Laura A. Macaluso’s The Art of the Amistad and the Portrait of Cinqué is a book of many ambitions. . . [It] establishes a solid foundation for future scholarship and an accessible resource for those interested in a truly remarkable moment in transatlantic history.

The New England Quarterly

“’Portrait of Cinque’ by Nathaniel Jocelyn, is the focus of author Laura A. Macaluso’s newest book entitled, Art of the Amistad & The Portrait of Cinque. The portrait has enjoyed iconic status for nearly two centuries because of Jocelyn’s singular vision of a man who’s humanity was not deadened by the ravages of enslavement, or stolen by the struggles he endured on his dogged quest for freedom. He is someone we would all want to know because his image convinces us that there is courage, dignity, promise, and greatness even in the least of us.”

Rex M. Ellis, Associate Director for Curatorial Affairs, National Museum of African American History and Culture, Smithsonian Institution

“Placing the great portrait of Cinque in a rich, changing artistic context, Laura Macaluso has written a fascinating and sublimely illustrated study of the art of the Amistad story. Nothing fired, for better and worse, the American antislavery imagination quite like the epic events surrounding the Amistad captives in 1839-41. And nothing left a richer tale of those events than the great painting by Nathaniel Jocelyn of Cinque, which itself had an epic history before it found its way on to the walls of the New Haven Museum. Macaluso has done some stunning research, and tells a narrative history of how this great story survives in many visual forms.”

David W. Blight, Class of 1954 Professor of American History, Yale University, and Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition at Yale University