Fra Angelico's The Miracle of the Black Leg: Skin Colour and the Perception of Ethiopians in Florence before 1450

Abstract

For the high altar of San Marco in Florence, Fra Angelico painted a scene in which Saints Cosmas and Damian graft the black leg of a deceased Ethiopian onto the body of a white European devotee. The white man, upon awaking, ‘saw nothing wrong’. Did he, or his audience around 1440, really have no objection to his new black leg? It would seem that to them the issue was not that the leg was black, but whether or not it came from a Christian. This essay uses Fra Angelico's image to ask broad questions about the contingency of skin colour and its associations in Florence before the advent of the transatlantic slave trade. It reviews the polarized position of recent scholarship on race in premodern Europe and seeks to follow a middle path. The development of this imagery after 1500, especially in Spain, shows racialized hostility towards the Ethiopian, which was not necessarily the case in the early fifteenth‐century examples discussed here. Instead, ideas of unity, rather than difference, will be employed as a framework for interpretation.