In the Middle Ages, the lives of saints were the closest thing to bestsellers: stories copied, read aloud, and performed across Europe. They offered the faithful models of virtuous suffering, miraculous healing, and divine intervention. One such story tells of a Roman verger—a church caretaker—whose leg had been consumed by cancer. In a dream, the twin physician-saints Cosmas and Damian appear to him with a startling cure: They exhume a recently buried Ethiopian from the cemetery of Saint Peter in Chains, sever his healthy leg, graft it onto the sleeping man, and affix the diseased limb to the corpse. When the verger wakes, he finds himself healed—no pain, no scar, no trace of the violence that made his cure possible.
All this is depicted in The Miracle of the Black Leg, painted in 1370 by the Master of the Rinuccini Chapel in Florence. For the medieval viewer (almost certainly imagined as white and European), the wonder lies in the successful transplant: the miracle of the divine made evident.
But for me, the image’s logic lands elsewhere. The painting stages the Ethiopian body as already available—pre-sanctioned—for dismemberment, asking the viewer to accept the extraction and reassignment of his limb without pause. The miracle depends on an erasure: the quiet normalization of a Black corpse’s violated integrity. And it is that visual conditioning—its invitation to overlook the Ethiopian man’s personhood—that feels most unsettling.
And so, I came to this image agitated by what felt like an evasion: a refusal to dwell in the violence itself. As a Black woman raised in the American South—where the afterlives of slavery announce themselves in the landscape, in monuments, in flags—I could not look at the dismembered Ethiopian leg without feeling the weight of a racial history that has never quite let up.
My first encounter with The Miracle of the Black Leg was through a scholarly interpretation that, like many in our field, sought to reassure the reader: reminding us that “race” had not yet assumed its modern biological form, that medieval viewers understood difference differently, that there are uplifting depictions of Black figures too. But that scholarly reassurance sat uneasily with me. I recognized the familiar shape of a move art historians often make: offsetting the discomfort of violent imagery with historical caveats, or counterbalancing negative representations with positive ones, as if the latter could absolve or neutralize the former. That gesture, well-intentioned though it may be, felt like a kind of intellectual balm applied too quickly, smoothing over the visceral shock of a Black body rendered disposable.
And so I turned back to the image, not to castigate any one scholar, but to question the larger disciplinary habit that treats medieval racial formations as either too embryonic or too foreign to bear the weight of our contemporary reactions. What if, instead of cautioning against presentism, we allowed our discomfort to guide our inquiry? What if the unease itself were a historically meaningful response—evidence of the long, recursive life of visual scripts. Following Geraldine Heng, I use the term “race-making” to describe the selective essentialization of human difference—the transformation of certain traits into fixed, hierarchical qualities. This aligns with Karen and Barbara Fields’s concept of “racecraft,” the ongoing social labor through which imagined differences acquire the weight of natural law.
To read medieval images of Blackness as solely symbolic—merely allegorical—is to refuse the fact that these visual formulas laid the groundwork for the very racial scripts we are living with today. We are living, after all, in a moment when tech billionaires Elon Musk and Peter Thiel openly romanticize a fictionalized Middle Ages to justify their own visions of hierarchy and rule. The medieval past is once again being dangerously mobilized to tell dangerous stories about who belongs, who leads, and who matters. This essay asks what becomes visible when we stop treating medieval images as immune to race-making and, instead, take seriously the violence they stage.
The Master of the Rinuccini Chapel’s depiction of The Miracle of the Black Leg (ca. 1370) is the oldest extant representation in the West. In it, a clear hierarchy is established, one that positions white life as sacred and Black bodies as profanely accessible.
The stark visual contrast between the Ethiopian corpse and the white verger reveals a deliberate imbalance in how dignity and bodily autonomy are represented. While the Black corpse lies naked with only his hands covering his genitalia, the white verger is afforded a blanket to preserve his modesty. The nakedness functions as more than mere exposure; it reinforces the idea of the body being available to the viewer, to the faithful—positioned for consumption, dissection, and dismemberment in ways the white body never is. Even though both figures have been dismembered, the white verger’s body remains visually inaccessible; we cannot see the contours of his body where the leg is affixed.
This differential treatment operates as both symbolic and literal violence. The painting thus renders the Black body accessible and vulnerable, while the white body maintains protective boundaries that preserve its fundamental human dignity.
This unequal distribution of dignity is compounded by the Black skin of the corpse, which prevents a clear reading of the body. Rendered in very dark paint, it is difficult to distinguish the contours of his body, the way he is joined together. This visual obscurity speaks to a deliberate anonymity, a refusal to distinguish his features or acknowledge his personhood. In its darkness, the Ethiopian corpse has no identity, no name—the means of fully identifying with him as a fellow human is obscured by his Black skin.
This is not accidental but strategic, creating a psychological distance that allows viewers to see this body as something less than fully human. When features are rendered indistinct, when the individual dissolves into shadow, the act of mutilation does not register the same way it would with a clearly defined human form. The darkness becomes a dehumanizing veil that reduces the corpse to mere material—a body without personhood, without the specificity that would demand moral recognition or empathetic witness.
This visual vulnerability reinforces the Black body’s primary function in the exchange: not as a person deserving protection, but as a resource to be utilized. In this exchange, then, the Black body functions bidirectionally: It is simultaneously giver and receptacle, antidote and host. Not only does the corpse provide the healthy limb that restores the parishioner’s mobility; it also receives his diseased, cancerous leg in return. This dual utility reveals how the Black body is valued not for its own wholeness or integrity, but for its capacity to serve white bodily needs in multiple ways.
With its homogenous black color, the Ethiopian corpse recedes into the background, while the white cancerous leg moves to the foreground. The verger’s limb is the only anatomical part of the corpse that is clearly legible. Through a play of light and shadow, the bloody white limb advances visually, claiming prominence in a body otherwise rendered invisible. This emphasis is significant: In the Italian tradition, very few representations show the cancerous leg of the verger affixed to the Black corpse. The Master of the Rinuccini Chapel’s deliberate choice to foreground the grafting—to make the contaminated white flesh the most visible element of the Black body—transforms the corpse into something more than a passive donor. Instead, the Black body becomes legible only where it has been burdened with white disease, visible only as a repository for what white flesh rejects. The decision to illuminate this exchange reveals the corpse’s assigned role within this economy of miracles: valued not for its own integrity, but for its capacity to absorb what threatens white wholeness.
To read medieval images of Blackness as solely symbolic—merely allegorical—is to refuse the fact that these visual formulas laid the groundwork for the very racial scripts we are living with today.
The Master of Rinuccini Chapel’s Miracle of the Black Leg exposes how structural difference could be seeded through seemingly “harmless” miracle stories. The Black body, positioned as material, stands in contrast to a white body that retains full agency at its expense. To acknowledge this inequity is to see how medieval images participated in race-making, even before “race” assumed its modern biological form.
In medieval contexts, somatic difference was only one part of this process; religious and ethnic distinctions also contributed to the production of racial meaning. What makes these processes racial is not biology, but power: who is essentialized, who is dehumanized, and who is granted the full status of personhood.
Harriet A. Washington’s Medical Apartheid meticulously chronicles the long, devastating history of violence enacted on Black bodies in the name of medicine. The path from medieval miracle story to modern medical exploitation is not linear, nor should it be imagined as such. Still, a deep historical pattern is illuminated by the Miracle of the Black Leg: its quiet acceptance of Black suffering, its normalization of Black bodily disposability.
The image participates in a visual logic in which Black bodies appear available, extractable, and structurally necessary to secure white well-being. That logic has endured.
The violence of The Miracle of the Black Leg does not end with its medieval reception; it reverberates. This is made clear by how the narrative has been engaged with by both the legal scholar and journalist Patricia J. Williams and former poet laureate Natasha Trethewey.
Williams recounts being haunted by an image of the miracle, after shown to her by a student, in her 2024 book The Miracle of the Black Leg: Race, Human Bodies, and the Spirit of the Law. She eventually locates her visceral disturbance in Frederick Douglass’s own language of amputation: the severing of personhood under slavery. Trethewey, in Thrall, confronts the story’s recursiveness, observing how in each depiction the Black leg becomes both “grafted narrative” and “redacted text.” Across centuries, the image retains its power to unsettle because it stages a violence that has never fully receded. It is, as Trethewey writes, “a story that’s still being written.”
To look directly at this image is to refuse the comforts of historical distance. Acknowledging the Ethiopian corpse’s erasure does not negate the existence of positive medieval representations of Blackness. Rather, it reveals the full complexity of a period that has long been sanitized. Naming the violence—its logic, its scripts, its quiet normalization—is part of an ethics of viewing that resists the impulse to explain away our discomfort.
The unease that rises in us has a history. It signals recognition. And in tracing the recursive life of race-making across time, we glimpse not a clean path from past to present, but a set of enduring structures that demand to be seen. To look straight at the Middle Ages is, finally, to look straight at ourselves. 
Featured image: Miracle of the Black Leg (detail), Master of the Rinuccini Chapel (Matteo di Pacino), Saint Cosmas and Saint Damian, c. 1370–75, tempera and gold leaf on panel, 79.4 x 135.6 cm / North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh
