NICHOLAS JONES: I have always been struck by and immediately drawn to the variety of persons of color in the lower part of the painting. We can see those people at the river bank.

NARRATOR: You’re looking at an image of 17th-century Seville, one of the richest and most cosmopolitan cities in Europe.

NICHOLAS JONES: My name is Nicholas Jones, and I’m a professor of Spanish and Portuguese at Yale University. What we’re seeing in this painting is the neighborhood of Triana. Historically the Triana neighborhood in Seville is where a variety of marginalized communities lived. They were people of African descent, Roma people, as well as a variety of indigenous people from both the Americas and the Philippines.

NARRATOR: Seville’s wealth and power stemmed from being a hub in the global exchange of culture and goods, including human capital. The riverbank you see here opens a poignant window onto the human tragedy of the slave trade.

NICHOLAS JONES: During this time, there was a trans-oceanic circulation of material, of knowledge, of ideas, of people, enslaved or free, carried with them bodies of knowledge knowledge that for me is manifested in song, dance, language. And perhaps we can read and identify in this painting a residue or semblances of some of those lived experiences.

NARRATOR: For instance, what’s led to the fight that’s broken out between the two men at right, allowing their donkeys to kick and destroy their cargo? What of the neatly dressed woman selling fruit from a basket? Where in a story of enslavement and emancipation do their lives fall?