A wonderful, scholarly, imaginative and necessary work [...] It profoundly develops our understanding of the semiotic construction of the black body [...] The work on the miracle of the black leg is extraordinary. [...] It has finally done justice to Velazquez, Juan de Pareja [...]This book has made available a hitherto neglected mini archive within the study of the visual cultures generated by Atlantic slavery.
Carmen Fracchia is a Professor of Hispanic Art History at Birkbeck University of London. Her work focusses on the Hispanic intellectual, political, and religious thought about local Spanish and transatlantic slavery, freedom, subjectivity, and hybridity and their articulations in the visual form during the Hapsburg dynasty.