“The Voyage of the Sable Venus from Angola to the West Indies,” a wood engraving by W. Grainger after T. Stothard. PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY WELLCOME LIBRARY / WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

In Italy, in Florence, hangs Botticelli’s “The Birth of Venus_,_” perhaps one of the world’s most celebrated paintings. The goddess Venus stands naked inside a tremendous scallop shell, gliding along the waters, riding the shell like a vessel. It is her birth, but instead of arriving as an infant she comes to us as an adult woman, fully formed, skin whiter than marble, golden tresses gathered together in one hand like endless blades of curling sea grass. Instead of pointing to her breast, she places her other white hand delicately over her heart. She is attended by two gorgeous gods, a redhead and a bronze-colored brunette. They blow her shell toward shore. Pink flowers with lush red centers fall from the sky like morning rain. As they hover above Venus’s shoulder, the whiter god wraps his arms and thighs around the darker one, as if not to fall out of the sky.

When I was a child, looking upon this Venus, I would think that predictable thought: I want to stand inside a giant shell. I want red flowers to fall from the mouths of clinging angels. I want to hover in the heavens, too.

One day—a banal day of phone calls, cleaning, walking, fetching a child from the playground, watching that child go down the slide—you turn the page of a book, and there it all is, an etching:

“The Voyage of the Sable Venus”

Here, the goddess is not white as marble; instead, she is a celestial black female, standing where she has never stood before, throughout thousands of years of Western art: right in the middle of the canvas. She is not just a torso. She is not holding a service tray or selling fruit or hanging from a rope. Like her sister in Italy, she, too, is poised atop a seashell, gliding along a gorgeous ocean.

The strapping and cut celestial figures in Botticelli’s painting have been replaced, however, and here she is attended by white cherubs, most of whom fan the Sable Venus with long white ostrich plumes. A few carry the feathers of a peacock. Cupid, above, takes aim at Triton, below. They are all riding across the middle of an ocean, shepherding the Sable Venus to some as yet unclaimed place. Indeed, perhaps her body will be used as a land claim, a territorial marker, a stake, a fleur-de-lis_._

Instead of pointing to her breast, like the Virgin, or covering her breast or heart, like Botticelli’s Venus, the Sable Venus has a pair of reins threaded through both of her hands. The reins are harnessed to two dolphins, dolphins that pull her chariot-shell through the sea. Unlike Botticelli’s pure and naked Venus, the Sable Venus wears one article of clothing: a pair of what can only be called colonial panties. And, unlike Botticelli’s Venus, the Sable Venus is strong, curved, muscular: a woman’s woman. Her form is twice as wide, with girth, her muscles: cut, lean. She is the embodiment of strength—no fragile anything in need of anyone. Her dark skin is adorned with jewels. All eyes are upon her and at her service—finally.

“The Kitchen Maid,” painted by Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez, c. 1620. PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY BOCACHETE / WIKIMEDIA COMMONS PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY BOCACHETE / WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

When she was first rendered as an engraving by Thomas Stothard, in the late eighteenth century, and later painted, in 1801—and still today_—_“The Voyage of the Sable Venus” was considered a visual travesty, an inversion of order. “How, at the height of slavery, could a black woman be drawn by dolphins through the primordial seas, adored and attended by the gods of Classical Greece?” goes the purist response, meaning the gods would never be seen in the company of a black female body, not to mention serve as her attendants. Others, recognizing immediately the atrocious irony, still question whether the painting was a satire. For, in 1801, her scallop shell could only be a metaphorical slave ship. Did the Sable Venus enjoy her trip across the Atlantic, gliding along the Middle Passage, guided by a white male celestial harem, destined for slavery?

Besides these obvious observations, however (that the world was on fire then; indeed, that is has been burning for millennia—and not only that—but that the majority of our population seems to be enjoying the blaze), you begin to feel a third question about the image rising in your throat, a subtler question about words. That is, quite simply, you begin to wonder if you had ever seen the words “sable” and “Venus” in the same sentence, at any point in time, in any language, anywhere, in print?

Just think of it: a word as exhausted and under-investigated as “Venus”—had you really never seen it occur intimately with something dark and adjectival?

Of course, the answer is, simply and tragically: no_._

“African Venus,” by Charles-Henri-Joseph Cordier, 1851. PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY THE WALTERS ART MUSEUM PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY THE WALTERS ART MUSEUM

It wasn’t merely the Sable Venus’s iconicity that grabbed me by the neck. Nor was it that deeply satisfying but ultimately simple delight in seeing the white Venus replaced by the black—as delicious as all that is, and it is!—that gesture was too undemanding, of myself, of history. Which is to say, ever since Rome, we keep replacing the statues but continue playing the same blinding games. When perhaps the real neurosis is our desire for monuments of any kind. Perhaps, instead of looking up for an icon, we need to look down and cherish and adore, even worship, the people working quietly right beside us, or, even more subtly, working—via memory—right within us. Real beauty isn’t tit for tat, as fun and even justified as revenge can be. So “The Voyage of the Sable Venus,” for me, is something more than a visual sleight of a historical hand. That something more is in its title. “The Voyage of the Sable Venus” is an epic written in one line.

The poet Marilyn Nelson once remarked that, if one has the ear and takes the time, even the front page of the newspaper is laden with sonnets. The back of a cereal box contains songs. Language is an organ, a musical instrument. Which means that even when having an argument we are singing.

The title_—“_The Voyage of the Sable Venus”—contains the story of all our histories.

Could it be, I wondered, that, instead of the intellectual propaganda we call “history,” the more honest, simple, and accurate narrative of art, of perception, was hiding right there in plain view—not, however, in the imagery but simply in what the image is called, within the signs, within the words?

If we went back, if we went all over the world and looked at every object, every statue, every painting that included a black female figure in any way, and wrote every title down, what would art’s epic sing then?

I never thought that I would find more than just a few titles. I never thought that I would travel through time.

What began as a small experiment expanded into the history of art in the entire Western world. The museums were invisible graveyards. They were just sitting there: broken, defaced, unseen. A catalogue of bodies.

It was an invisible archeology—an archeology that crisscrossed time and space. Everywhere I went, I found them, just off, just to the edge, just beneath: pieces of black female bodies buried in plain sight. A small black female carved into the handle of a tool. Miniature black women who could fit into your palm. A three-inch-long black female carved into a knife handle, so you could hold on to her body tightly whenever you sliced your daily bread. A palm-sized black woman in your hand when you brushed your hair at night, looking absently into the mirror. A spoon handle, a drum, a hammer, a flute—black bodies sculpted into the wooden frame surrounding a heroic painting of a white male on top of a white horse, riding triumphantly into war. Black female bodies ornamenting the tripods, the base of a table, sleeping inside the frame, selling, offering, tending in the background of innumerable paintings. Bending, standing, waiting. Our whole artistic history crawling with the decorative bodies of black women.