Queen Nzinga: The Warrior Queen Brought to Life

Nzinga is one of my favorite women in history. She lived a fascinating life that is not recounted nearly as often as it should be. I have an old version of Nzinga, but I wanted to recreate her because I don’t feel like I did the portrait justice the last time. 

Nzinga was the warrior ruler of the Kingdoms of Ndongo and Matamba, which now constitute modern-day Angola. She spent her life in on-and-off warfare with the Portuguese, trying to protect her people and the rest of the African interior from slave raiders. You can check out the full history of her life and the timelapse recreation of her portrait on the YouTube channel - Royalty Now Studios. With a reign lasting 37 years, she continues to be an Angolan hero to this day. 

So what did she look like? Unfortunately we don’t quite have a contemporary portrait of her - what we do have is a copy of a lost original sketch. 

This portrait is a version made by a French Lithographer in the 1800s. It’s based on original drawings completed by Giovanni Cavazzi during his travels to Portuguese Angola. I discovered some quirks that made it difficult to work from. It’s very very difficult to describe just how weird this portrait is, especially not until you’re the artist trying to reconstruct it. The face is painted at a strange angle to the neck, and the nose and mouth are painted from almost two different perspectives. So I had to do my best to translate this into a believable rendering, and a few changes were made. I created kind of a past-and present hybrid image of Nzinga that I really love. Let me know what you think!