Color In The Middle Ages

Medieval People of Color is an interesting place to start our Portrayals of Medieval Women class. It begins the attack of all beliefs that we hold about the Medieval Ages by pointing out a fundamental error in our thoughts. It makes us examine every assumption that we made in connection to medieval times and white supremacy. Examining the issue of color, which has become very dominant in today’s mindset, is an important starting point that draws people into the idea of misconceptions in the Medieval Ages. By using an issue that is prominent today, it works to draw people in and may result in further corrections about many different assumptions. These assumptions may include how men and women are portrayed today and the life they actually lived. …show more content…
The ironic thing about this is the picture I found actually depicts a black woman in power in Denmark. Not only was she in power, I later realized that she was actually supposed to be Queen Persina. The painting by Karel Van Mander III depicts a black woman wearing a crown and jewels. This demonstrates that any of the people in a historically accurate Frozen could have been a person of color including Elsa. I also noted that the models that were used for the portraits were actually people of color living in Denmark in the sixteen hundreds. Obviously this disproves the idea that there were no people of color in the Medieval Ages. It actually points out that people of color had more standing than whites would like to believe. Not only did they have more standing, but a woman was even in …show more content…
The easy discerning of the difference concerns me because it shows how little effort people put into their beliefs. They would rather follow the status qou than admit we have rewritten history to benefit white people. Both paintings I examined depicted angels. In the fist, that was decaying, the white pigment became an inky black that was destroying the paper. This is probably where people established the idea that all of the paintings depicting people of color come from decay. They forgot to take in account the fact that much of the picture was affected by the black substance. The other picture I examined clearly showed a person of color as an angel with no decay or discolorations evident. This painting was much more ambiguous to me. The angel could have been male or female and looked to be teaching a lesson. There was less importance on representing the angel as a certain gender than in the message he had to bring. This was important to me because most angels today are depicted as white women except for the few male angels in the Bible. Instead, the painting shows us that those in medieval times were less affected by gender than we were led to believe. They may have even been ahead of us because of the ambiguity of the angel’s