This image is part of a weekly series that The Root is presenting in conjunction with the Image of the Black Archive & Library at Harvard University’s Hutchins Center for African and African American Research. The pious figure of a black person is often presented as a subsidiary figure within religious works of early-modern Europe.…

This image is part of a weekly series that The Root is presenting in conjunction with the Image of the Black Archive & Library at Harvard University’s Hutchins Center for African and African American Research. Dominating a tropical landscape filled with an array of sumptuous fruit, a splendidly dressed noblewoman of colonial Spain evokes the…

This image is part of a weekly series that The Root is presenting in conjunction with the Image of the Black Archive & Library at Harvard University’s Hutchins Center for African and African American Research. Among the multitude of tributes made to the renowned African-American clergyman Absalom Jones, few capture his life and times in…

This image is part of a weekly series that The Root is presenting in conjunction with the Image of the Black Archive & Library at Harvard University’s Hutchins Center for African and African American Research. Among the most original treasures of the British Museum, a marble figure of a young black acrobat performs the daring…

This image is part of a weekly series that The Root is presenting in conjunction with the Image of the Black Archive & Library at Harvard University’s Hutchins Center for African and African American Research. Within the flowering branches of a divine version of the genealogical tree, eight biblical kings flank a majestic vision of…

This image is part of a weekly series that The Root is presenting in conjunction with the Image of the Black Archive & Library at Harvard University’s Hutchins Center for African and African American Research. From the other side of a narrow ledge, a black man looks out from a picture with an air of…

This image is part of a weekly series that The Root is presenting in conjunction with the Image of the Black Archive & Library at Harvard University’s Hutchins Center for African and African American Research. Reduced to its essential details, the slim lines of an 18th-century sailing vessel reveal the shocking accommodation of its interior…

This image is part of a weekly series that The Root is presenting in conjunction with the Image of the Black Archive & Library at Harvard University’s Hutchins Center for African and African American Research. When one is investigating the role of people of African descent in Western art, the results often take surprising turns.…

This image is part of a weekly series that The Root is presenting in conjunction with the Image of the Black Archive & Library at Harvard University’s Hutchins Center for African and African American Research. Four naked warriors, all still wearing a quiver of arrows, but lacking their bows, kneel within the decorative borders of…

This image is part of a weekly series that The Root is presenting in conjunction with the Image of the Black Archive & Library at Harvard University’s Hutchins Center for African and African American Research. Within the arched compartments of a late-Gothic Spanish altarpiece, a momentous conversation takes place between a Middle Eastern sultan and…