Can a King be Disabled? Leprosy, Power, and Colonialism in an Indonesian Sultan’s Portrait

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A middle-aged, mustached man dressed in a luxuriously decorated jacket and with a thick golden chain across his chest looks at us with a piercing gaze. He stands against a blank, grey background, and his left hand rests assuredly on a stone parapet. The man’s portrait is identical in its composition to standard seventeenth-century portraits of the Governor-Generals of the Dutch East Indies. But two details set it apart. First, the inscription at the bottom identifies the man as “Sayfoedin Coningh van Tidore,” “Sayfoedin King [Sultan] of Tidore.” Second, the sitter’s right arm is in a beautiful orange-golden sling, which reveals the absence of the hand and the wrist.

This juxtaposition of the royal status, wealth, and disability raises questions about how early modern viewers perceived rulers with non-normative bodies. Did they see disability as a defect that precluded one from leading a country? Did the etiology of one’s disability matter in this context? For instance, would they more readily accept a leader who lost his arm in a war than one whose arm was amputated due to an illness? Sayfoedin’s portrait offers a unique opportunity to examine premodern audiences’ answers to these questions, as it exists between Western and Islamic pictorial traditions. It also embodies the intersection of the Dutch and Indonesian political and economic interests at the height of colonial trade in Southeast Asia.

Sayfoedin’s is the only surviving Dutch portrait, and only one of two ever made by the Dutch in the seventeenth-century East Indies, of a local Indonesian ruler.^[1] As a sultan of one of the Moluccan islands, Sayfoedin (also spelled Saifuddin, r. 1657–1687) was a key ally of the Dutch East India Company (Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie, or VOC). In 1667, he signed a treaty with the VOC, which helped him control the Western parts of Papua while sealing the VOC’s monopoly of the spice trade in the region. Since the creation and exchange of portraits was a common diplomatic strategy in bolstering political and economic alliances in Europe, Saifuddin’s portrait was possibly painted as a gift that followed the 1667 treaty. To ensure their continued economic success in the East Indies, the Dutch sent cloth, expensive fabrics, and sometimes even clothes tailored according to European fashion – like the jacket worn by Saifuddin – to Indonesian rulers.^[2] A sultan’s portrait would perfectly complement those traditional gifts as a part of this imperial gift exchange.

We do not know exactly where and how this painting was originally displayed. However, we can reasonably assume that among its original viewers were both members of the Tidore court – including the Sultan – and members of the Dutch administration. As a culturally constructed identity, the Sultan’s disability would convey distinct meanings to these two groups of beholders. Seventeenth-century European viewers would have likely seen Saifuddin’s portrait as something of an aberration. By and large, Renaissance artists avoided depicting disabilities and deformities in paintings of rulers. Piero della Francesca’s portrait of Federico da Montefeltro (ca. 1475) shows the duke in profile, concealing a missing eye that he lost in a jousting tournament. Portraits of England’s Henry VIII do not even hint at the chronic infection of his leg that never healed properly after a jousting accident in 1536. In contrast, the anonymous group portrait of Henry, his children, and Jane Seymour from ca. 1540 highlights the bodily and behavioral non-normativity of the two Tudor court fools, Jane the Fole and Will Sommer. In this painting, the artists depicted disability as an attribute of lower classes, not royalty, regardless of its etiology.

In the early 1660s, about a decade before the unknown Dutch artist completed Saifuddin’s portrait, Rembrandt van Rijn broke with the tradition of concealing rulers’ disabilities. The Amsterdam city council commissioned him to paint the Conspiracy of the Batavians under Claudius Civilis for the city’s new town hall (see featured image in article header). According to the Roman historian Tacitus, in 69 AD, Civilis led a revolt against the Roman army in Batavia, the territory in the delta of the Rhine. For a young nation that successfully defeated the Spanish Empire in the late 1500s, the oath of Claudius Civilis was a sacred moment, depicted, among others, by Otto van Veen. Van Veen and other artists showed Civilis as non-disabled, even though Tacitus described him as missing one eye. In contrast, Rembrandt painted Civilis with a scar covering his empty left eye socket. At the same time, Civilis towers over fellow Batavians with his sword firmly in his hand. He confronts the viewer with his direct gaze, as if challenging them to acknowledge his political and military prowess despite his conspicuous disability. In spite of Rembrandt’s prominence, the city council rejected the painting without even paying for it. We do not know whether the council members disliked the portrayal of Civilis’s disability or found some other deficiency in Rembrandt’s monumental composition. Regardless of their motivation, their decision banned an image of a non-normative body from Amsterdam’s most important civic space.

The cited examples show that powerful Western states would not necessarily bar a person with a disability from a position of power. However, early modern paintings reveal that political elites still feared that flaunting disability in visual imagery could lead to questions about a disabled leader’s fitness for office and be a cause for concern among society. We have seen this in modern times as well. In the 1930s and 1940s, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s White House notably had an agreement with the press not to photograph or film the president in a manner that would reveal his disability. Furthermore, more recent debates about whether he should be shown with or without his wheelchair have marred his posthumous memorialization.

Roosevelt is an especially apt comparison for Saifuddin, as both men’s disease etiologies became the subjects of rumors. Although Roosevelt’s diagnosis has been questioned, most researchers agree that it was polio, arguably the most feared illness between the early 1920s and mid-1950s. Twentieth-century scholars suspected Saifuddin of having leprosy, an illness equally dreaded and with as strong a cultural history as polio, though in reality less contagious and dangerous. Saifuddin’s diagnosis is not surprising. In colonial narratives that have continued to haunt modern scholarship, leprosy has functioned as the quintessential disease of the overseas territories subjugated by Western European powers. This cultural perception of leprosy has trumped both the illness’s medical prognosis and the lack of seventeenth-century written evidence that could support Saifuddin’s leprosy diagnosis. Leprosy very rarely leads to amputation, especially of the upper extremities. Moreover, while VOC administrators in Batavia meticulously documented the Company’s daily operations, they only mentioned that Saifuddin suffered from a terrible affliction that resulted in correspondence delays and, on another occasion, caused him to miss an audience with the Governor-General. Saifuddin’s own letters, whose copies are included in the VOC daily registers, are likewise vague when it comes to his illness and disability.

While a specific diagnosis must, for now, remain a matter of speculation, Saifuddin’s portrait challenges the notion that throughout history, bodily normativity has been an absolute and universal prerequisite of political power. If early modern Europeans indeed perceived disability ambivalently, other cultures provide more positive examples. In Egypt – an unquestionable superpower of the ancient world – several priests and administrators had dwarfism and disabilities caused by polio and cerebral palsy. Even more remarkably, Alexandra Morris has shown that the most famous Egyptian tomb, that of Pharaoh Tutankhamun, included paintings and hundreds of everyday objects that prove beyond any doubt that the prematurely deceased pharaoh had club foot, incontinence, bone necrosis, and other disabilities that had to be accommodated in his life and afterlife.^[3]

Although we lack any premodern images specifically from Muslim-majority Indonesia, some of the world’s most famous examples of the presence and pictorial representation of people with disabilities come from the Islamic world. Ottoman art routinely showed deaf and mute servants and people with dwarfism among sultans’ courtiers, and some Islamic rulers themselves were shown as disabled. As one example, the late-fifteenth-century Book of Victories shows Timur, nicknamed the Lame (1336–1405), with his right leg resting on a stool. According to Islamic court etiquette and pictorial conventions, rulers always sat with both knees bent. Recognizing that Timur’s painted position deviated from that standard, Muslim viewers would understand that the fearsome emperor had a disability that prevented him from bending his leg.

Another example from four centuries later shows one of the last Mughal emperors, Alam II, whom an enemy blinded in a battle. Alam II’s late portraits unapologetically reveal his sightlessness. His closed eyes contrast sharply with the wide-open eyes of his court attendants, and his head is leaning down. In the center of the composition, Alam II’s hands caress prayer beads. The hands’ positioning and implied movement underscore the importance of touch over sight in how the now-blind Alam II engages with the world. Still, the Shah continued to be portrayed as the most powerful person in the Empire: in these late images, he presides over his subjects from the Peacock Throne, whose height and lavishness separate him from his courtiers.

Images operate on different levels, and their interpretations depend on the viewer’s education, beliefs, socioeconomic and ethnic backgrounds, visual literacy, and a myriad of other factors. Seventeenth-century Dutch and, more broadly, Western European audiences were not used to the representation of disability in royal portraits and probably perceived it as a defect. But Saifuddin and his North Maluku subjects would have likely seen in this portrait an image of wealth and power achieved through clever negotiations with the VOC. Saifuddin could have easily hidden his disabled arm under another fashionable garment or behind his back. Instead, he chose to show it off, supported by a sling made from a prized Indian fabric. In the end, the portrait delivers a strong visual statement on the coexistence of power and visible disabilities in the early modern world and challenges the Western conventions of pictorial representation of bodily non-normativity.

Notes

• Kees Zandvliet, The Dutch Encounter with Asia, 1600–1950 (Zwolle: Waanders, 2002), 120. ↑
• John Guy, “‘One Thing Leads to Another.’ Indian Textiles and the Early Globalization of Style,” in: Amelia Peck (ed.), The Interwoven Globe. International Textile Trade, 1500-1800 (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art /Yale University Press, 2013), 18. ↑
• Alexandra F. Morris, “Let that Be Your Last Battlefield: Tutankhamun and Disability,” Athens Journal of History vol. 6.1 (2019): 53–72. ↑

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Featured image caption: Rembrandt van Rijn, The Conspiracy of the Batavians under Claudius Civilis, 1661–62, oil on canvas, 196 x 309cm, Stockholm, National Museum. Image in a public domain.