Summary
- Giovanna Garzoni arrived in Turin in her mid-career as a prominent painter. In 1635 she painted the Portrait of Zaga Christ in a naturalistic and lively style.
- As Zaga Christ traveled through several Italian towns carrying on a scandalous social life, he claimed to be a descendant from royalty in his native Ethiopia. He sought financial support from nobles to regain his rightful throne, and promised to establish Catholicism in Ethiopia.
- Garzoni portrayed Christ with great sensitivity and respect, unlike previous paintings involving Africans, which showed them mainly as servants or slaves. On the reverse, Garzoni’s name appears in Amharic, the Ethiopian language, suggesting a close relationship between artist and subject.
- Christ went from Turin to Paris, where he was arrested on suspicions of adultery. He died in 1638 at age 22. Scholars today regard his claim to royalty as fanciful, agreeing that he was probably the son of a noble.
- After Turin, Garzoni traveled to London, Paris, and Florence, carrying out various commissions. She died in Rome in 1670, a wealthy and celebrated woman in a male-dominated profession.
- The Portrait of Zaga Christ was purchased in 2021 by the Allen Memorial Art Museum in Oberlin, Ohio, USA. Trying to diversify its collection, the museum was drawn to a portrait of a black man painted by a woman—both outsiders in 17th-century Italy.
The Artist
Giovanna Garzoni (1600–1670) was born into a family of goldsmiths and artisans in Ascoli Piceno, a small town in Italy’s Marches region. After some early painting instruction, she received further training in Venice, where she painted a miniature Portrait of a Gentleman in watercolor, signed and dated Venice 1625. Already visible in that portrait is the technique she would later use in the still-life paintings that helped secure her fame: careful brushwork using tiny dots. The Gentleman painting also presages, in style and subject matter, the Portrait of Zaga Christ.
Giovanna Garzoni, Self-Portrait as Apollo, 1618/1620, Quirinal Palace, Rome, Italy.
By the time Garzoni arrived in Turin, she was already famous as a portraitist and a painter of still lifes, having carved out a successful career in a male-dominated profession. From Venice she had traveled to Florence, Naples, and Rome, gaining instruction and clients, and following the itinerant habits of male artists.
She painted with a naturalistic style and vitality, yet with the precision more commonly found in scientific drawing, another skill that she had developed in her travels. Indeed, her beautiful studies of plants, elegantly composed and subtly colored, are among the finest botanical studies of the 17th century. In addition to painting, she excelled in calligraphy and textile art. Garzoni came to Turin at the request of the reigning Savoy family to paint portraits that would proclaim the family’s noble origins.
The Sitter
By 1635, Zaga Christ (1610–1638) had traveled through many Italian towns, presenting himself as a prince from Ethiopia. He first appears in historical records in March 1632, when he arrived at the Venetian consulate in Cairo. He told the chaplain of the consulate that his father, a claimant to the Ethiopian throne, had been defeated in a violent leadership conflict, requiring Christ to flee for his life. He told a colorful story of a desperate escape involving hunger, extreme thirst in the Egyptian desert, betrayal by his servants, persecution, and imprisonment. Christ said he was the rightful heir to the Christian kingdom of Ethiopia, and that he needed help to regain his lost royal position.
Zaga Christ, Prince d’Ethiopie in Eugène Roger, La terre saincte, 1638, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris, France.
The chaplain saw Christ as someone who, if placed on the throne, could establish Catholicism as the preeminent Christian denomination in Ethiopia. The chaplain helped Christ convert to Catholicism and sent him to Rome, supposedly to pledge obedience to the pope and to get the pope’s endorsement for Christ’s stated plan to eventually return to Ethiopia as a Catholic ruler.
In Rome, church officials were wary about supporting Christ because he lacked credentials. Some considered him an impostor, but many were not sure. While they debated what to do with him, Christ carried on an active social life—too active, in the opinion of some clerics. He unleashed a scandal by having an affair with a Franciscan nun, Caterina Massimi, from an illustrious Roman family. The lovers would meet on a hill overlooking the city. Perhaps the most bizarre aspect of the affair was that for the next four years, Christ and Massimi exchanged letters written in their own blood. The letters do not seem to have survived.
Viviano Codazzi, Exterior of Saint Peter’s, Rome, c. 1630, Museo del Prado, Madrid, Spain.
When he wasn’t trysting with a sister, Christ ventured across Rome, meeting various diplomats and other notables, secretly plotting his next move and comporting himself like the royal he claimed to be. Frustrated church leaders wanted to arrange for a patron state to support Christ’s trip back to Africa, where he would claim the throne of Ethiopia and establish Catholicism. It appears that Christ, on the other hand, simply wanted to find support for the carefree lifestyle he had established in Rome.
Ostensibly in search of patronage for the Africa trip, Christ set off for Venice with four Franciscan monks assigned to monitor him. In Venice, the group discussed various routes to Ethiopia, but Christ rejected them all. The friars became frustrated with how Christ changed his mind and dallied. The Zaga Christ traveling circus proceeded west. As in Rome and Venice, he used his expert self-fashioning and social skills to gain entry to the courts at Mantua and Piacenza, before arriving in Turin in 1634.
The Portrait
It was probably Zaga Christ who asked Giovanna Garzoni to paint his portrait. He had plans to travel to Paris and may have wanted the portrait as a gift for the French court. The format of the portrait certainly suited his peripatetic ways—it is a miniature small enough to fit in the palm of one’s hand. These miniatures were widely seen in Europe, including at the Savoy court, so Garzoni would have had several of them to study. The small size of such paintings made them intimate objects. They were given as tokens of friendship, or to remind the owner of a loved one who had died or was far away. Queen Elizabeth I of England had a collection of them.
Giovanna Garzoni, Portrait of Zaga Christ, 1635, Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin, OH, USA.
Garzoni painted Christ during the winter of 1635. She rendered his appearance with great sensitivity, respect, and care. Her naturalistic work can be contrasted with previous portrayals of Africans, which showed them as exoticized, or as slaves or servants.
Against a violet-tinged blue background, Christ wears a red and gold jacket with a broad collar of exquisitely detailed lace. This European court dress aligned with his claim to royal status. In tiny drops of watercolor, Garzoni portrayed his wispy mustache and soft Afro hairstyle. There is a liveliness and a sense of the individuality of the sitter. In painting Christ’s portrait, Garzoni documented the rare meeting of two outsiders at a major European court.
Verso of Giovanna Garzoni, Portrait of Zaga Christ, 1635, Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin, OH, USA.
The reverse of the portrait is equally intriguing. Garzoni signed it in Latin letters at the bottom and wrote in the city and the year. Above that, her name appears in Amharic, the Ethiopian language. The Amharic letters are poorly formed, suggesting they were written by someone unfamiliar with that script, likely the artist herself. She probably had Christ’s help. Garzoni’s attempt to write her name in Amharic indicates her curiosity and interest in the sitter, and hints at a particular closeness between painter and subject. A relationship often develops between artist and portrait sitter, but it is rarely emphasized in any way.
Fate of the Sitter
Christ arrived in Paris in the summer of 1635. By then it was clear to his monk-monitors that Christ had no intention of returning to Ethiopia. Indeed, Christ successfully petitioned Cardinal Richelieu, chief minister to King Louis XIII, for a pension that would allow him to stay in Paris.
While comfortably settled there, Christ was arrested just outside the city under suspicion of adultery with the wife of a Parisian councilman. He was also accused of trying to poison her husband. Worse, at least in the eyes of one prominent observer, authorities found the blood letters that Christ had received from his Roman lover, Caterina Massimi. In expressing his devotion to his new Parisian love, Christ swore to renounce his love for Massimi.
That noble gesture did not improve his fortunes. Christ was imprisoned and became ill. Richelieu had him released and moved to the cardinal’s estate at Rueil, west of Paris. Christ died there on April 22, 1638, of pleurisy. He was 22 years old. He was buried in the local churchyard. Christ’s tombstone, now destroyed, read:
Here lies the king of Ethiopia
The original, or the copy:
Was he king? Was he not?
Death has finished the discussion.
Yet the discussion does continue. Scholars today agree that this unusual adventurer was no royal. However, his refined manners and cultured speech indicate that he was wellborn, probably the son of a noble. As he traveled in Europe, he impressed his hosts with his religious and political ideas. Usually, his claim to royalty was neither rejected nor accepted. Some saw him as an exotic guest who could enhance their standing. Most were happy to generously support him. Many quite liked this charming young man, and a few even fell in love with him.
The Artist’s Later Travels
Giovanna Garzoni, the artist who immortalized Zaga Christ with a portrait, remained in Turin for two more years after Christ’s departure. In October 1637, Duke Victor Amadeus died, setting off a dispute over who would inherit the ducal throne, and Garzoni left town. She first went to London, but little is known about her London time. Garzoni had been interested in the portraiture of John Hoskins, then the leading English painter of portrait miniatures. He was active in the court of King Charles I and Queen Henrietta.
Garzoni then went to Paris for a brief but crucial sojourn. She received commissions from Cardinal Richelieu and other high-ranking dignitaries. She drew inspiration from the many still-life painters she met in the French capital. She observed their models of lavish floral displays and dishes overflowing with fruits and vegetables—themes that she would repeat in her later works.
Giovanna Garzoni, Yixing Vase Containing Diverse Flowers, 1659–1660, Uffizi, Florence, Italy.
Garzoni found herself back in Florence in late 1642. Her Yixing Vase Containing Diverse Flowers is an outstanding example of what she learned in Paris. A huge arrangement of a variety of flowers, including carnations, tulips, and daffodils, rises improbably from a squat round vase. Butterflies explore the foliage. On either side of the vase sit two seashells, each studded with rows of short spikes—samples from the ruling Medici family’s collection of treasures from around the world. The clay vase is decorated with leaves in low relief, similar to one Garzoni saw in Paris. It is possible that she started the painting in Paris and took it with her to Florence, where it was acquired by Cardinal Leopoldo dei Medici.
Garzoni moved on to Rome in 1651, but continued to carry out commissions for various members of the Medici family. For decades, noble families had paid considerable amounts of money for her work, and she arrived in Rome a wealthy and celebrated artist. She died there in 1670 at the age of 70, and the painter’s guild buried her with great honor in its church. Most of her works today are in the Uffizi and Pitti collections in Florence, including various portraits of nobility, and cardinals Leopoldo and Richelieu. Among the still lifes, one in particular stands out: a charming Dog with a Biscuit and a Chinese Cup (1648). It shows her inventive way of combining disparate elements into one composition, and her careful nature studies.
The Portrait Finds a Home
After Turin, the earliest record of the provenance of the Portrait of Zaga Christ places it in the collection of a French banker in 1752, supporting the notion that Christ commissioned the piece to take with him to France.
The portrait changed hands several times before it was sold at Christie’s auction house in Geneva in 1989, and then at Sotheby’s, London, in 2018. Finally, the portrait found its current home, in a quite unexpected location—the collection of the Allen Memorial Art Museum in Oberlin, Ohio, USA, which purchased the painting from Philip Mould, London, in 2021. The museum acquired the Portrait of Zaga Christ as part of its efforts to diversify its holdings. This earliest known painting of a black sitter, done by a woman, intrigued the museum’s curators. The portrait is on display inside a protective cabinet, behind two small doors that visitors are invited to “Please Open.”
Author’s bio:
Carol Damioli is a retired journalist who lives in Canada. She worked in daily newspapers, international radio, and trade magazines, and is the author of two novels involving art history.
