Referring to Titian’s Portrait of Laura Dianti and an Enslaved Black Child (circa 1523), Dani Ezor, visiting assistant professor of art history, said, “It started a creation of whiteness as a race, and started a hierarchy between races, and it’s one that we’re still dealing with.” Ezor made this observation during the Kenyon faculty panel portion of the “New Views on the Renaissance” mini-conference on Friday afternoon. It is the realities of life and race in this time period that director Fred Kudjo Kuwornu’s documentary film “We Were Here: The Untold History of Black Africans in Renaissance Europe” sets out to correct. The film was shown in the Gund Community Foundation Theater on Friday night just before a Q&A session with Kuwornu. Through “We Were Here,” Kuwornu, who is Afro-Italian, explores Renaissance art that reveals the often overlooked presence of Black people in Renaissance Europe — particularly their active and diverse roles in elite society.

In the documentary’s opening moments, Kuwornu, who provides voiceover in Italian (with English subtitles) throughout the documentary, asks viewers to consider: “Who decides what deserves to be framed?” This question, and Kuwornu’s answer, form the central axiom of the film. Footage shows a frame hanging from a tree, blowing in the wind, so that what is visible within its borders, and, more importantly, the surroundings that are excluded, shift before us. Kuwornu explains, “A frame doesn’t dictate what we must look at, but asks us to decide. It is a gesture that separates what we consider essential from what we leave on the margins.” In “We Were Here,” this concept of history and framing is more than just an idea: Shots of a simple gold frame are interspersed through the film, containing photos and details from paintings as well as contemporary videos. By narrating a history that many have attempted to erase, the documentary forces viewers to see the frame for what it might have actually contained — a diverse Renaissance Europe where many Africans lived and thrived.

Following the title card, a brief montage explains that the presence of Black people during the Renaissance in Europe was incredibly widespread (in certain areas, particularly around Portugal and Spain, Africans and people of African descent accounted for up to 40% of the population; in some cities in Western Europe, the population of Black people was higher than it is today). The documentary explores the history of slavery and its depictions in Renaissance art, focusing especially on enslaved people as a source of domestic labor and the sexualization and commodification of enslaved African women. However, its larger aim is to reveal some of the stories of powerful Black people and their impacts on Renaissance society. During the Q&A session, Kuwornu explained, “[The documentary is a] retelling of a story that has been forgotten, [of] things that are erased for power reasons, [which] I probably wanted to see when I was a kid in Italy.”

One such retelling in “We Were There” comes from the unsigned painting, circa 1570-1580, The King’s Fountain, which depicts the town square of the same name in Lisbon, Portugal. The painting shows a large number of people, Black and white, socializing, fetching water and milling about together. In the foreground is a Black man wearing a cloak emblazoned with a red cross, riding a horse adorned with bejeweled tack. Kate Lowe, professor emerita of Renaissance history and culture at Queen Mary University of London, explains that the man is a knight who belongs to the religious and military order of Sant’Iago, adding that around the same time, two other sub-Saharan Africans were admitted into this order. Lowe emphasizes the significance of this fact, saying, “It’s obviously a position, a kind of honor given to people at court by the King.” Other examples of Africans and people of African descent who are elites or important social figures featured in the documentary were an illegitimate Medici child born out of wedlock who went on to rule Florence, and Ne Vunda, a Congolese ambassador who was the first African ambassador to be received at the Holy See, to name two.

During the Q&A, Kuwornu mentioned that another way that art shapes the historical narrative is through the titles of artworks, such as paintings, which are often given centuries after the work is created. Kuwornu explained, “For example, sometimes they have the title and read ‘Henry IV and an African man’ but probably this African man is an ambassador that is coming from another kingdom. … This, again, changes the narrative of what we see.”

One of the art historians Kuwornu interviews in the documentary, Anne Lafont, professor of art history at the School of Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences, comments, “A matter that I have found really interesting is the representation of Blacks, where in the pursuit of such inquiries I often encountered apathy and a lack of interest and support from colleagues.” By highlighting these lesser-known successes of some Black people living in Renaissance Europe, Kuwornu hopes that “We Were Here” will join the burgeoning movement for media discussing and redefining the history we think we know. Through the film, a new picture emerges of life in Renaissance Europe, one that is infinitely better than the picture built on a lie we have now.

Kuwornu’s concern for how our understanding of a shared past shapes our contemporary time marked the conclusion not only of his comments at the Q&A but also of the film itself. In the final moments of the documentary, Kuwornu, narrating, leaves us with, “For me, these Black figures I see in paintings are not mere details. Unconsciously, I was searching for them. This makes me reflect on how we absentmindedly observe our present, forgetting a past that has always been there. They were there. We were here.”