Victor Stoichita's Darker Shades: The Racial Other in Early Modern Art, first published in French in 2014, is an ambitious, thought-provoking book that offers a new contribution to the question of how ethnic difference functioned in the formation of the Western artistic tradition in early modern Europe. Stoichita culls from theoretical discourses on otherness, building on discussions in anthropology, phenomenology, and postcolonial theory. He examines how the dialectic of Self and Other evolved in a specifically visual realm, bound up within formative art historical moments. The terms of the study are not novel introductions to the discipline of art history. Stoichita's creativity lies instead in the way he tethers the broader structural workings of racial difference to the pictorial strategies of early modern European art and the coalescing notion of the Western canon.

Stoichita organizes his study into four sections, each of which treats a particular category of otherness. The first and lengthiest chapter explores how Western representations of Black Africans worked to construct a racial dichotomy in tandem with a chromatic one. Stoichita draws upon a diverse set of artworks. Chapter 1, for instance, begins with Hieronymus Bosch and concludes with Enlightenment portraiture. In his next chapter, “The Invention of the Jew,” Stoichita investigates the long and uneven process of visually distinguishing Jewishness, a process that vacillated between a typological or genealogical understanding of Jews and the notion of a negative Other, a denier of Christ. Stoichita uses Giotto's depictions of Judas in the Arena Chapel to elucidate his argument, then turns to works by Paolo Uccello and Rembrandt. Stoichita's third chapter addresses images of the Ottoman sultan, commonly referred to in Europe as the Grand Turk. Variably fanciful, mimetic, and obscured, portrayals of Ottoman rulers tell the story of an increasingly visible—and potent—portrait of the Other. In his fourth and final chapter, Stoichita analyzes the ambiguous category of the gypsy, connecting the notion of the foreign nomad to artworks such as Giorgione's Tempest and Correggio's Holy Family. The chapter closes with an extensive reading of the gypsy figure in Caravaggio's Fortune-Teller, forming an elegant pendant to the book's opening passage on the notion of the Self in Caravaggio's Narcissus.

Stoichita states the value of investigating how “the imaginary construction of otherness operates within specific historical contexts” (41), raising the question of which historical contexts were chosen and why. His examples are broadly European and early modern, a choice with a contextual rationale. As Stoichita notes, the fifteenth century can lay claim to several watershed moments in the history of Europe's visible Others. It brought the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople, European contact with the Americas, the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, the beginnings of the Portuguese slave trade, and the arrival of people who would come to be called gypsies at European city gates. The artworks in Darker Shades largely date from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century, suggesting Stoichita is exploring the consequences of these events in visual culture. However, the inclusion of artists as distant as Giotto and Girodet demonstrates that Stoichita's selected objects are most united by their associations with the canon. The list of illustrations in Darker Shades echoes the slides in an introductory survey course on Western art. Here, too, Giotto finds himself catalogued alongside Rembrandt, Dürer, Caravaggio, Rubens, and Titian. Stoichita's choice of artworks, if traditional, is purposeful. Stoichita's intervention is precisely about the formation of that list: he shows how the idea of the White/Christian/European Self was profoundly connected to the convoluted construction of the Western canon.

Some of the book's most compelling moments are those when Stoichita interrogates early modern elisions of ethnic and pictorial ideas. Stoichita convincingly associates the racialized difference in Titian's Diana and Acteon—the canvas juxtaposes a pale, blonde goddess Diana with a Black female—with the writings of a sixteenth-century art critic, who dwells at length on concepts of contrast, variety, and blackness. Peter Paul Rubens's portrayal of a Black man in his Great Last Judgment is also shown to traffic in multiple types of difference, simultaneously ethnic, exegetical, and pictorial. Stoichita explores many similar examples, often supported by contemporary literary commentaries. Rembrandt's stylistic transgressions are coupled with his religious ones, and Caravaggio's illusionism, just like the gypsy figure he depicted, was described as enchanting. These case studies help Stoichita more persuasively link conceptions of cultural otherness to the pictorial strategies in his canonical artworks.

Stoichita's eminently readable prose, as translated into English by Samuel Trainor, belies its intellectual complexity. His analysis of otherness has far-reaching implications for a structural history of Western identity. Stoichita's approach has anthropological and philosophical dimensions, but he remains committed to the interventions that art history can provide, with its in-depth exploration of visual complexity. Anthropological scholarship appears intermittently in Stoichita's more traditional visual analyses, as when he relates the painted textile in Gentile Bellini's portrait of Mehmed II to Alfred Gell's work on apotropaic ensnarement. Art historians might have benefited from a more explicit discussion of the disciplinary stakes. Stoichita's fascinating description of images of the Virgin Mary that included attributes of gypsies, a situation that greatly offended the seventeenth-century Milanese archbishop Federico Borromeo, recalls Erwin Panofsky's iconological arguments, a fact that deserves further attention. Stoichita's reliance on the word iconosphere, too, could have addressed debates on the definition of art and the various substitute terms art historians have proposed. Overall, the publication of the English translation is a welcome development. Darker Shades is an intriguing interdisciplinary contribution that will inspire further conversations about cross-cultural interaction, theories of otherness, and canonicity.