From "Stranger" to "Strange": Representations of Black African Musicians in Medieval and Early Modern Europe.

Starting from the painting Perseus saving Andromeda, where at the beginning of the 16th century a fanciful African musical instrument was depicted by Piero di Cosimo as a hybrid assembling of European ones, this article examines the iconography of pipe and tabor, and their variants, as instruments adopted by African musicians in the Western world during the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance. The (inter)cultural context of the African diaspora, and the struggle for integration by African freedmen and semi-itinerant musicians and performers, is illustrated in various areas - Italy, Low Countries, England - by a rich iconography never before considered as a testimony of the African diasporic cultural history. Working on the intersections of iconography and history, the article also discovers and positions the early presence of black musicians in England – and more generally in Europe - during the late Middle Ages, without neglecting to evaluate also the related cultural constructs of legendary and fictional narratives. Furthermore, the visual examples will reveal the intrinsic limits of general anthropological categories like ‘ethnocentrism’ (in considering African music and dance) and ‘exoticism’ (in classifying what lies beyond the European horizon). In fact, musical iconography can contribute to bypass any excessive generalization by focusing on the social and cultural processes involved in the transformation of anything ‘stranger’ into something ‘strange but acceptable’, within the frame of Western perception and handling of ‘Otherness’.