue colour in this context is a straightforward reference to aristocratic pallor and "blue blood".44 In his article on Bor, Bloch evaluates the artist's contribution to the rise of Dutch tone-painting, claiming that the "helle Fleischton/Inkarnat" [light flesh tone] is distinctive of his style (26). According to Bloch, the composition of the painting, which involves

1773; or in *The Fortune Teller* (ca. 1626) by the Flemish painter Nicolas Régnier (1591–1667), oil on canvas, 127 × 150 cm, Musée du Louvre, Inv. Nr. 366; or in *Wahrsagende Zigeunerin* (ca. 1720), a work by the French-born court painter of Prussia Antoine Pesne (1683–1757), oil on canvas, 166 × 134 cm, Breslau, Muzeum Narodowe, Inv. Nr. VIII–2302.

44 As Montagu explains, "the term "blue-blood", which refers to a presumed special kind of blood supposed to flow in the veins of ancient and aristocratic families, actually represents a translation from the Spanish *sangre azul*, the "blue blood" attributed to some of the oldest and proudest families of Castile, who claimed never to have been contaminated by "foreign blood". Many of these families were of fair complexion, hence in members of these families the veins would, in comparison with those of the members of the predominatingly dark-complexioned population, appear strikingly blue. Hence, the difference between an aristocrat and a commoner could easily be recognised as a difference in "blood"; one was a "blue-blood", and the other was not." (183).

a group of figures placed in front of a white horse, is, in all likelihood, unique for seventeenth-century Dutch painting (25).

The palette of tones used by the Utrecht master indeed warrants closer examination. Let us consider a few elements that hark back to literature. To stress the brilliance of the white colour in a given description, writers usually devise visual tropes – such as metaphors or similes – that should prompt the reader's imagination by way of evocative comparisons. One of Cervantes' characters, for example, gives a full lecture on female purity in *Don Quixote*, providing an insight into the then-employed imagery codifying female sexuality. During his speech, Anselmo, the character in question, compares the chaste and virtuous woman to "an exquisitely fine diamond", a valuable jewel, a shining and bright mirror of crystal "liable to be sullied and dimmed by every breath that comes near it", "a fine garden full of roses and other flowers" whose fragrance is to be enjoyed "only at a distance, and through iron rails" (287). The most suggestive is Anselmo's description of the ermine, a white creature with fine fur that would not come close to dirt and would not suffer to destroy and sully "its whiteness, which it values more than liberty or life". "The virtuous and modest woman" – Anselmo concludes – "is an ermine and the virtue of chastity is whiter and cleaner than snow" (287). Clearly, all the images conjured up in Anselmo's speech are symbols referring to the abstract/concrete notion of female chastity/virginity.45 Artists, as well as writers, employ visual analogies in their works, incorporating elements that provide the viewer with a positive and a negative point of reference, a touchstone for 'whiteness' and its opposite value, 'blackness'. In Bor's painting, the figure of the winged Cupid and the white horse with its blue decorations set the standard by which to measure Preciosa's noble skin colour.  Even the garments of the two women speak of unbridgeable differences – Preciosa's lemon-yellow garment is set against the dirty grey-yellow ("smutziggraue Gelb" in Bloch's description) of the 'gypsy' figure (25). The opposition between the two worlds is clearly coded along the light/colour line: pure colours, white and the illusion of light vs. reduced colours, black and the illusion of

45 The aspirational ideal of whiteness and its symbols, undoubtedly, derive from religious visual symbolism and the cult of the Virgin Mary. As Fuchs notes, a painting representing Mary always contains symbolic references to her purity and virginity, such as a ewer of water, fire, strong light coming in through a window, or a vase of white lilies (16).

Fig. 7. Charles Steuben, *La Esméralda*, 1839, oil on canvas, 195.3 × 145 × 3 cm. Musée d'Art de Nantes.

shadow. The painting of the Utrecht colourist is a glaring instance of visual Othering grounded in class difference and coupled with the racialisation of the 'ethnic' Other. The images of the aristocrat and the 'gypsy' undergird 'white' and 'non-white' 'ethno-racial' identities, constructed in this work as the two polar ends of the social hierarchy.

I will conclude this section by drawing a parallel with another depiction of a 'gypsy'-turned-aristocrat, rendered in highly exaggerated white tones, to highlight the ubiquitous preoccupation with 'white' skin as well as the dexterity of representing it on canvas. *La Esméralda* (1839) by the French artist Charles Auguste Steuben (1788–1856) was painted two hundred years after Bor's work (Fig. 7). It features a portrait of a woman of noble blood (being the illicit child of a nobleman) who was stolen and raised by 'gypsies'. Steuben chooses to explore his idea of Esméralda in a classical French boudoir setting. Reclining on the edge of a bed, the semi-clad young woman looks down at a white kid goat curled in her lap, while "a remarkably undeformed Quasimodo" – the hideously deformed 'gypsy' child swapped for Esmeralda – "crouches like a surrogate voyeur in the shadows to the left" (Brown 42). Actually, the figure in the shadow could also be interpreted as Pierre Gringoire or even as Claude Frollo, but let us leave this detail aside and focus on the female figure. Steuben's work was celebrated as the major attraction of the Paris Salon of 1839. The critic Barbier, for example, praised each of the girl's features, one by one, and "especially the feet which, revealed by the removal of the pointed boots in the right foreground, were found to be particularly titillating" (Brown 42). It is important to note that Esméralda's face, bare shoulders, breasts, arms and legs are depicted in white colour that correlates to that of her white gown, the bed sheets, and the goat's fur. Light coming from above illuminates the figure, adding brilliance to her white skin and overall appearance: she is the hyperbolised version of a dazzling 'white' class/'ethno-racial' identity. It is only logical, as we are about to see, that the artistic obsession with female whiteness (read: virginity and restrained sexuality) would spur a counter obsession with authentic 'gypsyness' (read: promiscuity and unrestrained sexuality), that unceasing search for the real 'gypsy' and her fatally attractive 'non-white' body.

The Motif of 'Gypsy' Child-theft in Dutch History Painting

## 5.3 Proofs of Nobility: How White Can Human Skin Become on Canvas?

Proofs of Nobility: How White Can Human Skin Become on Canvas?

As already mentioned, all Dutch history paintings, with one exception, dramatise the miraculous moment of recognition. In literature, writers can employ the device of omniscient narration to offer direct access to the protagonists' inner world and describe their thoughts and feelings. For visual artists, though, it presents a special challenge to communicate inner emotional states, and Dutch figure-painters placed "great value … on the depiction of a person at the instant in which he is moved by powerful, conflicting feelings" (Blankert 121). Paulus Bor, Jan van Noordt, and Abraham van den Tempel grapple with the challenge of seemingly incompatible love, depicting in their works the first meeting of Don Juan and Preciosa. It is that auspicious and baffling moment when a noble soul recognises his kindred in a 'gypsy' and is stricken with love. Lievens makes an exception here with his fortune-telling scene, but for him as well as for the others, it is Preciosa's identity, her exemplary nobility, that sums up the work's chief message.

It is necessary to spell out once again the various facets of meaning transported via Preciosa's extraordinary and edifying whiteness. It is the Christian spirit residing in her that illuminates the pure vessel of her body, giving it its brilliant white colour (with blue undertones) and safeguarding her moral virtue and virginity. These supreme qualities testify to Preciosa's nobility and can be recognised only by a soul of the same moral eminence and social status in a revelatory moment of love. She has earned her place in the social hierarchy, which she also deserves by virtue of her high birth. The visual message represents a self-congratulatory equation and condensation of highly disparate qualities: Christian spirit (religious) = virtue (moral) = virginity (physical) = nobility (social) = white skin (social/'ethno-racial') = true love. The moment of recognition resurfaces again in the works of two late seventeenth-century Leiden artists: Godfried Schalcken and Willem van Mieris. While Schalcken chooses to depict Preciosa's reunion with her parents interpreting the scene in a highly theatrical manner, Willem van Mieris stages the double moment of recognition in his paintings. He achieves this merger of climactic moments by including Don Juan and Preciosa's parents in the composition.

The works of the Dutch masters are literally cluttered – just as the climactic scene in Cervantes' tale – with pieces of evidence pointing to Preciosa's noble birth.  Don Juan's love and the emotional response of the astounded parents present, too, crucial pieces of evidence, similar to a number of other symbolic and/or solid proofs of nobility that I point at in each of the following paintings.

In *Preciosa und Doña Clara* (ca. 1630) by Jan Lievens: the note on the forehead of the old 'gypsy' in which she confesses to having stolen Preciosa as a small child; Preciosa's superiority to occult practices: she is in the scene of fortune-telling but not part of it.

In *The Spanish Gypsy Girl* (1640) by Paulus Bor: Preciosa's bared breast revealing her white mole; her bared foot revealing her webbed toes; the winged figure of Cupid, a symbol of true love, peering from behind her.

In *Pretioze and Don Jan*/*De Spaensche Heidin* (1660) by Jan van Noordt: the allusion to the goddess Diana via her lavish white dress; the fresh rose – a coded reference to virginity – crowning Preciosa's head, another rose at her feet; the unrolled scroll of paper on the ground to her left containing the confession of the child-theft committed by the old 'gypsy'.

In *Don Juan and Preciosa* by Abraham van den Tempel46: the roses scattered around Preciosa and the figure of Cupid peering from behind her.

Johannes Voorhout also belongs to this list even though I have not been able to see his work; he also painted the meeting scene inspired, just like Abraham van den Tempel, by Noortd's *Pretioze and Don Jan* (de Witt 1999: 184).

David Ryckaert III represents a later moment in the scene, as Gaskell reports. "Pretiose in a Gypsy turban stands holding a rose garland and

46 A reproduction of the work is cited in Gaskell's article, identifying it as "Dutch School. *Pretiose and Don Jan* Boston, Museum of Fine Arts, bequest of Charles Turner" (46). De Witt refers to the same work, identifying its author as Abraham van den Tempel, while giving it the title *Don Juan and Preciosa*; the other details include: 71 × 60 cm, signed and unclearly dated, Boston, Museum of Fine Arts, Inv. Nr. 74.9 (1999: 186n17). The painting is unclearly dated, but it has been established that Abraham van den Tempel follows the basic layout of Jan van Noordt's work, only placing the figures in an interior setting (de Witt 1999: 184).

facing the viewer. Just behind her to the right are Majombe and an elderly male Gypsy. Don Jan kneels, offering Pretiose a diamond ring." (264).

In *Preciosa Recognised* (c. 1675) by Godfried Schalcken47 (Fig. 8): the marble vessel with fresh pink roses, the snail (another symbol of love), the note of the theft, a gold chain and a jewel on the floor in the foreground; Preciosa's opening her décolleté to show the white mole under her left breast; her bared feet revealing her joined toes; the old 'gypsy' – an unsightly creature emerging from the dark background – who points with a finger at the girl's birthmark, her gesture clearly addressing the viewers, urging them take a look and convince themselves. The auction catalogue of 1818, as Anja Ševčík notes, praised the painting as "the very celebrated cabinet chef d'oeuvre" and "an exquisite bijou", apparently referring to Schalcken's exquisite rending of the fine fabric and valuable accessories worn by the nobility. In depicting the old 'gypsy', he was influenced by a drawing of Simon de Vlieger's (Fig. 9) (which was used as an etching template by Peter Nolpe48); 'quoting' the facial features of the old 'gypsy' and the jewellery lying on the floor (128).

Vlieger's drawing (Fig. 9) is one of the very few images of the time that depicts the scene of child-theft and yet, remarkably, the focus is not, as one would expect, on the horror of abduction but on Preciosa's power and wealth, underscored by her regal attire, jewellery, and posture.  A similar interpretation of the childtheft scene can be seen in an illustration in the nineteenth-century German children's book *Anna, das geraubte Kind* (*Anna, the Stolen*

Fig. 8. Godfried Schalcken, *Preciosa Recognised*, c. 1675, oil on wood panel, 44.2 × 31.2 cm. Courtesy of the National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin.

Fig. 9. Simon de Vlieger, Pieter Nolpe (print maker), *Roma vrouw Majombe met Konstance*, 1643, etching / engraving, 129 × 106 mm.

*Child*) by Alexander Löwen (Fig. 28) where the abducted girl looks like a grown-up doll while her abductor is a 'gypsy' male with a black beard and a dark-brown hat. In the section on prints, we shall discuss in greater detail the rendition of the moment of the child-theft and the depiction of abducted girls as white dolls.

*Homecoming of Preciosa (Cervantes)/Die wiedergefundene Tochter (nach Jacob Cats: Het Spaens heydinnetye)* (ca. 1677–1685) by Willem van Mieris (Fig. 10). This work of Mieris, unlike his next one, strays from the tradition as it only hints at the extra proofs. Preciosa looks as if she has just covered her left breast and only the toes of her left foot show at her skirt's edge.

Fig. 10. Willem van Mieris, *Homecoming of Preciosa (Cervantes)* / *Die wiedergefundene Tochter (nach Jacob Cats: Het Spaens heydinnetye*), c. 1677–1685, oil on wood, 51.9 × 45.1 × 1 cm.

The Motif of 'Gypsy' Child-theft in Dutch History Painting

*Preziosa* (1709) by Willem van Mieris50 (Fig. 11): Preciosa's bared leg and feet, her undone leather sandal lying in the foreground; her fully bared breasts; the coffer with her baby trinkets on the table next to the scroll of paper containing the old 'gypsy's' confession of child-theft.

This section will end with one example in counterpoint. There are three more works featuring the first encounter that slightly differ from the pictorial tradition outlined so far. Authored by Philips Wouwerman, all three may be dated to the 1640s.51 Wouwerman appears to be the only artist of his time who visualises the moment of true love by elaborating a dramatic nature landscape. In the painting shown here (Fig. 12), he does not fail to place fresh roses in Preciosa's hands or to show her semibared breasts and bared feet as a reminder of her virginity. Neither are his renditions of the stolen aristocratic girl and the old 'gypsy' spared the contrastive black/dark and white/light tones – yet, their figures are not the main focus. His two other paintings suggest even more clearly that the artist took little interest in proving noble origin or depicting the glowing whiteness of female skin. Wouwerman's works express instead the dramatic encounter through movement and elements of nature: riding his horse, Don Juan lays his eyes on Preciosa who is sitting in the company of the old 'gypsy' under a gnarled, leafless tree. The figures are small and viewed from a distance. The sense of inner turmoil is conveyed through Don Juan's body reclining towards the girl, through the contorted shape of the tree but above all through the vast expanse of misty sky: two-thirds of the canvas is taken up by a spectacularly

Fig. 11. Willem van Mieris, *Preziosa*, 1709, oil on oak panel, 41 × 51.5 cm. Gemäldegalerie Dresden, Gal.-Nr. 1775.

The Motif of 'Gypsy' Child-theft in Dutch History Painting

Fig. 12. Philips Wouwerman. *De ontmoeting van Don Jan en Preciosa (J. Cats, Spaens Heydinnetje)*, ca. 1640–1643, oil on panel.

illuminated overcast sky. In Wouwerman's interpretation, the seizure of love is shown to be a mystery of nature, unknowable, baffling, even a bit disheartening, and yet a universal human experience that could transcend class divisions. The artist adopts the form of a non-narrative landscape painting to produce a story, and his choice of form in itself introduces an alternative to the discourse of racialisation that we have seen in history painting and points to the possibility for another, more universalist perspective on the topic.

*Pretioze and Don Jan*(1660) by Jan Van Noordt

5.4 *Pretioze and Don Jan* (1660) by Jan Van Noordt Dark-Skinned on Canvas: Is It the Suntan, the Shadow Effect or the 'Race'?

The third and last history painting I apply my scholarly lens to is *Pretioze and Don Jan* by Jan van Noordt (Fig. 13).52 Its source of inspiration is a popular theatre play published by Mattheus Tengnagel in 1643. Tengnagel organised his text in two parts: a moralising account of the story in prose and a stage adaptation. In the prose text, he specified that Pretioze wears a splendid white dress with blue reflections and that her skin is blue-veined (cf. de Witt 2007: 148n3); the aim clearly being to establish a parallel between the luxurious material and the most highly prized colour of human skin. As Gaskell observes, "the force with which Pretiose's beauty strikes Don Jan is conveyed by his suffering the delusion that she is his hunting goddess, Diana, captured by devils. (…) These he quickly recognises as Gypsies" (263–264).  It is notable that the white dress becomes a focal point of communication in Noordt's painting, expressing both the power of Pretioze's noble beauty and the power of Don Jan's noble love. Tengnagel's play was a source for a number of depictions by Dutch painters and Noordt's *Pretioze and Don Jan* is the best-known example on the theme (de Witt 1999: 184).

Jan van Noordt's work also stands out with its nuanced rendition of skin colour between the extreme poles of 'whiteness' and 'blackness'. Art historians have invariably focused on the two main figures in the composition but, in my view, the background of human figures – which ensures the visibility of Pretioze and Don Jan, and is marked by an intriguing complexity – deserves equal attention and scrutiny of detail. To begin with, the old 'gypsy' woman here is granted an unusual conspicuousness. Draped in a coarse hooded-cloak, her body looms like a shadow from behind and above Pretioze's seated figure. Against her brown, shrivelled and unsightly face, the viewer is prompted to appreciate the fine features of the girl, her luminous whiteness in skin and

52 There are two versions of *Pretioze and Don Jan*, "the only known example of an exact repetition in the oeuvre of Jan van Noordt" as de Witt comments. Painted at almost the same time, they show no significant differences (2007: 150). Noordt's work is also cited as *Pretiose and Don Jan* (Gaskell 46), *Preciosa and Don Juan* (de Witt 1999: 184).

The Motif of 'Gypsy' Child-theft in Dutch History Painting

Fig. 13. Jan van Noordt, *Pretioze and Don Jan* / *De Spaensche Heidin*, ca. 1660, canvas, 132 × 170 cm.

dress. Yet, and this is rather remarkable, a part of the old hag's body is set against a light sky gaining a clearer outline, while another part merges with the knotty-brown tree trunk behind her and with the ground. This double contrast is deployed to ascertain that her dark complexion is not a shadow effect, as is the case with the blond Cupid figure behind her, but represents a genuine skin colour. Thus, the old 'gypsy' is granted visibility and used as Pretioze's contrastive background. Undoubtedly, the dark earthy tones associate her with nature, dirt, and animal existence, communicating to the viewer that, unlike Pretioze, she is more of a body than an illuminated soul. (The blond child behind her, in the logic of the painting, is perhaps Cupid overcast by shadows or a stolen aristocrat but definitely not a 'gypsy' child.)

Both Lievens and Noordt complement their figure compositions with a Moorish slave,53 appearing like a shadow in the background, and both artists add visual touchstones of 'blackness'. The wealthy lady

53 The two artists reproduce the widespread Dutch view that Spanish nobility were slave owners (Wheelock 132n9).

in Lievens' painting is dressed in fine black fur, while Noordt chooses black clothes for Don Jan, linking him to a 'black' slave with a black falcon perched on his arm. Within the framework of colour references, the dark brown complexion of the old 'gypsy' and that of the other 'gypsies' in the distance (identifiable through the gesture of palm-reading) is firmly assigned to the 'non-white' section on the skin colour spectrum. As a result, 'gypsies' are racialised, i.e. constructed as 'nonwhite' (= non-European, sharing similarities with Africans), and thus de-Europeanised. In most of the history paintings considered here, the 'gypsy' figure merges entirely with the dark background, performing the function of a negative visual reference without which the message of Preciosa's nobility (whiteness) would lose its immediacy and clarity.

Finally, a few words are in order about the literary and pictorial tradition that influenced Jan van Noordt's choice of subject matter. In his wonderfully written monograph on the Dutch master, David de Witt comments that Noordt did not venture to experiment with novel themes but generally kept to the standard repertoire of topics that dominated the market of history paintings in the mid-seventeeth century. There was a demand for exemplars of virtue and love in the circles of the Amsterdam social élite, and painters responded with various depictions showing the moment of true love, usually in a pastoral setting. The main function of these paintings was to present morally exemplary behaviour, but also, notably, one that upheld "a doctrine of class and blood at it applie[d] to breeding and marriage" (de Witt 2007: 57). Among the favourite subjects was the meeting of Granida and Daifilo: their rural romance was interpreted on canvas by Abraham Bloemaert, Gerrit von Hornthorst and Jan van Noordt, and was based on Pieter C. Hooft's popular pastoral play *Granida* (1605). By choosing the story about the Spanish *gitanilla*, Dutch artists could, in turn, expand on their repertoire of idyllic love scenes.

Other literary and painted works also fed into the fashion for pastoral idyll, but – more significantly – all these, basically variations on the theme of true love, fall within a tradition established by Heliodorus' romance *Aethiopica*. In fact, Jacob Cats considered *Aethiopica* to be the prototype of Cervantes' story (Gaskell 268). Written in the first half of the third century A.D., the ancient Greek romance also warrants a mention. As Wolfgang Stechow underlines in his article "Heliodorus' *Aethiopica* in Art", the ancient text – "a colossus in the history of literature with boundless influence" to borrow his words – experienced an astonishing revival during the age of Mannerism and

Fig. 14. Karel van Mander III, *Persina and the Picture of Andromeda / Hydaspes und Persina vor dem Bild der Andromeda*, ca. 1640, 110 × 220 cm.

Baroque (144–5). Paintings presenting scenes from *Aethiopica* were produced by Ambroise Dubois, Jean Mosnier, Abraham Bloemaert, Gerard Honthorst, and Nicolas Knupfer. Pondering what contributed to this revival, Stechow lists six different reasons but fails, in my opinion, to identify the most pertinent one, and that is the binary coding of skin colour in the text.  At the same time, Stechow does not fail to notice that "the explanation of the complexion of Chariclea (…) has been rendered great gusto" by Karel van Mander III (1606–1670) in his *Persina and the Picture of Andromeda* (ca. 1640) (Fig.14) (152).

Clearly, Heliodorus' text provided suitable material for representations that espouse black-and-white morals, and what we would call today 'racial' antinomies, allowing Dutch royalties to self-style themselves against a background that would make them appear undeniably noble and 'white'. As Miles points out, until the end of the eighteenth century,

… although the predominant view was that the African was a human being, part of God's creation, and exhibited characteristics subject to environmental influence, the African was nevertheless defined as an inferior human being. The representation of the African as Other signified phenotypical and cultural characteristics as evidence of this inferiority and the

attributed condition of Africans therefore constituted a measure of European progress and civilization. The sense of Otherness was increasingly, although not exclusively, grounded in skin colour (…) and sustained by the attribution of other negatively evaluated characteristics. (30)

If we consider the attitude towards Africans, outlined by Miles, it is perhaps easier to explain why, and this is a question Stechow puzzles over irresolutely, almost all of the Dutch paintings deriving from *Aethiopica,* form cycles that were commissioned either as decorations for royal residences or as decorations for royal weddings.

## 5.5 The Effects of Racialisation

The Effects of Racialisation

*Of several patches of colour, all equally white, that patch will look whitest which is against the darkest background. And black will look most intense against the whitest background.*  Leonardo da Vinci, *Leonardo's Notebooks* (128)

In Cervantes' text, as we have seen, the colour opposition between aristocrats and 'gypsies' is unstable, symbolic and fraught with paradoxes; yet, in this archetypal story of initiation, human identity is conceived fluid enough to undergo cardinal changes. As a true heroine, Preciosa plunges from the world of light (nobility) into the world of darkness/ lack of light ('gypsies') to re-emerge renewed into her original world, bringing a new, brighter light. Psychologically, light and darkness can be read as metaphors for the conscious and unconscious state of mind, while the cycle of initiation traces the process by which human consciousness is expanded. The story structure encodes a universal phenomenon.

However, the sternly moralist Dutch literary and pictorial interpretations of "La gitanilla" do not sustain this playful and contradictory conception of human identity. In fact, Dutch writers shorten the period of time that the aristocrats spend among 'gypsies', making sure to impress on their readers that the former were not morally contaminated by the latter. Seventeenth-century artists added to the stabilisation of human identity by aestheticising and racialising it. Preciosa is firmly entrenched in realist (racialised) whiteness, while 'gypsies' are represented as her negating opposite. As a result, a dividing line of colour is constructed and a whole pictorial tradition is established in the framework of which nobility/national majority are imagined along the lines of European 'white' identity, while 'gypsies' are seen as its 'non-white' and non-European complementary Other. This division has three consequences. Firstly, the constellation in which aristocrats are opposed to 'gypsies' and not to sun-tanned peasants, for example, allows the ruling classes/national majorities to export social tensions outside of their realm, explaining such tensions with the Roma minority, i.e. re-formulating social disparities in 'ethno-racial' terms. Secondly, this polarised and racialising pattern of thought precludes the possibility of blond, fair-skinned and fair-haired individuals – although there are a great many Roma who fall within this segment of the skin tone spectrum – to be perceived and visualised, i.e. described, painted, photographed or filmed as 'gypsies' or as representative of the Roma. They are deemed non-existent; the individuals are taken for stolen children (of noble origin or of the national majority), or they are treated as curiosities. The phrase "blond gypsy", for example, is ubiquitously used as a laughter-inducing oxymoron. Finally, since the colour line of difference is artificial, having its roots in metaphoric language, it is highly mutable and can easily be adapted to serve the interests of those in power. In practical terms, this means that almost any member of a national majority in Europe, or even entire nations,54 can be labelled and represented as 'gypsy', and thus ostracised or otherwise punished in an exemplary manner.

The aesthetic polarisation of human skin colour into 'white' and 'nonwhite'/'gypsy' was expressed with zeal in another pictorial manner. In the nineteenth century, the artistic fixation on female 'whiteness' and celestial virginity flipped over into its opposite, turning into an obsession with 'non-whiteness'/'gypsyness' and promiscuity. As Lou Charnon-Deutsch explains, "Cervantes' Preciosa was transformed into a born Gypsy, which made it easier to justify her passion, impulsiveness and tragic allure" (64). The play with fluid identities in Cervantes' text was brought to halt, coded in immutable 'racial' colours and fragmented, which gave rise, on the one hand, to idealised portraits of our stolen 'white' vestals and, on the other hand, to ethnographised and sexualised portraits of real 'gypsies'. Examples of the first trend, taken up by Romantic artists and already tapering off in the second half of the nineteenth century, are Wilhelm von Schadow's work *Mignon* (1828); Narcisse Díaz de la Peña's *Frollo and Esméralda* (1845) and the artist's life's oeuvre; or Ary Scheffer's *Mignon Expressing Her Regret for Her Native Land* (1851) – "one of the most unlikely candidates for a gypsy ever painted" (Brown 43).

Assuming the form of naturalism, realism, and avant-gardism, the second trend gained the upper hand. In a chapter, aptly called "Canvassing the *real* Spanish Gypsy", Charnon-Deutsch gives an insightful account of the bohemian craze that swept literature, theatre and the

54 A prime example here are the so-called Balkan nations which are de-Europeanised in various ways but also with recourse to 'gypsy' figures, as Maria Todorova persuasively demonstrates in her seminal work *Imagining the Balkans* (1997). Another pertinent example comes from Bulgarian social media where the non-empathic attitude towards Syrian refuges is commonly justified by positing that the latter are no different to 'gypsies'.