‘Moor’ is simply just a synonym for ‘any black man’
It doesn’t always denote a fez or turban wearing African Muslim…
“…The handsome youth sculpted out of pear wood has dark skin and the striking facial features of a black African man…
However, his jewel-encrusted body ornaments and feather headdress indicate that the young man is not, in fact an inhabitant of the African continent, rather they show him to be a native of Florida, i.e., an American Indian…”
Saturiwa was chief of the Saturiwa tribe, a Timucua chiefdom centered at the mouth of the St. Johns River in Florida, during the 16th century…
His main village, also known as Saturiwa, was located on the south bank of the river near its mouth, and according to French sources he was sovereign over thirty other village chiefs…
Chief Saturiwa was a prominent figure in the early days of European settlement in Florida, forging friendly relations with the French Huguenot settlers, who founded Fort Caroline in his territory…
The Saturiwa were a Timucua chiefdom centered on the mouth of the St. Johns River in what is now Jacksonville, Florida…
They were the largest and best attested chiefdom of the Timucua subgroup known as the Mocama, who spoke the Mocama dialect of Timucuan and lived in the coastal areas of present-day northern Florida and southeastern Georgia…
He is represented as a muscular youth in swaggering stride; he is carved from pearwood, and lacquered a deep brown…
His broadly smiling face with its wide, blunt nose and full lips is clearly meant to be that of a Negro; but his curly hair is—when seen from the front—almost entirely hidden by a jeweled gold "feather" crown of a type generally associated with romantic of American Indians…
His dark brown skin is covered on arms, legs, and body with intricate tattoos, meticulously produced by thousands of tiny dots of blue-black lacquer paint…
In contrast to this dark background stands forth the lavish assortment of gem studded jewelry: necklace, pectoral, armlets, knee bands, cuffs, and greaves, and a belt heavily loaded with pendants to
form a fringed skirt…
He carries a tray of tortoiseshell, containing a matrix of emeralds…
This was presented to Elector Augustus (1553-86), the founder of the Dresden Kunstkammer (1560), by his friend Emperor Rudolf II in 1581, when Augustus paid him a visit in Prague, soon after Rudolf's recovery from a serious illness…
The emeralds were kept "in a black box lined with crimson velvet," and were catalogued under the section "Precious Stones, Unicorn and Rhinoceros Horns."
They were said to have come from the Indies of the West—probably Muzo in Colombia—and had presumably been sent to Europe by some Spanish conquistador…
In The Splendor of Dresden it is mentioned following a suggestion I had made to Joachim Menzhausen—that the Moor's tattoos and feather crown were taken from contemporary illustrations of travel accounts, and that the figure is supposed to represent an American Indian…
Indeed, almost every detail of the adornments of all four statuettes has a common source, a series of engravings of the New World by Théodore de Bry (1528-98)
Among de Bry's illustrations to René de Laudonnière's report about the abortive French settlement in Florida in 1564, we find the exact model for the Moor's tattoos in those of the "powerful king called Satouriona"
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