Benedict the Moor, venerated in the Americas. Unrecorded print.

[Benedict the Moor]. S. Benedictus a S. Philadelphio. Obiit 4 Aprilis 1589. Canonisatus 24 Maji 1807. My Body was quite black, but, God be thank’d! in Spite of Nature, my dear Soul was ever pure and white. S.l. [likely British Isles or Antwerp]: “H. Leys,” s.a. [after 1807]. [11.9 x 8.1 cm], [1] f. etching. Minor toning and staining, mounting stains on verso.
 
 
Unrecorded early 19th-century devotional etching depicting Benedetto of Palermo (1526-89), the Black Franciscan friar variously known as “il Moro” or “el Santo Negro.” Although Benedict the Moor is still venerated in Sicily and elsewhere in southern Europe, his influence boomed in the Americas, especially among Black populations.
 
Early depictions of Benedict are rather rare, and this print is doubly interesting for having been produced for an English-speaking audience. The inscription, added below an image of Benedict kneeling in contemplation of death, reveals a preoccupation with the saint’s skin color: “My Body was quite black, but, God be thank’d! in Spite of Nature, my dear Soul was ever pure and white.”
 
The print is signed in the plate “H. Leys,” i.e. Hendrik Jozef Martinus Leys, an Antwerp printmaker-publisher who specialized in acquiring and reprinting old copperplates. While it is possible that this copperplate was engraved with English text in Antwerp, it is more likely that Leys somehow acquired the plate from the British Isles (or even the United States?), where it had been cut in the years immediately following Benedetto’s canonization in 1807. (Note that Hendrik Jozef Martinus Leys is not to be confused with his son Jan August Hendrik Leys [1815-69], a peintre-graveur of some ambition.) 
 
“Benedetto Manasseri, the son of a black slave and a free black woman, was born in 1524 at San Fratello in the diocese of Messina. He lived as a hermit in different areas of Spanish Sicily. In 1562 he joined the convent of the Friars Minor at the monastery of Santa Maria de Gèsu near Palermo, but he never took orders. In 1581 he became the caretaker of the monastery, a fairly important position. He had a reputation as a healer, a good judge of the human soul, and an interpreter of the holy scriptures, despite the fact that he was apparently illiterate (an idiota, or so he was called in the written sources). He died in 1589, was beatified in 1743, and was canonized in 1807. Only a few years after his death however, churches in the kingdoms of Spain and Portugal had already consecrated altars to him. Benedict’s true iconography did not crystallize until the eighteenth century, on the occasion of his beatification” (V. Stoichita, “The Image of the Black in Spanish Art: Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” in The Image of the Black in Western Art, David Bindman and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., eds., vol. 3, part 1, p. 212). Benedetto’s major shrine was located at the Convent of Santa Maria di Gesù al Capo in Palermo; the church and his relics were largely destroyed by wildfires in 2023.
 
Benito’s influence quickly spread to the Americas, and confraternities devoted to him soon became prevalent in Venezuela, El Salvador, and Mexico (see, e.g., the studies J. de Dios Martínez Suárez, N. Rivas de Prado, E. Cruz and J. Heriberto). Historically Black Catholic parishes dedicated to Benedict the Moor can be found from Jamaica, Queens, to Kinsgston, Jamaica, and several are located in the American South. 
 
 
OCLC and KVK do not locate this print, nor have I encountered it in the literature on Benedict the Moor.
 
*Victor Stoichita, “The Image of the Black in Spanish Art: Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” in The Image of the Black in Western Art, David Bindman and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., eds., vol. 3, part 1, pp. 191-234; Juan de Dios Martínez Suárez, Mitos, leyendas y rostros sobre el culto a San Benito de Palermo en Venezuela; Nancy Rivas de Prado, Celebración de San Benito de Palermo una expresión religioso-sincrética de la cultura occidental venezolana; Erquicia Cruz and José Heriberto, San Benito de Palermo: Elementos afrodescendientes en la religiosidad popular en El Salvador; Estela Roselló Soberón, “La Cofradía de San Benito de Palermo y la integración de los negros y los mulatos en la ciudad de la Nueva Veracruz en el siglo XVII,” in Formaciones religiosas en la América colonial, María Alba Pastor and Alicia Mayer, eds., pp 229-42; María Elisa Velázquez, “Africanos y afrodescendientes en México: reflexiones del pasado y del presente,” Cuicuilco, vol. 18, no. 5 (2011), pp. 11-22; Cristina Verónica Masferrer León, “Por las ánimas de negros bozales: Las cofradías de personas de origen africano en la ciudad de México (siglo XVII),” Cuicuilco, vol. 18, no. 5 (2011), pp. 83-103; Sandra Nancy Luna García, “Espacios de convivencia y conflicto. Las cofradías de la población de origen africano en Ciudad de México, siglo XVII,” Trashumante: Revista Americana de Historia Social, vol. 10 (2017), pp. 32-52; Giovanna Fiume, Santo Moro: I processi di canonizzazione di Benedetto da Palermo (1594-1807); Giovanna Fiume, ed., Santo e patrono e la città: San Benedetto il Moro, culti, devozioni, strategie di età moderna.