I recently had an old painting brought up from the depths of memory. It's one of the freakier works we studied in a class on Italian Renaissance art I took for an Art History minor during my quest for a second degree. The painting, by Fra Angelico, is called Miracle of the Deacon Justinian. It's actually one of many that decorate the the predella (or altarpiece) of San Marco in Florence and are dated around 1438-40. In the composition, two twin brothers - the Saints Cosmas and Damian, both physicians who were martyred in 287 - appear hovering around the sleeping Roman deacon Justinian. The textbook briefly describes the painting as "show(ing) the two saints, who float in trailing soft clouds, exchanging the deacon's gangrenous leg for a healthy one amputated from a Moor," before matter-of-factly segueing into a comparatively lengthy celebration of Fra Angelico's mastery of light and shadow in the interior setting.
Fra Angelico's Miracle of the Deacon Justinian, 1438-40
If you're like me, your initial response to the painting runs somewhere along the lines of: Hmmm. Now that's awfully bizarre. And the textbook's authors' more or less glossing over of the subject matter only enhances its strange sense of mystery - and I don't mean the spiritual, saintly sort, I mean the WTF? sort of mystery...
The scene really does prompt a question or two. I mean, I suppose it's very swell to be less one rotten old leg; and so much the better to have a transplant rather than I stump, I am inclined to believe. But how strange to - you know - not exactly have a "matcher". Really, what's it like to wake up to that - The miracle and the mix-n-match? I'm willing to wager there's a broad expanse of reactions to be had. And then there's also the question of this new leg's origins: what happened to this donating Moor? Is he hopping around, less one leg?
Initially I was left to wonder if the painting didn't reflect some sort of de facto reduction of the African as commodity: as not only the European's source of (later) slave labor but even body parts as well. I've since googled the painting and its subjects several times for more information. The Fra Angelico work itself shows up frequently enough in search results - many art print companies sell copies of it - but a detailed telling of the actual story it portrays is harder to come across. A couple sites modify the brief telling to include that the leg came from a "recently deceased Ethiopian". Another site goes as far as to report that the Ethiopian donor had been a slain gladiator. Well, maybe so, but I am not entirely convinced: the relative silence seems somewhat deafening for such a curious composition - one that frankly begs for explanation upon first viewing - which leads me to wonder if the whole "recently deceased" thing isn't a little ex post facto, if you know what I mean. Well - either way - another of the pleasures of progressing through life is a diminished tendency to give the European the benefit of the doubt...
Speaking of Europeans behaving badly, my read of the moment is Charles C. Mann's delightful and fascinating 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created. It's the sequel to his perhaps even more compelling 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus. I like both books very much because Mann's research and reportage really challenge the old, misguided assumptions that we as Americans - which is to say as both citizens of the United States and also as peoples of the greater continental Americas - carry about in our patchy grasp of our own history. Mann's narratives are pretty much guaranteed to elicit an ongoing series of Hmmm's, Huhhh's, and How About That's...
Speaking of Moors under the knife, it was Mann's latest book that brought Miracle of the Deacon Justinian to mind: specifically the story of Esteban de Dorantes, a Moor under Spanish slavery, whose life is I think one of the more fascinating, adventurous, and frankly rather surreal narratives that I've read about lately. I won't chatter on too much about it, but rather let you enjoy the lengthy passage I have transcribed from Mann's 1493 [with a little commentary of my own added in brown] :
The paradigmatic example of the African disapora may be the man known variously as Esteban, Estevan, Estevancio, or Estebanico de Dorantes, an Arabic-speaking Muslim/Christian raised in Azemmour, Morocco. Plagued by drought and civil war in the sixteenth century, Moroccans fled by the desperate tens of thousands to the Iberian peninsula, glumly accepting slavery and Christianity as the price of survival. Many came from Azemmour, which Portugal, taking advantage of the region's instability, occupied during Esteban's childhood. He was bought, probably in Lisbon, by a minor Spanish noble named Andrés Dorantes de Carranza. Dreaming of repeating Cortés's feats of conquest, Dorantes, with Esteban in tow, joined an overseas expedition led by Pánfilo de Narváez , a fiercely ambitious Castilian duke with every good quality required of a leader except good judgment and good luck.
More than four hundred men, an unknown number of them African, landed under Narváez's command in southern Florida on April 14, 1528. One catastrophe followed another as they moved up Florida's Gulf coast in search of gold. Narváez vanished at sea; Indians, disease, and starvation picked off most of the rest. After about a year, the survivors built ragtag boats and tried to escape to Hispaniola. They ran aground off the coast of Texas, losing most of their remaining supplies. Of the original four hundred men, just fourteen were still alive. Soon the tally was down to four, one of whom was Esteban. Another was Esteban's owner, Dorantes. [ This is where I cannot help but put myself into the shoes of Esteban and ask of the universe, Seriously? 396 men die and none of them is the turd that owns me? Talk about really not catching a break...]
The four men trekked west, toward Mexico, in a passage of stunning hardship. They ate spiders, ant eggs, and prickly pear. They lost all their possessions and walked naked. They were enslaved and tortured and humiliated. As they passed from one Indian realm to the next, they began to be taken for spirit healers - as if native people believed their horrific journey of itself must have brought these strange, naked, bearded people close to the numinous. Perhaps the Indians were right, for Esteban and the Spaniards began curing diseases by chant and the sign of the cross. One of the Spaniards brought back a man from the dead, or said he did. They wore shells on their arms and feathers on their legs and carried flint scalpels. As wandering healers they acquired an entourage of followers, hundreds strong. Grateful patients handed them gifts: bountiful meals, precious stones, six hundred dried deer hearts.
Esteban was the scout and ambassador, the front man who contacted each new culture in turn as they walked thousands of miles across the Southwest, along the Gulf of California and into the mountains of central Mexico. By some measures, Esteban was the leader of the group. He certainly held the Spaniard's lived in his hands every time he encountered a new group and, rattling his shaman's gourd, explained who they were.
Eight years after their departure, the four Narváez survivors entered Mexico City. The three Spaniards were feted and honored. Esteban was re-enslaved and sold. His new owner was named Antonio de Mendoza, viceroy of New Spain. Mendoza soon assigned him as the guide to a reconnaissance party going north - Esteban was back on the road. The party was searching for the Seven Cities of Gold. Supposedly these had been established in the eighth century by Portugeuse clerics escaping from Muslim invasions. For decades, people from Spain and Portugal had been hunting them - the Seven Cities were an Iberian version of the Sasquatch or Yeti. Why anyone should imagine these cities were in the U.S. Southwest is unexplained and perhaps unexplainable. Somehow the tales of the Narváez survivors reignited this passion, and Mendoza had succumbed.
Leading the expedition was Marcos de Niza, a Franciscan missionary who has never been charged with insufficient zeal. Mendoza's instructions took pains to command Esteban to obey him. But Esteban had no interest in following orders. As they moved north he encountered Indians who recalled him from his previous journey. He shed his Spanish garb, wore bells, feathers, and chunks of turquoise, and shook a rattle in a spiritual fashion. He again acquired several hundred followers. He ignored Niza's demand that he stop performing ritual cures and refuse his patients' gifts of alcohol and women.
In a decision that the missionary claimed was his own, Esteban and his followers went ahead of the rest of the party after crossing the Rio Grande. Quickly they gained a lead of many miles. Once again, Esteban was moving into an area never before seen by someone from across the ocean. Days after the separation, Niza encountered some of Esteban's entourage, wounded and bleeding. In the mountains at the Arizona-New Mexico border, they told him, the group had come across the Zuni town of Hawikuh, a collection of two- and three-story sandstone homes that climbed like white steps up a hill. It's ruler angrily refused entrance. They barricaded Esteban and his cohort into a big hut outside town without food or water. Esteban was slain when he tried to escape Hawikuh the next day, along with most of the people accompanying him.
The Zuni themselves have a different story - stories, I should say, because many have been recounted. In one version told to me, Esteban is not refused entry, but welcomed into Hawikuh. The people have heard of this man and his extraordinary journey. They want to keep him there - want this very badly, at least in the story. He is a man like no other they have encountered, and incredible physical specimen with his skin and hair, a man whose spirit holds a great wealth of knowledge and perhaps more, a valuable possession they have no desire to lose.
To prevent his departure, they cut off his lower legs, lay him gently on his back, and bathe themselves in his supernatural presence. Esteban lives in this way for many years, the story goes, always treated with the respect due to such uncommon figures, always on his back, legs stretched out, with the wrappings on his stumps carefully tended.
All versions of his end are based on stories that people have told to themselves. His actual fate may never be known with certainty. What seems clear is that in the end this man who crossed so many bridges fell into the same delusion that possessed so many Spaniards. He thought that he understood the shook-up world he was creating and that he was in control. He forgot that under bridges is only air.
Well, quite a life's journey, don't you think? I confess that I'm going with the Zuni version of Dorantes' denouement naturally, because it adds a certain element to an already rather bizarre narrative. And Mann's telling of Esteban de Dorantes' life frankly makes me yearn for Federico Fellini to return from the dead to direct the film adaptation, preferably in the style of his Satyricon of 1969.
- a.t.s.
Charles Mann's 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created is available through Alfred A. Knopf publishers, wherever better printed books are still sold...
Quotation in second paragraph taken from History of Italian Renaissance Art: Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture by Frederick Hartt and David G. Wilkins, fifth edition, published by Harry N. Abrams.
