Previous articleNext article FreeCultural Encounter, Race, and a Humanist Ideology of Empire in the Art of Trecento VeniceThomas E. A. DaleThomas E. A. Dale Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreThe art of trecento Venice, particularly in the official government settings of San Marco and the Palazzo Ducale, has long been understood to represent a shift in the Venetian outlook. One can readily see a turning away from its former political and cultural dependency on the Byzantine Empire to assert a new self-confidence as cosmopolitan hub of an international trade network and an emerging colonial power in the Levant, while simultaneously embracing the lingua franca of Europe, the “maniera moderna” first described as “gothic” beginning in the fifteenth century. I seek to revise this celebratory and triumphalist narrative by putting Venice’s embrace of cultural encounter and appropriation in conversation with genealogies and topographies of race and racialization viewed through the lens of early Italian humanism and its ideas about empire. In asserting that certain image programs of early trecento Venice in mosaics, sculpture, and illuminated manuscripts constitute “techniques of race,” I draw on a framework for premodern race articulated by Sara Ahmed, a scholar of feminist, queer, and racial studies. In her essay “Race as Sedimented History,” Ahmed argues, “The idea of race, the idea that humans exist as distinct groups with common lines of descent, was a useful idea, which in turn gives us a different idea of ideas: ideas as techniques for rule … It is not that there are distinct races. But once human beings are understood in these terms, race comes to have a certain kind of existence.” Ahmed further emphasizes the materiality of race: “To think of race as a sedimented history is to think of how race matters as matter.”1The visual images from trecento Venice that I will explore here reveal at once the intrinsic power of material representations as techniques of race and the complex, even contradictory, attitudes toward racial and religious difference in the premodern Mediterranean world. In Fig. 1, from the missal commissioned by Doge Andrea Dandolo in the 1340s (Venice, Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, MS lat. III, 111 [2116], fol. 142r), Venice’s patron saint, Mark the Evangelist, is attacked by a Black African and two light-skinned, turbaned Egyptians as he celebrates the Easter mass in Alexandria.2 The threatening figure of a Black African, who embodies a dehumanizing racialized figure frequently described in medieval Christian writings as an Ethiopian, takes the lead in violently strangling the Christian saint.3 Yet he is joined by light-skinned Muslims, who were considered likely converts due to the relative whiteness of their skin.4Fig. 1. Saint Mark the Evangelist is attacked as he celebrates Easter mass in Alexandria. Missal of Andrea Dandolo, c. 1343–45. Venice, Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, MS lat. III, 111 (2116), fol. 142r. Photo: Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, Venice.View Large ImageDownload PowerPointFig. 2 comes from one of the capitals of the Palazzo Ducale: it is a remarkably naturalistic portrait of a Mongol who appears together with heads of other physiognomic types that were used to define distinct races; elsewhere in the sculpture of the palace, Mongols are labeled “Tartars,” a term that, like “Ethiopian,” was used as a negative form of racialization in medieval Latin texts.5 Though sometimes interpreted as celebrating Venice’s expansive trading network reaching as far east as Mongol China, these images, in my view, also embody racial genealogies and topographies of race. I further propose that early Italian humanism contributed to the perception and production of race in trecento Venice by emphasizing Trojan and Roman descent and advocating for a restoration of a universal Roman Empire in a new, Christian form.Fig. 2. Mongol head. Detail of capital P16 of Peoples of Diverse Nations, c. 1342–48. Museo dell’Opera, Palazzo Ducale, Venice. Photo: Author.View Large ImageDownload PowerPointIn what follows I begin with a broader consideration of medieval constructions of race and show how its genealogical conception is visualized in the manuscripts of Fra Paolino Veneto’s compendium of history, the Chronologia magna. I then explore the visualization of race in three further contexts during the early fourteenth century: first, the public narrative cycles commissioned for the Basilica of San Marco by the Venetian doge and historian Andrea Dandolo, including mosaics in the Baptistery and the Pala feriale, painted by Paolo Veneziano to cover the Pala d’Oro, the golden altarpiece at the high altar of San Marco; second, the maps and pictorial narratives of the Liber secretorum fidelium Crucis, a crusading treatise authored by a merchant and diplomat, Marin Sanudo Torsello; and third, the exterior sculpture of the Palazzo Ducale, or Doge’s Palace, begun in the early 1340s. I propose that these images highlight racial and religious difference while promoting a universal empire, in which Christianity was projected as a new ethnos or race superseding other religious and racial identifications. I also want to foreground what will become more apparent at the end of this paper, that the racialization witnessed in these images, more than simply a form of fixed representation in words and images, was a process that was ultimately realized more concretely in a series of harmful and discriminatory practices that include legal exclusions and prohibitions, as well as the reprehensible practices of enslavement for which theories of environmental determinism and religious difference provided the justifications visualized in the works discussed here.6 Also important to emphasize, as Geraldine Heng has observed, is the complex interaction of multiple racializing discourses, simultaneously promoting genealogy and lineage of distinct “gentes,” nations whose bloodline or “stirps” was claimed to be traced to esteemed ancestors alongside pan-European discourses of religious difference within the framework of Christian claims to universalism and supersession of all previous identities.7Before turning to medieval Venice, however, I want to acknowledge the importance of this time and place in America’s contested histories of race, and intersections with medieval studies. The University of Virginia’s historic campus, where we gather today, was founded by Thomas Jefferson, principal author of the Declaration of Independence, who held complicated views on race,8 advocating for the abolition of slavery, yet relying on enslaved people to run his own estate and fathering unacknowledged children with the enslaved African American woman Sally Hemings.9 This concealed history has only recently been officially acknowledged at Jefferson’s Monticello estate, in 2018. On campus, the new Memorial to Enslaved Laborers, dedicated in 2021, honors the memory of African Americans who built the original university buildings and grounds.10 Equal in circumference to Jefferson’s domed Rotunda, for which the design was derived from the Pantheon in Rome, the new memorial takes the shape of broken shackles and displays hundreds of names of enslaved people and placeholders for thousands yet to be discovered. This sacred space for African Americans, indeed all Americans, is also a counter-monument to the equestrian statue of Robert E. Lee, a potent symbol of the Confederacy and slavery, and the focus of the Unite the Right rally in August 2017.For many medievalists, the Charlottesville rally was a moment of reckoning with the weaponization of the medieval past by white nationalists, who displayed Norse runes, Celtic and crusader crosses, and fake armor alongside Confederate and Nazi flags as references to an allegedly pure white medieval past.11 A common response by medievalists to these false narratives was to emphasize premodern globalism and cultural complexity. For example, scholars point to Black Africans, Muslims, and Jews depicted in a mural painting in Verona being welcomed by Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II, an image interpreted as a statement of Frederick’s cosmopolitan empire and court;12 and Saint Maurice, a convert to Christianity from Egypt, is represented for the first time with recognizable sub-Saharan African features in the thirteenth-century sculpture at Magdeburg, thus offering a model of redemption and virtuous knighthood for Black Africans and of inclusion within universalizing Christian imperium as projected by Frederick II.13 But the white nationalist myths of the Middle Ages cannot so easily be dismantled unless we also acknowledge the systemic racism that underlies Western attitudes toward difference, be they explicit forms of cultural discrimination or more tacit ones of exclusion and white normativity. It is these uncomfortable “sedimented histories” that critical race theory encourages us to uncover and teach.14Accepting the framework of race for the Middle Ages requires us to confront the argument that this charged term, which originated in the fifteenth century, is anachronistic and misleading for medieval Europe. Robert Bartlett and William Chester Jordan have cautioned that medieval criteria of prejudice were primarily cultural—religious, legal, and linguistic—and more malleable, while modern racism emphasizes immutable and biologically based traits.15 There is growing consensus, however, that the techniques of race did exist in medieval Europe. Heng thus clarifies that premodern “race” is “a repeating tendency … to demarcate human beings through differences … that are selectively essentialized as absolute and fundamental, in order to distribute positions and powers differentially to human groups.”16 While the theorization of medieval race has been predominantly text-based, I want to emphasize what should be obvious from the recent focus on Confederate monuments: the power that visual images exercise as techniques of racialization and domination. As Debra Strickland, Madeline Caviness, and Asa Mittman have shown, visual culture reinforces racial difference through a range of visual signs—physiognomy, skin color, dress, topography, and narrative tropes such as idol worship and cannibalism.17 Yet, as Pamela Patton and Roland Betancourt have emphasized, the perception and visualization of race varies according to context; thus, the strident caricature of race in northern European art that is the focus of much recent scholarship contrasts with a more nuanced and complicated view of race in Iberia and the Eastern Roman Empire (“Byzantium”) resulting from greater familiarity during prolonged cohabitation and cultural alliances with distinct religious and ethnic groups.18Venice’s visualization of race is conditioned by its close economic and cultural ties to the Levant. Adopting a regional tradition that Mark had founded the church of nearby Aquileia, Venetian merchants seized Mark’s relics from Alexandria in 828, on the grounds that the Egyptian caliph was about to dismantle the saint’s shrine and that Venice itself was predestined to be Mark’s final resting place.19 The Egyptian connection was enhanced by expanding trade under the Mamluks in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, including grains, textiles, and luxury goods, but also enslaved peoples of diverse religious and geographical origins, who were forcedly brought to market on the same ships.20 Cultural encounter was further fostered by colonization of Byzantium: in the wake of the Fourth Crusade in 1204, Venice acquired Crete, Negroponte, parts of mainland Greece, and the Dalmatian coast. These outposts allowed Venice to expand its trade beyond the Mediterranean and through the Black Sea to Mongol China, as documented by Marco Polo.21 At the same time, the Venetians, who forbade Jews to reside in the city prior to the creation of the ghetto in the sixteenth century, ostensibly because of their role as moneylenders, came to preside over large Jewish communities in the colonies of the Stato da Mar.22The genealogical underpinnings of Venetian ideas about race are apparent in the manuscripts of universal chronicles authored by the Venetian Franciscan, Fra Paolino Veneto, in the 1320s and 1330s, when he served as penitentiary and diplomat at the papal court of John XXII in Avignon.23 In the working manuscript of his Chronologia magna (Venice, Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, MS lat. Z. 399 [1610]), Fra Paolino presents a visual summary in a table showing genealogies of nations, royal dynasties, and priests and pontiffs, beginning on folio 1r with the biblical genealogy of the descendants of Adam and Eve (Fig. 3). In his Prologue, featured on the same folio, Paolino defines the purpose of this pictorial compendium to “show the origin, connection and order of history through six ages up to the present time, and thanks to a picture … these events are readily and clearly understood … just as field or crop is known in a seed, and a tree by its root.”24Fig. 3. Prologue and Descendants of Adam and Eve. Fra Paolino Veneto, Chronologia magna, Venice, 1320s. Venice, Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, MS lat. Z. 399 (1610), fol. 1r. Photo: Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, Venice.View Large ImageDownload PowerPointJoan Holladay has argued that genealogical series were used with increasing frequency in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries to visualize dynastic and political legitimacy, in parallel with the sacred model of Christ’s descent in the Tree of Jesse.25 I go further to suggest how genealogies, drawing on metaphors of trees and cultivation, are racialized. In Paolino’s Chronicle, the linea regularis, a vertical column at the center of each folio’s verso, forms the spine and timeline of history. It shows portrait series depicting the patriarchs, beginning with Adam, judges, and kings of Israel before giving way to Persian and Egyptian rulers, and finally the Roman emperors, starting with Julius Caesar. Parallel columns are devoted to the Jewish priesthood; the lineage of Christ; the kings of Italy and the Latins; the kings of Troy, Greece, Egypt, Sicily, and Athens; and eventually the doges of Venice. These columns of names and portraits, outlined in red and divided into temporal units by horizontals, embody bloodline, a classic definition of race, as it first appeared in Latin vernaculars in the fifteenth century. As Charles de Miramon has demonstrated, the oldest occurrences of the term race in French, from which the English term directly derives, were applied in 1481 to the breeding of birds, dogs, and horses used in hunting, and from this context, race was applied to the human bloodlines of their masters.26 The Old French term Haraz, used for breeds of horses, can be traced even farther back, to the twelfth century, and the Italian term razza to the fourteenth century, with possible origins in Latin radix [root] or Arabic ras [origin].27 Essential to genealogies of dynastic rulers, lineage could also apply to gentes—the nations or peoples, defined by geography and religion, and the biblical genealogies descending from the sons of Noah and Abraham.The map of Venice (Figs. 4, 5) is placed strategically on folio 7r to complement the Trojan lineage on the opposite folio, concluding with Priam and his progeny. A second Trojan named Priam, grandnephew of the elder king and son of Polites, mentioned in the Aeneid as “destined to increase the Italian race,” appears in the lowest row of Trojans (Fig. 4).28 The adjacent text in Paolino’s chronicle explains that the younger Priam traveled by ship to the Adriatic and built the city of Venice.29 Antenor, another Trojan, is described as marveling at Priam’s achievement before he himself founded Padua and Altinum.Fig. 4. Trojan Lineage. Fra Paolino Veneto, Chronologia magna, Venice, 1320s. Venice, Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, MS lat. Z. 399 (1610), fol. 6v. Photo: Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, Venice.View Large ImageDownload PowerPointFig. 5. Map of Venice. Fra Paolino Veneto, Chronologia magna, Venice, 1320s. Venice, Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, MS lat. Z. 399 (1610), fol. 7r. Photo: Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, Venice.View Large ImageDownload PowerPointFra Paolino’s map of Venice, the earliest extant plan of the city (Fig. 5), reinforces the racial metaphors of seed and soil by identifying the Trojans as colonists and cultivators of the Venetian terrain.30 Oriented to the southeast with the Arsenale, the Certosa, and Castello at the top, the map details the islands and canals within the mudflats, including the Grand Canal, while also delineating forty-six parishes associated with the city’s founding families. Piazza San Marco, the Basilica, and the Palazzo Ducale, enclosed within fortifications, feature prominently near the middle of the map, as does the Arsenale, the shipyard for the Venetian navy, to the far east at the top of the map. Rialto, the earliest settlement, is indicated by the wooden bridge over the Grand Canal. The inclusion of this and other maps in Paolino’s chronicle, alongside genealogical diagrams, demonstrates his affirmation that maps are essential in explicating the topographical underpinnings of history, and maps or pictures in turn require the explication of texts. Paolino specifically connects the Noahtic genealogies of the three continents and their distinct races with maps, as he makes the case for the interdependence of text and “pictura,” arguing that it is “impossible without a world map to make an image of, or even for the mind to grasp, what is said of the children and grandchildren of Noah, and of the Four Kingdoms and other nations and regions, both in divine and human writings.”31Fra Paolino’s assertion that Trojans founded Venice revised a tradition that the city had been founded in two waves of emigration from the mainland, one during the invasion of the Huns in the fifth century, and another following the Lombard invasion in 565.32 Venice claimed Roman inheritance based on its connection to Aquileia, Roman capital of the province of Venetia and Istria, founded in the second century BCE. As early as the eighth century CE, Paul the Deacon had asserted that Saint Mark the Evangelist established the Christian church there, and had Peter consecrate Hermagoras as founding bishop, but Venice later claimed it had replaced Aquileia when Roman Christians fled to the islands of the Venetian lagoon. The new theory of origins may be traced back to the twelfth-century chronicle Origo civitatum Italie seu Venetiarum.33 Competing with the inland city of Aquileia, which had been repopulated by the Carolingians in the ninth century, Venice established a pre-Roman lineage, affirming that the Trojans had founded Aquileia after they fled the ruins of Troy.Venice adapted the narrative of Guido delle Colonne’s Historia Troiana.34 The Venetian chronicler of the Origo civitatum Italie claimed that Antenor “entered the lagoon with seven galleys, and in that place built the city named Aquileia, because it was bound by waterways.”35 It was further asserted that the people of the Venetian lagoon, the Eneti or Venetici, derived their name from another Trojan, Aeneas, alleged founder of Rome.36 At the end of the thirteenth century, this tradition was updated in the Chronicle of Marco, who claimed that the first Trojan colonists had already populated the islands of the Venetian lagoon itself, and further that “the first construction of Rialto preceded the construction of the city of Rome” and Padua.37 Marco’s assertion of Venetian primacy among Trojan foundations responded to the alleged rediscovery of bodily remains of Antenor in the heart of Padua in 1283.38 Local antiquarian Lovato de Lovati identified the remains and celebrated Antenor’s memory in an inscription and a new monument encasing a late antique sarcophagus containing a cypress-wood coffin inscribed “Regis Antenoris Memoria.” In Lovati’s new epitaph, Antenor is described as a “voice straining for peace of the fatherland,” thus anticipating the humanist argument that a new Roman empire would restore peace.39 A fuller account of Venice’s Trojan lineage is provided around 1300 by Pace da Ferrara’s poem dedicated to Doge Pietro Gradenigo:The … renowned progeny of the Trojans placed their noble walls upon the Illyrian brine … Aeneas, guided to Latium from the Sicilian waters was, at last, the origin of the race of Romulus. But Antenor arriving safely on the shores of the Adriatic prudently occupied the pleasant lands of the Illyrian gulf … And when many foundations of the Venetian people were established, he tried to bring the rights of the sea under his control. Little by little the city was built up in the middle of the waves that would be the head and substance of a new kingdom. From that time forth … ruling so many peoples … with her scepter, [she] … has grown so much, renowned through the whole world, that Rome herself is inferior in power to the city of Venice.40A final stage in Venice’s attempt to gain the upper hand over Padua in its Trojan pedigree is recorded both in Paolino’s chronicles and in Marin Sanudo Torsello’s crusading treatise, the Liber secretorum fidelium Crucis, composed in the 1320s and 1330s. Sanudo introduces another Trojan, who could directly claim the bloodline of King Priam of Troy, the king’s grandnephew and namesake. According to Sanudo, “a band of [Trojans], under Priam, the young offspring of the nephew of King Priam from the sister of Laomedon, arriving with questing ships at the end of the Adriatic sea, and with islands in view and close to land, he decided to build dwellings on the islands to preserve his accustomed liberty, thinking it unworthy that the freemen he was leading should be subject to another.”41 Paralleling Sanudo’s account, as seen earlier, Paolino specifies that Antenor marveled at Priam’s new city of Venice and decided to build his own cities of Padua and Altinum.42Venice’s rivalry with ancient Rome is visualized in the same Venetian manuscript of Paolino’s chronicle by the inclusion of a map of Rome toward the end of the text (Fig. 6).43 What is significant is its dual focus on the topography of the seven hills and the relics of antiquity: the Roman walls, with the major gates and aqueducts; the ruins of the Colosseum at center; the Pantheon (Santa Maria ad Martyres), identified as the Christian church, nearby; and toward the bottom right the Lateran Palace, with its outdoor display of ancient bronzes, including an alleged head of Constantine, the Spinario or Thorn-puller, and the equestrian monument of Marcus Aurelius, then believed to be Constantine. The meaning of these imperial remains was not lost on Cola di Rienzo. Speaking at the Lateran in 1347 to advocate for a restoration of the Roman Empire, he contrasted the sorry condition in which Rome found itself with the majesty that she had once enjoyed; referring to the tablet with the Lex de imperio vespasiani, he observed that the Roman people had once given power to emperors and could renew the empire in the present.44 The prominence of Constantinian relics only strengthened the idea of the renewal of empire in Christian form.Fig. 6. Map of Rome. Fra Paolino Veneto, Chronologia magna, Venice, 1320s. Venice, Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, MS lat. Z. 399 (1610), fol. 98r. Photo: Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, Venice.View Large ImageDownload PowerPointThis reverence for ancient Rome and Trojan lineage highlights also what Alexander Lee has recently shown was a growing consensus among humanists in northern Italy, including Francesco Petrarca, that a restoration of the Empire was desirable to preserve peace and liberty among the warring communes.45 Despite his admiration for Cicero and the ideals of the republic, Petrarch came to see the renewal of the Empire as part of a positive humanist agenda in which the recovery of Roman literature and rhetoric provided a foundation for restoring the Augustan peace. Petrarch comes close to certain modern concepts of race when he evokes Trojan lineage as a shared heritage for Italian city states. Writing to Doge Andrea Dandolo of Venice in May 1354 to dissuade him from continuing war with Genoa, Petrarch appeals to a shared Italian identity rooted in the land and Trojan heritage: “resist, I beg you, and, since Trojan blood flows within you, consider … the Trojan commander’s words: ‘Lay aside your arms, O blood of mine.’”46 The enemies of the Italians are characterized by Petrarch in an earlier letter to Doge Dandolo in June 1351 as principally peoples from the East, thus participating in what Nancy Bisaha has described as a form of premodern “Orientalism” rooted in Greek and Roman attitudes toward others:Would that your enemies were cities such as Damascus or Susa, Memphis or Smyrna rather than Genoa! Would that you were fighting the Persians or Arabs, the Thracians or Illyrians … If you still have any respect for the Latin name, consider that those you endeavor to destroy are your brothers. Alas, as in Thebes long ago, now throughout Italy battlelines of brothers are being drawn.47To these Eastern enemies, Petrarch adds the topos of monstrosity:A monstrous race [genus] of men are they … who lead miserable and worthless lives for shameful pay … who love war, and like wolves and vultures delight in the slaughter of men … I beg you not to allow a flourishing state, entrusted to your race, and this wealthy and beautiful region of Italy … to fall prey to foreign and famished wolves.48If we accept the idea that Petrarch’s articulation of Italian identity is tinged with the language of race, including shared bloodline, geography, and character, then we can also recognize that the normative Trojan and Roman heritage he claims for Italians is complemented by a negative racial counterpart. Petrarch’s emphasis on the Eastern Other invites consideration of a more visible contrast found in Paolino’s visualization of universal history, which is rooted in another genealogy drawn from biblical history. While the first folio shows a single lineage descending from Adam and Eve, the next opening draws on Isidore of Seville to articulate a racial geography based on the descendants of Noah’s three sons (Fig. 7). On folio 1v, Noah appears at the top of the linea regularis with a diagram of the Ark and its five compartments beside him to record his role in the salvation of humanity from the flood. Shem, the eldest, appears immediately beneath Noah and is associated with Asia. Japheth appears immediately to the right with his descendants in Europe.Fig. 7. Noah and the Descendants of His Three Sons. Fra Paolino Veneto, Chronologia magna, Venice, 1320s. Venice, Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, MS lat. Z. 399 (1610), fol. 1v. Photo: Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, Venice.View Large ImageDownload PowerPointHam’s lineage occupies folio 2r (Fig. 8). Paolino follows Isidore of Seville, who, in the Etymologies, attributes the origins of distinct nations or races on the three known continents to the three sons of Noah, casting Shem as the ancestor of Asia, Japheth of Europe, and Ham of Africa. For Isidore and other Christian commentators, Noah’s curse on Ham for mocking his nakedness cast a pall over all Africans from Ham’s line and particularly Ethiopians. Paolino copies the map frequently found in manuscripts of Isidore’s Etymologies and adds the Tower of Babel to signal the origins of linguistic diversity as a complement to the Noahtic genealogies.49Fig. 8. Descendants of Ham in Africa. Fra Paolino Veneto, Chronologia magna, Venice, 1320s. Venice, Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, MS lat. Z. 399 (1610), fol. 2r. Photo: Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, Venice.View Large ImageDownload PowerPointAs Catherine Leglu has recently argued, the curse of Ham shaped the racialization of his descendants in terms of physiognomy and skin color in Fra Paolino’s pictorial genealogies.50 Ham’s four sons were associated with five African nations: Chus with the Ethiopians, Mesarim with the Egyptians, Puth with the Troglodytes, and Canaan with the Afri and Phoenicians. The inclusion of the Troglodytes among Ham’s dark-skinned African descendants is significant, as this people was described among the “monstrous races” thought to reside in Ethiopia described by Pliny and in the medieval tradition of the Wonders of the East. What made them monstrous and susceptible to racialization, apart from their localization in Ethiopia, was a series of cultural attributes including dwelling in caves, lacking speech, and their penchant for eating snakes.51 In the Venetian manuscript of the Chronicle, the line of kings of Egypt begins at the bottom of fol. 1v. The first king, Festus, though depicted as a European portrait type, with flowing hair and beard, is distinguished by his darker gray skin. The Egyptians are depicted with similar dark gray skin in the Pentecost mosaic at San Marco (Fig. 9), dating from around 1200, as an example of the desired conversion and redemption of the Ham’s African descendants within a universalizing Christian Church.Fig. 9. Egyptians, detail of Pentecost mosaic, c. 1200. San Marco, Venice. Photo: Ekkehard Ritter, North Adriatic Project Fieldwork Records and Papers, Dumbarton Oaks, Trustees for Harvard University, Washington, DC.View Large ImageDownload PowerPointThe racialization of the Egyptian kings is also seen in the manuscript now in London, British Library, MS Egerton 1500 (fol. 3v; Fig. 10), which is a translation of Paolino’s text into Occitan, made under his supervision while he was resident at the papal court of John XXII in Avignon. Leglu assumes that the artists of this version of the text were local, and that they deployed a more pronounced racialized iconography based on the ty
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Dec 13, 2023
Kevin B. Reynolds 
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