ImageHunting

When I first began looking for paintings and sculptures of Black saints in Spanish and Portuguese churches, the process seemed as though it would be fairly straightforward. I accumulated a list of towns and churches, gleaned from a variety of sources such as Artstore, early modern hagiographies and histories, and even simple Google searches. What I didn’t realize was how often my attempts would be foiled: locked churches, convents converted to hotels, images in “conservation”or simply vanished. Each attempt to view and document an image became an adventure as my father and I criss-crossed Portugal and Spain, visiting the same sites two or three times. We calculated at one point that our odds of success in seeing an image were about 50/50. The churches and chapels on our list ranged from cathedrals to private chapels; almost all are in active parishes with liturgical celebrations happening. We waited the end of masses, funerals, and weddings, standing near the door and in neighborhood plazas. Early modern sources mentioned many cities and specific churches where images of Black saints were housed, yet none of the works I found mapped onto these sources. Images are moved and destroyed as the result of closing convents and monasteries, natural disasters, and war. The survival of fragile works across centuries make them feel like small miracles. The dynamic encounter between survival and destruction, discovery and absence, lies at the heart of all historical research, frustration exceeded only by the thrill of revelation.