Continuing with posts celebrating Black History Month, I bring you the artistic tradition of St Maurice in the Middle Ages. This beautiful sculpture of Saint Maurice resides at the Cathedral of Magedeberg and dates to the first half of the 1200s. Dressed as a soldier in chainmail, the figure clearly shows Maurice as an imposing person of African descent. The story of Saint Maurice goes back to the late Roman period, but in the Western artistic tradition, he was rendered as a white-skinned person until the 13th century, when artists began portraying him with black skin.
Maurice was thought to have been an early martyr for Christianity. He was from Thebes, a city in Africa, but worked as a Roman military leader. The cosmopolitan Empire had Maurice stationed with his men in a place called Agaunum in modern-day Switzerland’s St Maurice, named for you-know-who. When he defied a command to kill fellow Christians during the purges of the third century, legend goes that he and his troops were put to death.
The Holy Roman Emperors of the Medieval period associated themselves with Maurice, employing what they believed were his spurs, sword, and lance in their royal ceremonies for centuries. With the reign of Frederick II (1194-1250), whose court was made up of Christians from Africa, Jewish and Muslim people, as well as Europeans, the depiction of Maurice as Black was the norm. Later centuries had examples of Maurice in paintings that showed him wearing resplendent armor, looking wealthy and aristocratic, and signaling the success of Christianity across a wide geographical area.
Btw: the German city of Coberg had a coat-of-arms with Maurice on it, and the Nazis made the city remove it in 1934 so as not to contribute to “the glorification of the African race.” After the Nazis lost, Coberg got Maurice reinstated on their coat-of-arms.
Source(s): There is so much literature on Saint Maurice and Blackness in Medieval culture. Works by Geraldine Heng, Matthew Vernon, and Carl Whitaker are of recent importance, but _The Image of the Black in Western Art_, vol 2, by Jean Devisse, is foundational.
