This painting shows cloth made from some vegetable fiber perhaps from raffia or palms, likely to a nobleman in the Kwanza North region. Soldiers with bows and arrows in the background. Antonio Cavazzi (b. 1621) was an Italian priest who from 1654 to 1667 joined the Capuchin mission in what is today northern Angola; after a visit to Europe, he returned to the Kingdom of Kongo, where he remained from 1672 to 1677. He died in Genoa in 1678. Cavazzi made this and other watercolors, the originals of which are in his manuscript, held in a private collection in Modena, Italy (see also Cavazzi for other images on this website). Bassani reproduces the full set of 33 watercolors of which only 8 are reproduced on this website. A microfilm copy of the manuscript is held by the Special Collections Department, University of Virginia Library. Cavazzi's drawings must be among the earliest known eyewitness sketches of African life by a European; they can be contrasted to, for example, the fanciful depictions found in Dapper or by the De Bry brothers (see Dapper and De Bry on this website). Thanks to Joseph Miller for his assistance in interpreting this image.

Ezio Bassani, ed., Un Cappuccino nell'Africa nera del seicento: I disegni dei Manoscritti Araldi del Padre Giovanni Antonio Cavazzi da Montecuccolo [A Capuchin in Black Africa in the Seventeenth Century: Drawings of the Araldi Manuscript of Father Giovanni Antonio Cavazzi da Montecuccolo] (Milan: Quaderni Poro, no. 4, 1987), plate 17.

Cavazzi, Antonio

Italian

Image is in the public domain. Metadata is available under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International.

Bassani-17

Africa--West Central North

"Untitled Image (Selling Fiber Textiles)", Slavery Images: A Visual Record of the African Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Early African Diaspora, accessed March 20, 2023, http://www.slaveryimages.org/s/slaveryimages/item/2280