Histories are also stories of forgetting. How do we go about recovering long-lost voices and stories to fill the gaps and silences? How do works of art dwelling on the periphery transform and unsettle our understanding of what is in the dominant center? In images sacred and profane from Venice and Genoa, to Florence and Livorno, Antwerp and Lisbon, Black Africans were largely marginalized in Renaissance imagery – often literally so, represented as they typically were as bystanders, nurses, kitchen maids, pages, musicians and entertainers, boatmen and gondoliers, executioners, and servants in crowded banquet halls. Still starker inequalities are impossible to ignore in contemporary lived realities – nowhere more so than that of the slave trade. The international conference Hidden in Plain Sight: Black African Lives and Visual Histories in Early Modern Europe is conceived with these inescapable truths firmly in mind. Hosted by the Dutch University Institute of Art History (NIKI) and NYU-Florence, the three-day event will bring together scholars in a wide-ranging conversation spanning a multiplicity of disciplines. The latter will range broadly, embracing global art history, African and African diasporic studies, anthropology, history, literary culture, and musicology. By necessity, ours must be a collective inquiry, drawing on contributions from specialists in different fields, working on different lands, practices, and knowledge systems.