Thomas E. A. Dale

Visualizing Race & Cultural Encounter in Medieval Venice

Public art, as recent responses to confederate statues have demonstrated, constitutes a powerful technology of race originating in premodernity.  But is it appropriate to apply critical race theory to the medieval past, long before “race” appeared in European languages?  And do Latin Christian theories and representations of non-Christian Others have anything to do with the essentialist, biological and physiognomic theories of race that was used to justify the slave trade?

My book project offers the first in-depth study of race and cultural encounter in the visual culture of medieval Venice during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.  During this period, Venice became a colonial power, controlling almost half of the East Roman Empire, and expanded trade eastward as far as Mongol China. Simultaneously, Venice played a central role in the slave trade, acquiring and enslaving Slavs, Circassians, Greeks, Tartars, and North-African, black Muslims. For the first time, Venice ruled a significant multi-ethnic and mult-religious population. It is in this context that I explore how Venice uses architecture, appropriated objects and forms, visual narratives in sculpture, mosaic and illuminated manuscripts to justify a proto-humanist ideology of empire, that is articulated by Petrarch and other antiquarians in the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Race emerges as a multi-valent and changeable concept, drawing on religion, physical appearance, customs, geography and genealogy to exercise Venetian dominance over the non-Christian Other. As much as Venice participates in some of the pan-European racial tropes both in images and texts, the evidence of Venetian historical texts and wills in the Venetian archives offers more nuanced views of Venice’s intercultural relations, demonstrating a taste for luxury goods from the east and more positive views of the enslaved Other including frequent references to manumission and collaboration of the Venetian mercantile elites with (former) enslaved members of households and workshops.

Thomas Dale (B.A. University of Toronto, M.A. & Ph.D., Johns Hopkins University) is Simona and Jerome Chazen Distinguished Chair in Art History at UW-Madison. His research and teaching explore the visual culture of medieval Europe and the Mediterranean. Special interests 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. Awards include election as fellow of the Medieval Academy of America, and fellowships from CASVA at the National Gallery of Art, 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 École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris, and the University of Colorado-Boulder.