The Queen of Sheba at Klosterneuburg
The "Image of the Black" in its Artistic Context
An enamel image from the late twelfth century, showing the Queen of Sheba arriving at King Solomon’s throne with her two gift-bearing attendants, is one of the most beautiful and innovative renderings of this biblical episode in all medieval art.
It is part of an object about whose origins we have firm, reliable information (hallelujah!), thanks to a lengthy Latin inscription that identifies the patron — Werner, provost of the community of Augustinian canons at Klosterneuburg near Vienna, where the work remains — the main artist, Nicholas of Verdun (leader of a workshop that included several designers and many craftsmen), and the date of completion, 1181. (A good overview of this object can be found here, and scans of all the enamel plaques, along with the full text of the inscription and a drawn reconstruction of the ambo, here. The latter come from the monograph by Buschhausen 1980.)
Already in 1987, in her book on the Black St. Maurice, art historian Guda Suckale-Redlefsen noted that “Nicholas of Verdun, a great innovator, was the first artist to emphasize the African origins of the Queen of Sheba, portraying her as black-skinned in the ambo of Klosterneuburg . . . Her coiffure, however, still remained European as did her features” (Suckale-Redlefsen 1987, 25). In the first of two volumes of The Image of the Black in Western Art dealing with medieval iconography (first published in 1979, reissued in 2010), the French historian Jean Devisse observed that the Klosterneuburg depiction “differs oddly” from earlier traditions in its rendering of the queen, “whose skin is black and whose hair is blond” (120). (In fact her hair is not visible at all; she wears a headscarf under her crown, whose edges fall around her face and neck, then wrap around her shoulders.) More recently, Geraldine Heng (2023) explains that the combination of black skin and “elegant, refined” facial features, representing the “standard” form of “European faces,” marks “this esteemed biblical figure as pre-Christian and foreign, but also familiarly and reassuringly Christian European” (40).
I singled this image out in my Yale Art and Architecture blog post (2020) on depictions of Black women and their attendants in Gothic art, again to highlight the artist’s use of “a deep blue enamel to display her black skin.” (I must correct that statement: the enamel really is black but is tinged with grey highlights that temper its flatness.) I also noted that her attendants’ “faces are rendered in gold, the default skin color in this ensemble, but both are physically stout and display the broad features and cropped hair that mark them, if not necessarily as African, then as members of a rustic or servile class.” This affirms Devisse’s assertion, grounded in readings of twelfth-century theology, that “at the end of the twelfth century, there is no ‘ethnicism’ in the area [sic] of the empire. Dark color roughly symbolizes the pagan peoples, but the earlier pejorative intent is absent” (126).
I have more to say about this image’s representation of blackness in a book I’m co-writing with Isaac Jean-Francois, on the many surprising resonances of medieval European and modern Black arts and aesthetics. But for now I want to situate the plaque in its own immediate context. It was never meant to be seen as a stand-alone image, cropped from its material and visual surroundings, as it is always shown and discussed in our books and websites. Its significance in the history of black figuration remains intact, and perhaps even deepens, when we consider how this image fits into the larger constellation of pictures and words that encompass it.
The image of the Queen of Sheba is one of 45 enamel plaques that Nicholas and his team made in the late 1170s for a large object that would be seen in a liturgical space. Today this takes the form of a winged retable (altarpiece) that stands on a side altar in the Klosterneuburg abbey church. I’ve highlighted the Sheba scene in the photo below:
When Nicholas completed this work in 1181, he would not have imagined this kind of setup; it was only transformed into an altarpiece in the 1330s, with six new enamel images added near the center. Nicholas’s team made this work to form the outer surfaces of an ambo — a raised lectern from which one of the canons would perform the daily scriptural reading.
Here you’re seeing an early example in the basilica of Sant’Apollinare Nuovo in Ravenna, which I just visited in May 2025 (and will write about separately — it’s an amazing place). In his monograph of 1980, the German scholar Helmut Buschhausen reconstructed the Klosterneuburg ambo as looking like this:
So the three-part design was the same as we see now, but instead of folding inward around a person standing at an altar, the two side panels folded back (for more on this change, see Schlie 2018). A viewer on the ground would have to physically move from a central standpoint to see the two wings fully. And their view would be crowned not by a reliquary shrine containing the corporeal remnants of a saint, such as we see today, but by the living body of a person giving voice and breath to the words of scriptures — scriptures visualized and commented on in the shining imagery of Nicholas’s artful construction.
As you can see in the full photos, there is no single focal point in the composition. The overall effect is of a richly variegated, shining surface — sheets of glistening gold modulated by small patches of darker blue and black, and lighter streaks of silver and white. The highlights change in different angles and lighting conditions. Here’s another view:
It takes very close, prolonged looking — originally, with one’s head craned back, as the installation would have been considerably higher than now, if Buschhausen is correct — to even recognize all the scenes, let alone read the captions and tease out the iconographic program. It’s extremely complex, and extremely intelligent. (The theological nuances in the text-image arrangements have been explored with particular insight by Buschhausen 1974, Schlie 2018.)
The three-part grid you see is carefully structured to both narrate and interpret the Christian sacred history by aligning key episodes from the New Testament with analoguous scenes from the Old Testament, the Hebrew scriptures. The Christian story is literally and conceptually central: the middle row of images, running in chronological order from left (starting with the Annunciation of the angel Gabriel to Mary that she will bear God’s son) to right (ending with Christ’s return at the end of time to judge the living and the dead). The last two columns pull together the rows into continuous scenes. In the penultimate column, Christ (top) directs trumpeting angels (middle) to summon the dead from their graves (bottom), then returns to central position as the elect enter heaven (top) and the damned plunge into hell (bottom).
But otherwise the imagery of the columns is arranged typologically, to show how the Christian narrative meshes with, and is foreshadowed by, episodes from Jewish sacred history. That history is divided here into two main periods: the era ante legem, or “before the Law” (up to the convenant God struck with Noah in the Ark), which occupies the top row, and the era sub lege, or the time “under the Law,” which fills the bottom row — everything between Moses’s receipt of the Commandments and the Annunciation of Christ’s incarnation. Apart from these two broad groupings, the Old Testament scenes are not arrayed chronologically, but rather are chosen for their correspondences with the episodes arrayed in the middle in the era sub gratia — the period under Christ’s grace.
This way of organizing time, and interpreting sacred history (and everything else) typologically, goes back to early Christian writings, and was a familiar part of monastic and clerical training throughout the European Middle Ages. It was a form of understanding centered on texts and, usually, conveyed through texts — though it structured artistic creations too. While it was unusual for lay artists (at least those who were not members of religious orders) to be able to read, Nicholas of Verdun must have had some degree of literacy, to judge from his sophisticated handling of the Latin texts around the images. But he clearly was also in dialogue with the theologically erudite men who formed the community of canons, who helped determine the scenic arrangements. It was then up to the artists to visually underscore the connections between the textual stories.
The Solomon-Sheba image anchors the fourth (and final) column on the left-hand wing. Its Christian analogue, just above it, is the Adoration of the Magi (Matthew 2: 9-11), where three “wise men from the East” — here shown as kings — follow a star to locate the baby Jesus on his mother’s lap. The inscription around the frame reads: “Three kings give three mysterious (mistica) gifts to the true God” (for all the inscriptions, see Buschhausen 1987).
And above, representing the era ante legem, the warrior Abraham, after a successful series of battles, meeting the king and priest Melchisedek on a battlefield (Genesis 14: 18-20). The scene was usually depicted as a foreshadowing of the Eucharist, since Melchisedek “brought forth bread and wine” and blessed Abraham — and to be sure, the bowl the high priest (on the right-hand side) holds looks like a liturgical vessel. But, as the inscription indicates, it is Abraham doing the giving: “Abram, victorious over the kings, gives over a tenth of all the things” — in other words, a representative of the worldly state pays tithes (a tax) to the religious orders, just as was supposed to happen in the twelfth century.
Let’s put these images side by side, so we can see them all together (keeping in mind that they are aligned vertically, not horizontally):
What we find in the inscriptions, moving from left to right (top to bottom, in the real piece) is a shift from a very pragmatic offering — the payment of tithes to support the religious institution — to one that signals recognition of the “true God” to one that points forward, across time, to a new faith. For around the image of Sheba we find the statement: “The queen, in her gifts, signifies Solomon’s faith.” The key term is MISTICAT, an unusual word that here signals allegorical content (Seelbach 1984, 183). But it resonates with MISTICA in the Adoration scene, which indicates obscurity — the fact that the meaning of the Magi’s gifts (DONA) is hidden, mysterious. It also plays on the biblical text (3 Kings 10:1), where the Queen of Sheba comes to Solomon “to try him with hard questions” (tentare eum in aenigmatibus) — or, more colorfully, to tease him with enigmas. (I thank my friend Ittai Weinryb for this suggestion.) Only after does he satisfy her questions — indicated here by her tilted head and pointing finger — does she lavish him with the gifts she has brought: gold, precious stones, and an abundance of aromatic spices. These are suggested by the goods borne in the servants’ boxes, which — like Solomon’s faith and wisdom, apparently — far exceed what we are able to see.
If we take the three images as a set, we can see their visual rhymes along with their textual connections. In all of them, there is no central figure. The main focal point is a moment of human connection highlighted by the crossing of hands over a vertical bar: Abraham handing Melchisedek the bowl of coins in front of the banner-pole held by a soldier behind them; the kneeling king proffering a vessel of “mysterious” contents through the slender arcade leading to Mary’s chamber, Sheba pointing her finger toward Solomon across the slim scepter he holds upright against his knee.
In each case, there are three people on the giving side (one dominant character and two companions), and one recipient. In the first two, the givers come from the left, and their movement stops with the person receiving the gift. The Solomon-Sheba scene reverses this. Structurally, it puts the Queen into the power position, setting us up to see her as the recipient of homage. This is belied by the immobile, enthroned position of Solomon, whose body, with its splayed knees and active hands, mirrors that of the Virgin Mary.
This mirroring effect is very pronounced in the horizontal arrangement we see above, but is diffused in the vertically stacked sequence of the actual work. In their vertical alignment, it is decidedly Sheba who picks up the figure of Mary. Both wear the same kind of veil that leaves their neck exposed before draping around their shoulders; both tilt their heads down, toward their interlocutors, and lift their right hands in speech. Both wear layers of draped garments that cling to their shoulders and reveal the swell of a single breast.
In the language of visual typology, the Queen of Sheba shimmers into view as a type of the Virgin Mary — just as, in scriptural exegesis, she was understood to be the Bride in the Song of Songs, who in turn was interpreted as the human soul, the Christian church (Ecclesia), and, in that sense, Mary too. Her distinctive feature was her black face: “Nigra sum sed (somtimes et) formosa,” says the female voice at the beginning of the Song of Songs (in the Latin translation medieval people knew) — “I am black but (or and) beautiful” — a poem that Jewish and Christian interpreters alike read, at its most literal level, as a love song between King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba.
The use of black enamel for the queen’s face in Kosterneuburg was a way to signal that facet of her identity. It is no more or less than a visual artist’s play on words. It lets us see that the royal woman who visited the famous biblical king — whose riches were as abundant as his faith — was also the Bride of the love song, and thus the soul and church beloved of the Christian God. The blackness, then, is not so much representational — attempting, that is, to visualize a person with dark skin — as figurational — an artistic fabrication, in the shape of a human, that bears meaning of different kinds.
The blackness of this figure’s face makes her a standout within this enormous program of images; no other figure is shown with dark skin, including persons, like her two attendants, who have other signs of foreign origin — short and very curly hair, broad foreheads, turned-up noses. Contrary to modern expectations that medieval art consistently uses darkness to denigrate (see Heng 2018, 00), the artists use other means — gestures above all, but also costume elements — to show negative status. The soldiers who arrest Christ (in an enamel added in the fourteenth century), the sailors who cast Jonah over the ship’s side, even the demons who torture sinners in hell are rendered in the same bright gold as the holiest characters. (Again I urge readers to spend some time with the full array of images accessible here!)
There is only one body that departs from this norm, and that is Christ’s when he is being baptized in the River Jordan:
Seen through the flowing water, Christ’s legs become dark green, with light gray highlights that give volume to his limbs and groin. This is the most remarkable depiction of the physical mass and tactility of the body that we find in a program that otherwise suggests muscles, tendons, and flesh through crisp black lines. As with the Queen of Sheba’s face, both the outer contours of the legs and inner details (such as his toes) are rendered with golden lines — a reversal of the images’ usual use of black to define the outlines, and gold to fill in the surfaces. In the case of Sheba, her face becomes less like that of a Black person (Nicholas could easily have rendered her in a dark blue enamel, and retained the black detail lines if he wanted to do that) than like a photographic negative — an inversion of the pictorial norm. She is both beautiful and — literally, materially — black.
What else is black in the Klosterneuburg enamels? The letters of the inscriptions, for one thing: black is the color that speaks. In a medium where bright gold is the default color for lines and surfaces — all the other colors are pigments that have been poured into the cavities between the raised gold parts, and baked to harden and shine — black is the color of precious objects. The top of the altar table in the Abraham and Melchisedek scene, the outer surfaces of the boxes held by Sheba’s attendants, the base of Solomon’s throne — all these (and many more solid things elsewhere in the program) appear to be fashioned of porphyry or onyx or Purbeck marble, the kinds of dark stones that lent glamour, variety, and beauty to architectural furnishings and luxury arts.
Nicholas of Verdun was hardly a stranger to the power and beauty of black stones. Along with travels that may have exposed him to Byzantine arts, he inserted numerous ancient cameos, many with deep purple or black backgrounds, into his next major commission, the reliquary of the Three Kings at Cologne Cathedral (begun 1180). Here is a glimpse of the front panel, from my visit there in 2018:
(More on those to come!) In some of the Klosterneuburg images, black signified the luxurious sheen of a precious stone surface — in others, it suggested deep space.
In the bottom image of the sixth column, an Israelite guides the Paschal lamb into a church-like building where he will be slaughtered — signifying, we read, Christ’s self-sacrifice. The black opening into which the animal is pressed becomes the site of salvation. Just next to it, another man places a vessel of holy manna into an open chest. The chest itself is made of variegated stones trimmed with gold; its interior is solid black. The inscription picks up on this visual form: “The manna signifies you, Christ, hidden/enclosed (clausum) in a darkened figure (obscura figura).” The darkness into which the vessel is absconded is as important to the meaning as the manna itself (which we do not see). In the top image of the twelfth column, a man paints a sign with blood on the lintel of an open door, while an angel slays an Egyptian enemy — the scene of Passover (Exodus 12:23). Here we see the juxtaposition of black surface and black space, in the alignment of the pediment onto which the man paints and the vertical slice of the open door, an aperture to a protected interior whose contents remain safely unseen.
Within this visual field, the Queen of Sheba’s face takes on new resonance. The blackness signals beauty, surface, shine. It also suggests depth — the space of the hidden, the obscure, the unseen. In this sense it is a figuration of the word misticat, with its dual sense of revealing or opening up, and of mystifying, making obscure; it makes the queen into the kind of riddle, enigma, with which, pointing her graceful finger, she challenges Solomon.
I am black and beautiful, says the Bride in the Song of Songs. The black surface is one kind of beauty, but another resides in her shape. For anyone accustomed the aesthetic ideals of Classical antiquity, this is easy to see: the figure is clearly modeled on the kinds of idealized Greek and Roman goddesses that populated the carved cameos Nicholas’s workshop had at their disposal (Zwierlein-Diehl 1997), and the many ancient ivories, bronzes, and fragments of stone sculptures that survived in the old Roman provinces. Just sticking with cameos on the Three Magi reliquary, we can see how the figurations reverberated in the Klosterneuburg enamels . . .
. . . with the simulation of clingy garments flowing across solid, mobile limbs in a way that reveals the body more than conceals it, as in the image of the dancer at left. Nicholas’s many vigorous “action scenes,” such as that of the Israelite and the angel above, are unabashed about showing the shapely contours of bodies as the garments wrap around thighs, butts, and shoulders, taking inspiration from these kinds of Classical images. The Queen of Sheba does not shimmy in that way, but she is more in line with the stately female figure scholars now recognize as Agrippina crowning her husband Nero in the cameo at right, from around 54 CE (Zierlein-Diehl 1997, 68) — svelte, elegant figures in a contrapposto stance, with the body’s weight resting on one leg and the other one relaxed, and the hips and torso tilted to counterbalance that asymmetry. This the “Classical grace” pose par excellence, and Nicholas uses it for particularly iconic figures in moment of quiet revelation — Mary at the Crucifixion, Jesus in the river Jordan.
We can surmise that this Classical form of figuration conveyed the beauty that complemented the blackness of the Queen of Sheba’s face. Seeing the figure shimmer among her companions on the Klosterneuburg panels allow us to recognize her not as a lonely unicum — a first, incomplete effort at rendering a Black individual — but as an artistic construction as fecund with significance as the boxes of gold and spices her servants carry. Nigra et formosa: she expands our sense of what both blackness and beauty signified, and how they could be conveyed, among the learned artists and audiences in a well-connected religious community in northern Europe at the end of the twelfth century.
WORKS CITED
Buschhausen, Helmut 1974. “The Klosterneuburg Altar of Nicholas of Verdun: Art, Theology and Politics.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 37: 1-32.
Buschhausen, Helmut 1980. Der Verduner Altar: Das Emailwerk des Nikolaus von Verdun im Stift Klosterbeuburg (Vienna: Tusch).
Buschhausen, Helmut 1987. “Die Geschichte der Inschriften auf dem Verduner Altar des Nikolaus: Überlegungen zu einer Neudatierung.” Wiener Studien 100: 265-309.
Devisse, Jean 1979/2010. “The Black and His Color: From Symbols to Realities,” in David Bindman and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., ed., The Image of the Black in Western Art II: From the Early Christian Era to the “Age of Discovery,” Part 1 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press), 73-138.
Heng, Geraldine 2018. The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press).
Heng, Geraldine 2023. “Why Black? The Meanings of Epidermal Race in the European Middle Ages,” in Kristen Collins and Bryan C. Keene, ed., Balthazar: A Black African King in Medieval and Renaissance Art (Los Angeles: Getty Museum), 40-41.
Jung, Jacqueline E. 2020. “Reflections on Africans in Gothic Sculpture, Part 3: Erasure, Submission, Apotheosis.” Yale University Press Art & Architecture Blog, Dec. 21, 2020.
Lauer, Rolf 2006. Der Schrein der Heiligen Drei Könige (Cologne: Cathedral Press).
Schlie, Heike 2017. “Vom Ambo zum Retabel - Das Klosterneuburger Goldschmiedewerk von Nikolaus vonVerdun.” Zeitschrift fuer Kunstgeschichte 80, no. 2: 247-72.
Schlie, Heike 2018. “Die Ordnung der Reime. Zur Konmedialität von Schrift und Bild in ihrer ursprünglichen Setzung auf dem Klosterneuburger Ambo des Nikolaus von Verdun.” MEMO 3, Object Links: 34–67.
Seelbach, Wilhelm 1984. “Bemerkungen zu τύπος, άντίτυπος und άρχέτυπος sowie zu den Inschriften des Verduner Altars.” Glotta 62, no. 3/4 (1984): 175-86.
Suckale-Redlefsen, Gude 1987. Mauritius: Der heilige Mohr / The Black Saint Maurice (Houston: Menil Foundation and Zurich: Schnell und Steiner).
Zwierlein-Diehl, Erika 1997. “‘Interpretatio christiana’: Gems on the ‘Shrine of the Three Kings’ in Cologne,” Studies in the History of Art 54, Symposium Papers XXXII: Engraved Gems: Survivals and Revivals: 62-83.