Thomas E. A. Dale
Resident Fellow (2021-2022)
Department of Art History, UW-Madison
Visual images, ranging from the contested confederate statues to cellphone videos of George Floyd’s murder, constitute a significant technology for racial oppression or exclusion. Although coercive image practices have an acknowledged history that can be traced back to antiquity, it is only relatively recently that scholars have debated the ramifcations of pre-modern visual culture for our understanding of modern and contemporary race. Medievalists have recently responded to the alt-right’s misappropriation of medieval images and symbols by highlighting aspects of cultural diversity that challenge the myths of uniform Christian whiteness, but they have also questioned if it is appropriate to use the term “race” with its attendant meanings in modern and contemporary contexts or to apply the logic of critical race theory to recover the genealogies of modern racism in the medieval past, long before the term “race” first appeared in European languages. My presentation responds to these questions by exploring the representations of racial geneaologies and topographies in the art of Venice in the fourteenth century—focusing on examples in the basilica of San Marco, the Doge’s Palace, and the manuscripts of a crusading treatise by Marin Sanuto the Elder. This was a crucial moment in which Venice’s sea power sustained the colonisation of a multi-ethnic, multi-religious Levantine empire—the “Stato da Mar,” its merchants expanded its trading networks as far as China, and its mercantile fleet played a central role in the slave trade.
Thomas Dale (B.A. University of Toronto, M.A. & Ph.D., Johns Hopkins University) is President of the Medieval Academy of America, and Professor of Art History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research and teaching explore the visual culture of medieval Europe and the Mediterranean. Particular areas of interest include the cult of relics and the saints, the senses and religious experience, race and cultural encounter. He has published three books: Relics, Prayer and Politics in Medieval Venetia: Romanesque Mural Painting in the Crypt of Aquileia Cathedral (Princeton University Press, 1997); as editor/contributor with John Mitchell, Shaping Sacred Space and Institutional Identity in Romanesque Mural Painting. Essays in Honour of Otto Demus (Pindar, 2004); and Pygmalion’s Power: Romanesque Sculpture, The Senses, and Religious Experience (Penn State University Press, 2019); as well as over 30 articles and book chapters. His research has been supported by the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (CASVA), Dumbarton Oaks, the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Samuel H. Kress Foundation. He has held visiting professorships at the Ecole des Hautes Etudies en Sciences Sociales, Paris, and the University of Colorado-Boulder.