Romani alterity and Gypsy Exteriority Romani iconography in the Louvre and Prado national museographic collections (original) (raw)

Ever absent from the national historical tales in which they have nonetheless played a part since the 15th century in Europe, the various Roma groups were at the very heart of geopolitical affairs in the times and countries that they went through. Disseminators of knowledge, exteriority reflected in the mirror, historiography has treated them like free radicals, outside the world and outside history. Only a doleful approach to their history has been able to mobilise historians. Specialists in Roma studies and experts of all kinds have appropriated the 'subject' in order to make them their 'object', in a type of treatment that ranges from the entomological to the cultural approach via a dignified vision of the 19th century at the climax of colonialism. Roma, Bohemians, gypsies, tsiganes and travellers are also creations and motifs. Using the most prestigious and political French art collections as a means of decrypting the connections that create the structure for Romaphobia and anti-gypsyism has without any doubt been an endlessly enriching experience for my own work in historical epistemology. Works have been produced using contradictory projections and artistic motifs par excellence. Ever since this people lived among mainstream societies, these depictions have not ceased to project the mysteries, fantasies and fears of the latter, in live performing arts, literature and the collective imagination. At the Louvre and the Prado Museums, they have been depicted by the greatest masters of European painting. They are seen every day by thousands of people without even being looked at. Even if a visitor were to seek out and glimpse the realities of Roma people, it would not be possible to experience either the power or the vulnerability of the Otherness. Thirteen works have been listed, thus creating for the first time a complete list of depictions of the people whom we now know as Roma, Manouches and Kale, whether travelling or settled, in the most important museum's collections in France and Spain. These lists show the way in which pictorial representations of Roma have evolved, each time in response to social, moral, ethical and geopolitical necessity among majority societies and in dialectics that oscillate between presence and absence. In fact, there is a shift at the Louvre and at the Prado from the 15th century to the 19th century, from a religious and moral treatment to a political one and finally Orientalising the Roma. From Raphael to Goya, Bosch to Niccolò dell'Abate via Caravaggio, Bourdon, Brueghel, Jan van de Venne, Madrazo y Gareta, Navez and Corot, disembodiment is a common leitmotif. There are only a few works that escape this logic, thus giving us a paradigm to decipher. Depictions of the Roma body and of Roma attributes, whether real or imagined, serve the majority societies. Their appearance in Europe in the 15th century, as a full epistemological caesura between the waning age of interpretation and the embryonic age of cogito, influences a certain relationship with otherness. Whether hermeneutical, allegorical figures of vice, seduction or even embryonic nation states, it is the ontological absence of Roma that is highlighted by the Louvre and the Prado's pictorial list, and this clarifies the relationship that the European power apparatus maintains with this minority. It is important to remember that there is a deliberate position behind my approach. As a historian and specialist in the military history of the Roma in the modern era, I also work and teach at the University on questions relating to epistemology and the decolonisation of knowledge.As a Kali, as a woman, as an intersectional knowledge producer, my narrative has a particular position. It thwarts some of this impossibility of being, this ontological absence, through the words of a historian and with all the methodological rigour that this entails, but also through the words of a racialized women historian claiming her own ethnicity and thus offering another relationship with both the historical narrative and the interpretations offered by historiography on this topic. While until the 16th century Roma dress and regalia were used inter alia to portray biblical figures known for their hermeneutic and prophetic gifts, from the second half of the16th