We Were Here: The Untold History of Black Africans in Renaissance Europe

Filmmaker and current Folger Artistic Research Fellow Fred Kuwornu found himself looking at Renaissance paintings and wondering who the Black Africans were in some of these iconic works. What were their stories? How did they come to Europe? In his groundbreaking documentary, We Were Here, Kuwornu reveals the diverse African presence in Renaissance Europe that he found: princes, ambassadors, saints, artists, scholars, and knights—all revealed through art from the period.

In We Were Here, Kuwornu tells the stories of San Benedetto “Il Moro,” co-patron of the city of Palermo; the ambassador Ne Vunda buried in the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome; Joao Panasco, a Portuguese knight of the military and religious Order of Santiago; the painter Juan De Pareja, who was the enslaved assistant to Diego Velázquez; the Latin professor Juan Latino, the first Afro-descendant professor at a European university; and Alessandro de’ Medici, the first Duke of Florence. Additional stories capture Afro-European women in several well-known paintings.

“Discussions about Black people in the 15th and 16th centuries typically focus solely on their condition as enslaved individuals, overlooking the remarkable figures who lived in Europe during that time,” Kuwornu explains in his director’s statement. “We Were Here aims to empower the Black diaspora by highlighting their presence as an integral part of Renaissance Europe’s societal fabric. It seeks to address the gaps in our historical education and challenge the narrow narrative that has long shaped our understanding of this period.”

The multi-lingual documentary, which was screened earlier this month at the Folger, combines reenactments, inspired by Renaissance paintings of Velázquez, Carpaccio, Mantegna, and others, shot on locations in Europe and Brazil, with interviews of art historians, curators, historians, and Black Studies scholars. We Were Here captures the stories of a handful of notable Africans in Renaissance Europe and shows how they shaped history and the visuals of Europe’s most famous art movement.

“Behind this word ‘European’ still lurks the belief that it equates solely to white,” Kuwornu shared in an interview with Art Africa. “My work aims to dismantle this notion, revealing the complex, multicultural tapestry that has always been at the heart of European identity. The film serves as a form of visual archaeology, unearthing stories and perspectives that have been buried beneath layers of historical interpretation. It asks viewers to consider the aesthetic qualities of these artworks and the social, political, and economic contexts in which they were created.

Meet some of the Black Africans featured in We Were Here

A Saint

Benedict the Moor (1524 –1589), also known as Benedict of Palermo, Benedict the Black, or Benedict the African, was a Sicilian Franciscan friar who is venerated as a saint in the Catholic Church. Born of enslaved Africans in San Fratello, Sicily, he was freed at birth and became known for his charity, miracles, and piety. As a young man he joined a Franciscan-affiliated hermit group, of which he became the leader. In 1564 he was sent to the Franciscan friary in Palermo, where he continued good works. Benedict was beatified by Pope Benedict XIV in 1743 and canonized in 1807 by Pope Pius VII. He was declared a patron saint of African Americans. At least seven historically Black Catholic parishes in the United States, bear or bore his name.

From the Minneapolis Institute of Art:
Saint Benedict of Palermo was the first Christian saint of African origin to be canonized in modern times. He was born in Sicily (then part of Spain) of parents who were freed slaves, and who were said to have come from Ethiopia. Saint Benedict was admired as a model of extraordinary religious devotion, wise counsel, and spiritual leadership. After his death a grassroots movement to make him a saint ensued. By the early 1600s Saint Benedict was widely venerated in Italy, Spain, and Latin America.

José Montes de Oca’s statue, carved in Sevilla in the 1730s, masterfully captures Saint Benedict’s charismatic personality. The glass eyes and bone teeth add to the saint’s life like quality. Yet it is the concentrated facial expression, Benedict’s welcoming gesture of his spread arms, the movement of his cowl and his contrapposto stance, by which Montes de Oca renders the saint’s inspiration within the statue’s every inch.

A Diplomat

Antonio Emanuele Ne Vunda (died 1608), also known as Antonio Manuel Nsaku ne Vunda (or Vunta or Funda) was an ambassador from the Central African Kingdom of Kongo to the Vatican, sent by his cousin, the Catholic king of Congo, Alvaro II, to Pope Paul V in 1604–1608. Ne Vunda’s task was to ask for priests to be sent to the Congo and to “plead the case for a Congolese bishopric. Pope Paul V was also eager to meet and enhance connections with Congo as part of his plan for promoting global Christianity. During Ne Vunda’s three-year journey to Rome which took him through Brazil, Portugal, and Spain, he was robbed by Dutch pirates, and then reaching Lisbon, wounded and almost naked, he was detained in the Iberian Peninsula for several years because the Spanish crown frowned on any contact between Congo and the Holy See. The African Royal finally arrived in Rome on January 3, 1608. Unfortunately, having fallen ill on the long journey, Ne Vunda died two days later on the eve of Epiphany, having only briefly met the Pope. The original plans for a procession became a funeral. Ne Vunda was the first African ambassador to the Holy See and the first African ambassador to Europe in history.

From Face2Face Africa:
“The Pope commissioned a bust of Ne Vunda, made from colored marble with a deep green-black stone and featuring the shirt worn by nobles and a quiver of arrows. According to history, there was confusion over how best a Christian, African ambassador’s identity should be represented. Should religion or culture be the focus? At the end of the day, Ne Vunda was portrayed as an African in an African dress. It is documented that his bust is in the Baptistery, a side chapel of the Church of Santa Maria Maggiore, one of the five great, ancient basilicas of Rome, which was also the setting for his funeral.”

People in Motion adds, “The sculptural portrait by Francesco Caporale and commissioned by Pope Paul V depicts Ne Vunda in Congolese apparel, as had already been done in Ne Vunda’s portrait on the commemorative medal commissioned by the pope. As Kate Lowe explains, he wears a tunic of openwork raffia known as a kinzembe or zamba kya mfumu, that is, clothes reserved for persons of elevated standing, often combined with a cloak and a so-called “power bag” (nkutu a nyondo), always worn over the left shoulder. Indeed, the carved quiver seems to represent a nkutu that originally contained arrows.”

A 1608 engraving by Raffaello Schiaminossi shows Ne Vunda in European clothes, holding a document presumed to be a letter from King Alvaro II to the Pope, while Guillermus du Mortier’s engraving shows him in traditional dress. An image of Ne Vunda in the frescoes of the Sala Regia in the Quirinale Palace by Giovanni Battista Ricci. Scholars generally identify him as the man in the second loggia on the north wall, appearing between two guards wearing red-feathered hats in the Caravaggesque manner.

A Knight

João de Sá Panasco (1524–1567) was a Black African in the employ of King John III of Portugal. He was eventually elevated from court jester to gentleman courtier of the Royal Household. Celebrated as a very spirited man, he began his career entertaining the King and Queen Catherine with witty jokes and parodies. Even though he enjoyed the King’s protection, João de Sá received constant racist abuse from other courtiers who frequently brought up his earlier enslavement. But de Sá could do something as jester that others could not: he could mock the nobility with impunity. That status as both outsider and insider made him an invaluable informer to the King. John III arranged a marriage for de Sá and made him his own personal valet. In 1535, de Sá accompanied the King’s brother, Infante Luís, Duke of Beja, to northern Africa, where he was part of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V’s military campaign to conquer Tunis from the Ottomans. After the important victory over the Turks, the King made de Sá a knight of the prestigious Order of Saint James.

From  Smarthistory:

Detail from Chafariz d’El-Rey (The King’s Fountain in the Alfama District, Lisbon), showing a black Knight of the Order of Saint James (typically identified as João de Sá “Panasco”). Oil on wood, ca. 1570-80. The Berardo Collection, Lisbon.

The painting Chafariz d’El Rey shows the King’s Fountain in the Alfama district on a feast day… Before running water in homes, public fountains were an essential service, and the painting highlights the laborious task, most often assigned to Black women, of carrying water in red ceramic jugs from the fountain to homes. The painting does not represent a single moment or scene but is a composite that attests to the large Black presence in 16th-century Lisbon, whose 10,000 to 12,000 Black inhabitants constituted 10% of the city’s total population. The city had the highest concentration of Black inhabitants in Europe, and foreign visitors often commented on the city’s Black population in their travel accounts and letters.

In the lower right, we see four Black knights, identifiable by their clothing and swords. Two knights are walking on foot. Another knight, who we see from the back is riding on a donkey. The knight featured more prominently is riding on a pony. This knight, who has been identified by name as João de Sá Panasco, has the red cross of the prestigious military order of Saint James on his right sleeve….His regalia, boots, and the adornments on the pony underscore Sá’s high social status. These four knights demonstrate that Black Portuguese people could reach elite social status in early modern Portugal—though it must be noted that only donkeys and ponies (not horses) were available to these knights, perhaps due to horses’ high price. These Black knights were one of the main reasons why Portuguese scholars doubted the painting’s authenticity. They argued that knightly orders were regulated according to blood purity laws, which restricted membership to people who could prove that their ancestry was white and Christian for at least three generations. However, Hector Linares, a scholar studying how non-whites gained access to these prestigious orders, has shown that sometimes Iberian kings, who commanded these orders, bypassed these rules and admitted non-white men to them as reward for service to the crown, as in Sá’s case.

An Artist

Juan de Pareja (c. 1607–1670) was a Spanish painter, born into slavery in Antequera, near Málaga, Spain. We do not know how he came to the household and workshop of painter Diego Velázquez, but due to Velázquez’s position as the favorite portraitist of the king, the two lived in the court among Spain’s nobility, and when Velázquez was assigned to travel around Europe to buy and bring back works of art to Spain, Pareja joined him and their trips becoming an extended lesson in art history for both painters, broadening their visual language. Velázquez agreed to free Pareja in 1651, who would gain his freedom four years later, a standard practice at the time. As a free man, Pareja went on to paint large, flowery religious scenes: the Virgin Mary surrounded by cherubs at the moment of immaculate conception, the baptism of Christ, the flight of the Holy Family to Egypt. In one of his best-known works, The Calling of Saint Matthew (1661), Pareja inserted his own self-portrait at the left edge of the painting: a figure holding a slip of paper with his name on it.

But modern viewers may be more familiar with Pareja’s image from Velázquez’s painting, Portrait of Juan de Pareja (ca. 1650), shown here, now part of the Metropolitan Museum of Art which purchased it in 1971 for an auction record-breaking $5.5 million. Meanwhile, The Calling of Saint Matthew languished in storage for many years in the Museo del Prado in Madrid. It wasn’t until Arturo Schomburg, a Black historian active during the Harlem Renaissance who wrote extensively about Pareja, took interest in Pareja’s life that any serious, critical study was made of this once elusive historical figure and his paintings received their due.

From the Metropolitan Museum of Art:
Between 1649 and 1651, Velázquez traveled to Italy with Juan de Pareja, a man of African descent born in southern Spain who was enslaved in Velázquez’s studio and household for at least two decades. According to an early biography, shortly after arriving in Rome, Velázquez exhibited this portrait, “which was so like him and so lively that, when he sent it by means of Pareja himself to some friends for their criticism, they just stood looking at the portrait in admiration and wonder, not knowing to whom they should speak or who would answer.” Within months of completing it, Velázquez signed papers that would liberate Pareja by 1654, paving the way for his own successful career as a painter in Madrid. Enslaved artisanal labor was widespread in the workshops of Spanish painters, sculptors, silversmiths, and woodworkers at this time.

Metropolitan Museum of Art 2023 exhibition, Juan de Pareja, Afro-Hispanic Painter

A Scholar

Juan Latino, or Juan de Sesa as he was actually named, (ca. 1518–ca.1596), was an Afro-Hispanic poet in Renaissance Spain. He taught at the Cathedral school in Granada and became famous for his epic Latin poems. A native of Berbería, a Spanish term associated with the Northern Coast of Africa, Latino was brought to Spain at the age of twelve. He and his mother were slaves in the house of Doña Elvira, the daughter of Fernándo de Córdoba, the famous Spanish war hero.

In 1530, the family moved to Granada, taking young Juan Latino with them. There, Doña Elvira’s son, Gonzalo, the future Duke of Sesa and the enslaved boy became friends. Latino was often seen accompanying his young master to his grammar classes. With Gonzalo’s permission, Latino dedicated himself to the study of letters at the Cathedral school. Under his teacher Pedro de Mota, he became outstanding among his classmates, excelling in Greek and Latin and soon writing his own poems in Latin.

From the Cathedral school he moved to the newly founded University of Granada, receiving his bachelor’s degree in 1546. It was there that he adopted his new name Latino, which associated him with the humanist ideals he was trying to rehabilitate in Spain.

His sophistication in Latin and his skills as a poet and musician soon gave him access to the best houses in Granada where he found his wife Ana Carlobal, a noblewoman.

Nominally, he was still a slave, but with his master Gonzalo campaigning in Italy, Latino enjoyed the virtual, if not actual status, of a free man. When his old teacher Pedro de Mota died in 1556, Latino, with the help of his protector Archbishop Pedro Guerrero, took up his job as a lecturer in the Cathedral school.

Between 1573 and 1585, Latino published three volumes of Latin poems in which he reflected on the condition of blacks and negated the validity of any religious justification for slavery of Africans. His most famous poem is probably the “Austrias Carmen,” dedicated to Juan de Austria, the hero of the sea battle of Lepanto.

Latino died on an unknown date after 1594. Despite his accomplishments, there is no evidence he was ever freed.
—From a BlackPast.org entry by Nikolaus Wirth

A King

Alessandro de’ Medici (1510–1537), nicknamed “Il Moro” due to his darker complexion, served as the first Duke of the Florentine Republic. He ruled Florence from 1530 to his death in 1537, the first Medici to rule Florence as a hereditary monarch and also the last Medici from the senior line of the family to lead the city. His assassination at the hands of distant cousin Lorenzaccio (bad Lorenzo) caused the title of Duke to pass to Cosimo I de Medici, from the family’s junior branch. What makes Alessandro unique is his ethnic background, which was composed of both European and African origins—his father was Lorenzo II de’ Medici (some historians believe Alessandro was actually the son of Giulio de’ Medici, future Pope Clement VII) and his mother Simoetta da Collevecchio, an African slave—making him the first Black head of state in the Western world. He held great power and influence in Florence. He was the patron of some of the leading artists of the era. His common sense and his feeling for justice won his subjects’ affection until his death in 1537. Alessandro is buried in the famous Medici Chapel, which also features the exquisite sculpture of Renaissance master Michelangelo.

From the Philadelphia Museum of Art:
Alessandro de’ Medici, duke of Florence from 1530 until his assassination in 1537, is shown not as a powerful ruler, but in a private chamber making a drawing of a woman in metalpoint (a type of drawing made with a thin rod of metal inserted into a holder—together, known as a stylus—applied to a prepared surface). At the time, drawing was considered an acceptable activity for a gentleman, but here the reference may be to love poetry. The 14th-century poet Petrarch, who enjoyed a revival in readership in the early 16th century, wrote sonnets about a metalpoint drawing he owned of his beloved Laura.

Alessandro’s assassination is the subject of Alfred de Musset’s play Lorenzaccio; Alexandre Dumas’ play Lorenzino; and the basis for Thomas Middleton’s play The Revenger’s Tragedy, among other works.

A Maid

When asked by Art Africa about the most challenging aspects of uncovering and portraying the stories of Black Africans in Renaissance Europe, Kuwornu said:

“Some of the challenges we faced were iconographic. For instance, to accompany the in-depth exploration of specific stories, such as that of Juan Latino, the first African professor to teach at a Spanish university in the 1500s, or João de Sá Panasco, a knight of the Order of Saint James in Portugal, there weren’t enough paintings available. Conversely, there were numerous representations of figures like Alessandro de’ Medici. Therefore, in the film, while considering historical accuracy fundamental in demonstrating the existence of these stories, we had to allocate more space to historical reconstruction.

“Another challenge that limited the film concerns the stories of Afro-descendant women. We recounted their dramatic experiences as sexual objects in the 1500s and as domestic workers, unfortunately lacking different narratives. Only in the 1700s and 1800s did we begin to have more detailed female stories that could become richer narratives. This limitation profoundly saddens me, and I hope that over the years, scholars will uncover stories through texts that emphasize the experiences of Afro-European women.”

From the National Gallery of Ireland about the Velázquez painting, The Kitchen Maid with the Supper at Emmaus, shown here: 

Regarded as the greatest Spanish artist of his time, Velázquez began his career in his native Seville and later became the leading artist at the court of King Philip IV in Madrid. This painting is widely considered to be Velázquez’s earliest known work. The artist painted Christ appearing to his disciples at Emmaus in the left background. In the foreground he depicted a Moorish servant working in the kitchen. The inversion of the religious and the worldly subjects was inspired by Flemish painters, including Pieter Aertsen.

From the Art Institute of Chicago which also has a copy of the Velázquez painting under the title, Kitchen Scene:

In this modest kitchen scene, a type known as a bodegón (from the Spanish for pantry), Diego Velázquez depicted a young African woman at work, surrounded by exquisitely rendered pots, jugs, a mortar and pestle, and a crumpled paper wrapper for spices. Slavery was widespread in the young artist’s hometown of Seville: Velázquez, his father, and his teacher, Francisco Pacheco, were all enslavers. In creating this painting, Velázquez may have used an enslaved woman from one of these households as a model.

About the filmmaker

Fred Kuwornu is a multi-hyphenate, socially engaged artist, filmmaker, educator and cultural innovator, whose work—deeply influenced by his African heritage—transcends traditional narrative boundaries, exploring the complex intersections of identity, race, and historical representation. Possessing triple citizenship (Italian, Ghanaian, and American), Kuwornu brings a unique transnational perspective to his creative and scholarly pursuits.

After earning a degree in political science from the University of Bologna in Italy, Kuwornu began his film career working on the 2008 Spike Lee film Miracle at St. Anna. Inspired by the experience, he went on to direct the film Inside Buffalo in 2010, focusing on African-American soldiers in World War II. In 2012, he explored the citizenship rights of second-generation immigrants in Italy in his film 18 Ius Soli and in 2016, he examined Black representation in Italian cinema from 1915 to the present day in his film Blackspoitalian.

In 2013, Kuwornu founded the Do the Right Films production and distribution company, focusing on documentary filmmaking, exhibitions and film festivals, including the Black Europe Film Festival. His latest film, We Were Here: The Untold History of Black Africans in Renaissance Europe, was featured at the 60th Venice Art Biennale, curated by Adriano Pedrosa, in 2024.

Kuwornu’s work bridges past and present, the hegemonic and subaltern, the seen and the unseen, making it a vital contribution to contemporary visual culture. His curatorial vision is a form of historical reconfiguring of archival materials, hidden histories and contemporary narratives, thereby challenging conventional perspectives.