It examines the modes of representations developed by European artists to depict the Roma foreigners in European cities – first the traditions of north German art and later those of the European Renaissance and Baroque –, and places special emphasis on the development of specific iconographical types to show the processes of differentiation, othering, demonisation and abjectification in European visual history.
01 The Image of Roma in Art History
The research papers and conference presentations in this subsection will lead researchers through Roma images from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with a special emphasis on Central and Eastern Europe, where, in the visual arts, Roma became ‘pendants of the African and Asian “primitives” of Western Europe’, and the artists created their own ‘“black” through their own Roma colonies’. The subsection ‘The Image of Roma in Art History’ also demonstrates how a particular post-colonial power game destroys research, and how many depictions of Roma were appropriated by the more powerful black and Jewish art history narratives; thus there will be a certain reclaiming of these Roma images as an act of re-writing and intervention in the grand narrative of European and other art histories.