ILLUSTRATIONS:

Figure 1: Reconstruction of an early modern Spanish playhouse. The nine recesses of the back façade were used to stage entries and exits, discovery settings, window and balcony scenes, mountaintops, and so on. The design would have been in place at the time of the Triad. Illustration by Ramón Rodríguez, from Ars Theatrica: tramoyas y decorados, courtesy of Evangelina Rodríguez and José Luis Canet.

Figures 2 and 3 (figure 3 is a closeup of the Black magus from figure 2): Juan Bautista Maíno, Adoration of the Magi, completed in Toledo in 1614 (Museo del Prado, Madrid). Note the ray of light from heaven illuminating the Black magus.

Figures 4 and 5 (figure 5 is a closeup of the Black magus from figure 4): Diego Velázquez, Adoration of the Magi, completed in Seville in 1619 (Museo del Prado, Madrid). Note the European features and dress of Velázquez’s Black magus as opposed to the distinctly African appearance of Maíno’s (Figures 2 and 3). Though different in their approaches, both Velázquez and Maíno were representative of a sympathetic treatment of this figure, whose presence in European art was widespread by 1620 and may have served as a model for the Triad protagonists.

Figure 6: Diego Velázquez, Portrait of Juan de Pareja, completed in Rome in 1650 (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York). Born c. 1608, Pareja was Velázquez’s slave and apprentice. The stunning portrait compels the viewer to confront the humanity of its Black subject, representing the culmination of a tradition that includes Lope de Vega’s Black Saint plays (c. 1600), previous paintings by Maíno and Velázquez (Figures 2–5), and the plays of the Triad (c. 1620). Only a few months after finishing this work, Velázquez signed Pareja’s letter of manumission, which took effect in 1654.

Figure 7: Illustration from a thirteenth-century illuminated codex of Alfonso X’s Songs of Holy Mary (Real Biblioteca del Monasterio de El Escorial, Cod. T.I.1, cantiga clxxxvi, fol. 244r). A Moor, “black as pitch,” is burned alive after being ordered to lie in the bed of a white woman, who is saved from the flames by the Virgin.

Figure 8: Additional illustration from Alfonso X’s Songs of Holy Mary (Real Biblioteca del Monasterio de El Escorial, Cod. T.I.1, cantiga xlvii, fol. 70r). The Virgin confronts the Devil, “black as pitch”: exactly the same language used to describe the Moor in Figure 7. Such associations were one way that blackness was identified with evil in medieval and early modern iconography: a trend reversed, to differing degrees, by Lope de Vega and the authors of the Triad.

Figure 9: Illustration from a fifteenth-century illuminated codex of the Book of Zifar the Knight (Bibliothèque Nationale de France, ms. espagnole 36, fol. 34v). Given that the titular hero is said to be from India, whose people are described as “dark and close to blacks in color,” he potentially figures among the very limited cast of Black characters of medieval Spanish literature. But the anonymous author never confirms his protagonist’s skin color, which remains irrelevant to the plot. This illustration, from more than a hundred years after the book’s composition, suggests that readers thought of him of as olive-complexioned.

Figure 10 and cover image: Jan Mostaert, Portrait of an African Man, c. 1525–1530 (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam). The confident bearing and elegant dress of this painting’s subject, indicative of European nobility, anticipate several characteristics of the Triad protagonists.