Sky Arte turns 10: to celebrate, a documentary on African presences in 16th century art

This year, Sky Arte celebrates its tenth birthday: in fact, since 2012 Sky’s television network dedicated to art has been chronicling the world’s artistic heritage, with a special focus on Italy’s. In ten years with more than 250 original productions and more than 600 hours produced, Sky Arte has covered 50 Italian cities and 380 different places of artistic interest, more than 450 cultural events and more than 150 national artists. And now it celebrates with a new documentary: the Sky Original production The Hidden Renaissance. African Presences in Art, which will be broadcast exclusively on Sky Arte on Sunday, November 27 at 9:15 p.m., streaming only on NOW and also available on demand.

This is a production with which Sky Arte wants to explore the theme ofartistic inclusion. In the works of art that populate the Uffizi Galleries, the halls of the great Venetian palaces, or the most important basilicas in Rome, faces of African and Afro-descendant characters who lived during the Italian Renaissance and who, for the most diverse reasons, were immortalized in timeless masterpieces and still went unnoticed for centuries, are in fact represented. The Hidden Renaissance. African Presences in Art goes in search of the stories of these characters, traversing works and documents, starting with portraits of the most famous Afro-descendant, the first duke of Florence, Alessandro de’ Medici, through depictions of enslaved people or important African ambassadors, to portraits of those who constituted the fabric of Renaissance society: gondoliers, knights, clergymen, and swindlers.

Just look at Sandro Botticelli ’s frescoes in the Sistine Chapel showing Ethiopian dignitaries visiting the Pope; Filippino Lippi’s, Mantegna’s, and Ghirlandaio’s sacred representations in the halls of the Uffizi, depicting black subjects, inspired by black people encountered in everyday life; the face of a maid peeking out from just behind a column at the back of the Florentine crowd painted by Domenico Ghirlandaio in the church of Santa Trinita in Florence, or a marble bust depicting the ambassador of the kingdom of Kongo Antonio Manuel Ne Vunda, watching from above visitors, unaware of his presence from a niche in the basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome.

And then again, paintings by Carpaccio and Veronese in Venice, Titian, Pontormo, Michelangelo and Vasari restore the faces of characters whose names, along with details of their existence, are kept in historical archives that speak of dates, events, and accounts of the most diverse experiences.

The documentary, conceived and written by Francesca Priori and directed by Cristian Di Mattia, brings together for the first time an international team of experts who seized the impetus of the most recent wave of civil rights demonstrations around the world and decided to tell the lives of African and Afro-descendant people who lived during the Renaissance, reconstruct their identity and their role in society, finally revealing an aspect of this extraordinary era that has so far remained hidden, although it was under everyone’s gaze: Justin Thompson, artist and director of the Black History Month Florence initiative, and of The Recovery Plan cultural center, a research center dedicated to the histories of African and Afro-descent people and cultures in the Italian context; Kate Lowe, professor of Renaissance history and culture at Queen Mary, University of London, has devoted her entire life to researching Renaissance society and was was among the first to shine a light on the history of Afro-descendant characters in the Renaissance; John Brackett, associate professor of history at the University of Cincinnati, is the leading expert on the Alessandro de’ Medici story and its iconography; Jonathan Nelson, who teaches art history at Syracuse University Florence, has expanded his research on black figures in Filippino Lippi’s paintings, always the focus of his studies, with interesting findings; Matteo Salvadore, professor at American University in Sharjah, UAE, is a profound connoisseur of the African Renaissance diaspora and the influences that African personalities had on Italian society; Cécile Fromont, full professor of African and South Atlantic art at Yale University, is an expert on the influences that African kingdoms exerted on European culture and vice versa; sociologist Angelica Pesarini, professor at the University of Toronto deals with the colonial past and studies the condition and representation of Afro-descendant people in Italy; finally, Igiaba Scego, writer and activist, tells of the lives of African and Afro-descendant people in Italy today.

The historical reconstructions are enhanced by animated illustrations created by TIWI. Accompanying the narration is the original soundtrack that brings together Renaissance themes, traditional African instrumentation and electronic sounds, composed by Alain Diamond and Victor Kwality.

Image: Andrea Mantegna, Adoration of the Magi (1497-1500; glue and gold tempera on panel, 54.6 x 70.7 cm; Los Angeles, Getty Museum)

Sky Arte turns 10: to celebrate, a documentary on African presences in 16th century art

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