Union of Saint and Venus

Source catalog description

This description refers to material held by Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. Visual details below describe the original material.

Painting depicting the pope's mitre composed of red-tinted textual clippings and encrusted with faux-jewels. The text includes both Latin and English copies of the Dum Diversas, images of the Brookes Slave Ship, and advertisements for the purchasing of enslaved persons. A white line figure wears the mitre and uses two golden croziers as a symbolic phallus to penetrate the black abstract figure of the South African Khoikhoi woman Sarah Baartman, which lies horizontally beneath the pope figure. The light grey background is composed of many varied and repeating abstract figures including a ship carrying enslaved persons, shackles, a trio of enslaved figures, and crosses.

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