Suppose I were to read Juan de Pareja’s Saint Matthew as carefully as Foucault does Velázquez’s Las Meninas. What can I say? Where will my discourse fit, or fail to fit? Foucault recognizes that a tour de force requires its analogue in writing, and dutifully obliges. What would be my mirroring gesture given the failed reception of my subject? Certainly, I’m not able to emulate an art historical discourse of hagiographic adulation. Such a move would already be understood as belated and therefore derivative. Moreover, it would be slotted neatly into a contemporary notion of redress or reparation. It would risk the whiff of appealing to white liberal guilt. Such readers would concede to my claims as a matter of tacit etiquette, a small price to pay for a relieved conscience. To put it another way, even if I were able to muster the rhetorical force of a T. S. Eliot rescuing a John Donne whose talent he believed had been unfairly discarded by his tradition, my claims would be suspect. Donne was never a slave, except to his appetites. The negligence Eliot had to overcome was essentially evaluative; it presented no fundamental epistemological or ontological difficulty. Pareja, by contrast, spent the greater portion of his life an African slave in Spain, owned by an ambitious artist who in life and in death overshadows him. Pareja presents complications before his brush even touches the canvas.