All About Love From a Black Medieval Angel

"Looking to the Middle Ages for answers to the perennial puzzles of life can seem quaint, even artificial, a long reach across centuries marked by violence, hierarchy, and exclusion. And yet medieval culture offers a way of thinking about love that still speaks to the present. If love is most urgently tested in moments of strain and upheaval, then it is in those moments - where care is stressed or obscured - that its meaning comes most clearly into view."

"In our own moment, we are living amid forms of exhaustion that make sustained attention difficult: humanitarian emergencies reduced to statistics, social care systems hollowed out by austerity, and digital economies that reward speed over responsibility. Care is not absent so much as continually deferred, obscured by scale, distance, and a growing insistence that vulnerability should be managed rather than answered."

"Medieval European visual culture returns to moments of strain and trial again and again, often figuring them through blackness: through bodies marked by humility, penitence, and spiritual testing. Images of Black figures in the Western tradition are not rare, but love - in its fullest, most generous sense - is rarely what they seem to offer at first glance. In depictions of figures such asSaint Maurice, blackness often functions as a site of moral recognition,"

A rare medieval manuscript illustration reframes Blackness as the ground from which love might take shape, challenging common medieval visual tropes that use blackness to signal penitence or moral testing. Contemporary life often defers care amid crises, austerity, and digital economies prioritizing speed over responsibility. Medieval visual culture repeatedly portrays strain through blackness, typically prompting viewers toward moral self-recognition by confronting sin and insufficiency. Familiar saintly figures sometimes position Black bodies mainly for the viewer's moral reflection rather than as sources of generous care. The illustration offers an alternative vision where Blackness becomes the locus of compassionate relation and creative love.

Read at Hyperallergic