# Angelo Soliman: Honoured in Life, Skinned and Stuffed by the Same Vienna

Angelo Soliman spent most of his adult life inside the highest circles of Habsburg Vienna. Born around 1721, probably Kanuri, in the region of the Bornu Empire spanning today’s northeastern Nigeria, he was taken captive as a child, sold through North Africa to Sicily, educated in the household of a Messinese marchioness, and eventually became chamberlain and tutor to the children of Prince Joseph Wenzel I of Liechtenstein. He spoke Italian, Latin, German, French, English and Czech, was known as a formidable chess player, married into minor nobility, and rose to Grand Master of the Viennese Freemason lodge True Concord, one of the most intellectually prominent lodges of the Enlightenment. When he died of a stroke on 21 November 1796, at around seventy-five, he was, by any account, one of the most respected men in the city.

Within weeks, the same city had skinned him.

What happened to the body

At the request of the director of the Imperial Natural History Cabinet, and with the approval of Emperor Francis II, Soliman’s corpse was not given the Christian burial he had wanted and had documented wishes for. His organs were removed and buried separately. His skin was stripped from his body, stretched over a wooden mannequin, and dressed in feathers, shells and beads to resemble what the museum’s staff imagined an African „savage“ should look like. The finished mount was placed in the cabinet’s display alongside stuffed animals and, according to several accounts, at least one other African body prepared the same way. A plaster cast taken of his head shortly after death survives separately; it disappeared from record for over a century and was rediscovered in the Rollett Museum in Baden in 1996.

Soliman’s daughter Josephine, then in her twenties, protested repeatedly and sharply, petitioning to have her father’s remains returned for burial. Her petitions were refused. One account records the museum’s own later director explaining the decision plainly: Soliman had been considered so striking in appearance that the emperor wanted him preserved as a specimen.

Sources differ on exactly how long the mount remained on public display. Several give 1806 as the date it was withdrawn from the exhibition, roughly a decade after Soliman’s death. What is consistent across sources is that the mount itself, whether on display or in storage, was not returned to the family and was not buried. It survived, in the museum’s keeping, until it burned in a fire during the suppression of the 1848 revolution, fifty-two years after Josephine’s first petition.

The scholarly reassessment

The fullest modern academic treatment, a 2020 open-access article by Iris Wigger and Spencer Hadley in the journal Race & Class, places Soliman’s case explicitly inside the intellectual history of the Enlightenment rather than treating it as an isolated act of cruelty. Their argument is that the violation of Soliman’s body was not a lapse from Enlightenment values but was, in their words, ideologically fuelled and legitimated by the same era’s own emerging race science and its ambivalent concept of humanity. Soliman’s decades of successful integration into bourgeois Viennese and aristocratic life did not, in this reading, protect him from being reclassified after death; if anything, his death was the moment his social status stopped mattering and his body was, in the authors‘ phrase, transformed back from its bourgeois state to what contemporaries imagined as its natural one.

This is the point worth sitting with. Soliman was not an outsider whom Vienna failed to fully accept. He was accepted, by the standards of eighteenth-century Habsburg society, about as fully as a Black man of the period could be: married into nobility, entrusted with educating princes, elected to lead a prestigious Masonic lodge. The same institutions that had admitted him, the court, the museum administration, the emperor himself, were the ones who decided, within weeks of his death, that his body belonged in a cabinet of curiosities rather than a grave.

What doesn’t add up

**The transition from honoured courtier to museum specimen happened without any change in who Soliman was, only in whether he was alive to object.** No new information emerged about him between his final years and his death that would explain a shift from respected Freemason to display object; the only thing that changed was that his own capacity to resist, and eventually his daughter’s repeated formal objections, could be simply overruled by an emperor’s wish. The Wigger and Hadley analysis treats this as evidence that Enlightenment-era acceptance of an individual Black man never fully overrode an underlying racial framework that could reassert itself the moment he could no longer contest it himself. What would sharpen this claim further: a documented comparison with how the remains of white courtiers or scholars of comparable rank were treated after death in the same Viennese institutions in the same period, to establish precisely how exceptional Soliman’s treatment was, or was not, relative to contemporary norms around anatomical collection generally.

**Josephine Soliman’s petitions were refused for over fifty years, through several changes of monarch, without the refusal ever being explained in writing beyond one museum director’s remark about her father’s striking appearance.** A formal objection from a legitimate daughter, repeated over decades, met with no documented substantive institutional response beyond that single justification, of the mount’s value as a visually impressive specimen. The imbalance, between the seriousness of the request and the thinness of the recorded justification for denying it, is itself part of what the case demonstrates about whose objections carried institutional weight in Habsburg Vienna and whose did not. What would help: publication of whatever internal correspondence survives in Habsburg or museum archives concerning Josephine’s petitions, if any exists beyond the secondhand account of the director’s remark.

What stays open

No burial ever took place; the mount was destroyed by accident, in a fire connected to a political uprising with nothing to do with Soliman himself, rather than by any deliberate decision to finally let the matter rest. Only the plaster cast of his head remains today, in a museum in Baden, itself only rediscovered in 1996. Josephine Soliman never received what she asked for, and no institution ever recorded formally granting or refusing to grant it; the refusal simply continued by default, decade after decade, until there was nothing left to hand back.

KardiKassin

Writes about Africa’s history and how it gets told, sourced and checked at every step.

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Sources

• Wigger, Iris and Spencer Hadley: Angelo Soliman: Desecrated Bodies and the Spectre of Enlightenment Racism. Race & Class 62 (2), 2020, pp. 80 to 107. Open access. https://doi.org/10.1177/0306396820942470
• Black Central Europe: Angelo Soliman (ca. 1721 to 1796), by Jeff Bowersox, including material on Josephine Soliman’s petitions. https://blackcentraleurope.com/sources/1750-1850/angelo-soliman-ca-1750/
• Wien Geschichte Wiki (City of Vienna): Angelo Soliman. https://www.geschichtewiki.wien.gv.at/Angelo_Soliman