A detail of a statue of Saint Maurice, patron saint of the Holy Roman Empire, made about 1240 by an unknown German artist, from the Cathedral of Saint Maurice and Saint Catherine, Magdeburg, Germany. "If, only recently, you had asked the greatest experts in medieval art how many depictions of Saint Maurice as a black man existed, they would have said three or four," says Karen Dalton. "But our researchers have found 300 of them." Image of the Black in Western Art Project

The Invisible Appears

An archive of images adjusts the color of history.

In 1960 Dominique de Ménil, L.H.D. '92, and her husband, Jean, art patrons and antisegregationists who had emigrated to the United States from France, decided to mount an exhibition of works of art depicting blacks. They quickly discovered that little was known of such imagery. They hired art historian Ladislas Bugner to investigate potential exhibition material. He went to the photography archive at the British Museum, which documents about a million and a half works of art, and said he wanted to see everything they had on Negroes. We don't have that category, said the British Museum. Then let me see Africa, said Bugner. We don't have that, said the museum. So Bugner sat down and looked at all their photographs. By 1976, he and other researchers had examined 6.5 million photographs in 40 institutions throughout Europe. The de Ménils had funded a research project to discover and analyze how the Western mind had conceived of blacks during a span of 5,000 years.

Portrait of Jean-Baptiste Belley, 1797, by Anne-Louis Girodet, from the Musée national du Château de Versailles. Belley was a Senegalese transported as a slave to what is now the Dominican Republic. "Brought as a child onto tyranny's soil," he wrote, "through hard labor and sweat I conquered liberty." He joined the local French forces, became a captain, and in 1793, in the midst of the Reign of Terror, was sent to Paris as one of six deputies to the National Convention, the acting government of France. He was a signer of the constitution of 1795 that established a new French government, the Directory. Giraudon/Art Resource, N.Y.

The project's archive now includes 27,000 photographs of images made in all artistic media except photography. They are being published; the fourth, multivolume, volume will come from Harvard University Press perhaps in 2000. In 1994 the Image of the Black in Western Art Project and its director-curator, Karen Dalton, moved from Houston, where the archive had not been readily accessible to scholars, to Cambridge, where it is. The project, with offices on Story Street, is now part of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Research.

Scholars in many fields are learning to treasure this revelatory horde of images. A Ph.D. candidate at work on a dissertation about blacks and whaling, for instance, comes to the archive, and Dalton speedily turns up 10 representations of blacks hunting whales. Dalton hopes that the pictures she oversees will be widely disseminated, work their way into academic curricula, become found instead of lost. "It will take time to alter the physiognomy of history," she says. "But that's part of what this project is about--to make the invisible appear."