Step back in time to 18th-century France at the annual Rosenberg Fête celebrating French art from the Michael L. Rosenberg Collection.
This year, Dr. Oliver Wunsch, Associate Professor at Boston College, presents Rosalba Carriera and Africa’s Difference.
Schedule of Events:
Music in the Galleries
5:30–6:20 p.m., European Art Galleries, Level 2
Lecture: Rosalba Carriera and Africa’s Difference
6:30–7:30 p.m., Horchow Auditorium
Rosalba Carriera and Africa’s Difference
Around the time she visited Paris in 1720, the Venetian artist Rosalba Carriera created a remarkable series of pastel allegories representing the Four Continents. Rather than emphasizing the traditional accessories and geographic settings of Europe, Asia, Africa, and America, Carriera brought the figures close to the viewer, treating them as vivid studies of color, surface, and facial expression. Within this already unusual group, the personification of Africa (Dallas Museum of Art, 2024.24.FA) especially stands apart. The figure’s open-lipped smile and sidelong gaze make Africa the series’ most animated figure, while the interplay between dark skin and white accents of fabric, pearls, eyes, and teeth creates a distinctive set of coloristic contrasts.
This talk examines what the particular characteristics of Carriera’s Africa mean within the Continents series and within the wider culture from which the allegories emerged. Carriera produced the pastels at a moment when travel writing and ethnographic description frequently treated African people as a distinct human category, marked and often demeaned by supposedly characteristic physical traits. At the same time, 18th-century art theory increasingly granted color, surface, and sensory effect a value independent of the subject represented, allowing even supposedly marginal or lowly subjects to acquire new aesthetic potential. Carriera’s Africa stands at the intersection of these developments. The pastel draws on emergent racial stereotypes, but it also transforms them through the distinctive priorities of art. Features associated with bodily difference become vehicles of visual pleasure and material display, producing a liveliness and individuality that paradoxically exceed the stereotypes on which the work depends.
Dr. Oliver Wunsch is Associate Professor of Art History at Boston College. His research and teaching focus on 18th- and 19th-century European art, with a particular emphasis on the history of artist’s materials and techniques. He is the author of A Delicate Matter: Art, Fragility, and Consumption in Eighteenth-Century France (2024). In the 2026–2027 academic year, he will be a fellow at the Hutchins Center and W. E. B. Du Bois Research Institute at Harvard University, where he will be completing a new book on the way Enlightenment aesthetics redefined theological concepts of grace and redemption through depictions of Black subjects. A portion of this research, published in the journal Art History, won the 2026 James L. Clifford Prize from the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies.
To request accessibility accommodations such as ASL interpretation, gallery stools, or wheelchairs, please send an email to access@dma.org.
This series is supported by the Michael L. Rosenberg Foundation.
Image: Personification of Africa, about 1720. Rosalba Carriera. Pastel on paper. Dallas Museum of Art, Foundation for the Arts Collection, Mrs. John B. O’Hara Fund, 2024.24.FA.