Black Bodies as Baroque Decorations: Africans and Aristocratic Self-Representation in Polish-Lithuanian Portraiture

This working paper examines a group of eighteenth-century portraits from the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth that depict elite women accompanied by Black attendants. It asks how such figures entered aristocratic self-representation in a society without overseas colonies, but entangled in wider European aristocratic networks, visual culture and colonial imagination. Focusing mainly on portraits of Tekla Róża Radziwiłł and Magdalena Radziwiłł née Czapska, the paper reads Black attendants not as straightforward portraits of identifiable individuals, but as racialised visual tropes used to highlight particular messages of the artwork. At the same time, the paper does not treat these images as merely decorative. By placing them alongside archival evidence for African presence at Radziwiłł courts, including the purchase and training of African children for courtly performance, it suggests that painted fantasy and lived dependency were closely connected. The paper argues that Polish-Lithuanian magnates could participate in what may be called coloniality without colonies: not through direct overseas rule, but through the appropriation, display and exploitation of real racialised bodies and their images within Baroque elite culture.