The Decorative Page
During and following the Renaissance it became fashionable for black boys and young men to be decorative pages, placed into fancy costumes and attending fashionable ladies and lords. This custom lasted for several centuries and the "African page" became a staple accoutrement of baroque and rococo style.
The character is frequently illustrated in literature and film, particularly periodwork:
- In the Grace Kelly film, To Catch a Thief, an undercover detective wears the costume of her "African page" to a costume ball.
- Valentine Nwanze played an "African page" attending James Graham, Marquess of Montrose in the film Rob Roy.
- "Koko", the fictional manservant of an opera diva, is cast as her African page in A Nut at the Opera by Maurice Vellekoop.
- Decorative pages feature in a drawing room scene in Persuasion.
- In the 2012 historical drama film A Royal Affair Christian VII has an african page boy named Moranti
Read more about this topic: Page (servant)
Famous quotes containing the words decorative and/or page:
“A man may lack everything but tact and conviction and still be a forcible speaker; but without these nothing will avail.... Fluency, grace, logical order, and the like, are merely the decorative surface of oratory.”
—Charles Horton Cooley (1864–1929)
“So here they are, the dog-faced soldiers, the regulars, the fifty-cents-a-day professionals riding the outposts of the nation, from Fort Reno to Fort Apache, from Sheridan to Stark. They were all the same. Men in dirty-shirt blue and only a cold page in the history books to mark their passing. But wherever they rode and whatever they fought for, that place became the United States.”
—Frank S. Nugent (1908–1965)