Kneeling African figure

Kneeling African figure

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

By the eighteenth century, Venice’s wealth was increasingly connected, much like the rest of Europe, to the transatlantic slave trade. In 1700 the sculptor Andrea Brustolon carved enchained African men as ornamental supports for the Ca’Rezzonico, a palace on the Grand Canal, spreading the trend for “blackamoors,” stylized and often racist depictions of Africans. Used as domestic decoration, works with such imagery proliferated throughout the Grand Tour market and were later exported to the United States. Probably from the nineteenth century, this glass figure, which once held a vessel, speaks to the subject’s disturbing popularity even in the era of emancipation.

European Sculpture and Decorative Arts

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

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The fifty thousand objects in the Museum's comprehensive and historically important collection of European sculpture and decorative arts reflect the development of a number of art forms in Western European countries from the early fifteenth through the early twentieth century. The holdings include sculpture in many sizes and media, woodwork and furniture, ceramics and glass, metalwork and jewelry, horological and mathematical instruments, and tapestries and textiles. Ceramics made in Asia for export to European markets and sculpture and decorative arts produced in Latin America during this period are also included among these works.