In western Early Modern imaginaire, the Ottoman enemy was often perceived, at a symbolic level, as the quintessence of threat and persecution against the Catholic faith. Figures of ‘Turks’, identified by way of easily recognizable attributes (such as the turban), were therefore substituted for other, radically different characters in a plurality of visual narratives. In a semantically significant anachronism, Turks populated Old and New Testament scenes as well as the depictions of the martyrdoms of Christians persecuted by the Romans in the first centuries. In parallel, the same attributes were also sometimes superimposed on the figures of other, contemporary enemies of the faith, who lacked an established iconographic tradition of their own: namely the Protestant ‘heretics’. This paper aims to illustrate this visual device through a selection of significant case studies taken from the territory of the Republic of Genoa, a state characterized by a long-standing involvement in the fight against Ottoman forces and Barbary corsairs.

This text proposes a genealogy of the trope of the “Sodomitic Moor” in medieval Iberian culture and its consolidation from the Modern Age onwards, coinciding with the imperialist/colonialist expansion towards America. The object of the study are the literary sources that describe the martyrdom of Saint Pelagius in the 10th century (Raguel and Rosvita of Gandersheim) and the visual representations of the same subject in the 16th-century Spanish painting, specifically the images that make up the altarpiece of Saint Pelagius painted by Master of Becerril, which is now in Malaga’s Cathedral. The analysis of the sources will be carried out considering the contributions of queer theory to the study of medieval Iberian cultures through authors such as Mark Jordan or Gregory Hutchenson. As for the visual analysis, the text reviews the historiography of Spanish art history on the images that make up this altarpiece, as well as other contributions such as Francisco de Holanda’s theory of painting, the persecutions for sodomy that were consolidated at the end of the 15th century with the approval of the Pragmatic against Sodomy by the Catholic monarchs, or the principle of ‘interconnected Otherness’ defined by Victor Stoichita, which allows us to understand how the Muslim religious Other is interconnected with the racialized Indian Other from the end of the 15th century onwards.

The figure of St James riding his white horse and conquering the enemy is found throughout the Hispano-American world. While the image originated in Compostela (Galicia) in the 13th century to celebrate the victory of Christ’s apostle over the Muslims, in the 16th century it migrated to America to defeat the Christian faith’s new enemy: the indigenous Americans. This equestrian figure of a hero crushing the enemy underfoot would be what Aby Warburg referred to as a pathosformel - an effective, efficient figure that visually embodies the emotional charge of a time period and is part of a cultural strategy. The horseback rider is a triumphant hero who embodies the possibility of salvation for a culture that feels threatened with extinction. A fierce, white horse tramples the enemy underfoot. This enemy represents Otherness, which is a threat to the system’s stability. The conquest of America brought with it a new enemy, which embodied religious and cultural Otherness, a new enemy whose beliefs and ‘idolatry’ needed to be destroyed, a new enemy to be crushed by St James’ fierce horse: the indigenous Americans. With regard to the conquest of the American territory’s visual strategy, images that portrayed the Moor as an enemy continued to be produced, turning this iconography into a demonstration of the overall victory of the Christian religion over other belief systems. The simultaneously emerging iconography depicted a defeated indigenous American and a victorious St James the Moor-slayer. The formula has proven to be successful, as new uses have arisen lately.

This paper focuses on the visual and textual portrayal of the Polish commander and hetman (highest military officer), Stanislaw Żołkiewski (d. 1620), in an early 17th-century Ottoman illustrated history book, the Şehname-i Nadiri. Żołkiewski’s legendary memory was cemented in Polish history with his depictions in painting and literature. Yet, his depiction in a wellknown Ottoman book has largely escaped scholarly attention. The text of the Şehname-i Nadiri describes Żołkiewski as a wise and influential nobleman before it narrates his death on the battlefield by both lamenting the demise of a nobleman and celebrating the Ottoman victory. A painting of the Battle of Cecora in the same volume emphasizes his high rank and hints at the aftermath of his death. These textual and visual portrayals in the Şehname-i Nadiri offer an insight into representations of the Other in Ottoman historical narratives.

Several studies have highlighted the role assigned to images by religious congregations, particularly since the Counter-Reformation. Among the less studied religious orders is also that of the Augustinians, who, from the very beginning of the 16th century initiated within their Order a profound criticism of the evils of the Church. The most famous outcome of this criticism, with epochal repercussions for Christianity, was Martin Luther’s “protest” in Germany. In other Western European territories, struck by similar social problems but with a different cultural substrate and political context, the Augustinians faced the problems of their time, starting with a careful reform of their organization with the aim of being able to operate at their best in each territorial context according to the peculiar social, political and cultural contingencies. This reform in 1512 also included the establishment of the Augustinian Province of Sardinia, including Valencia, the Balearic Islands and the island of Sardinia. The extension of the religious institution coincided with the political one as the Kingdom of Sardinia, the Kingdom of Mallorca and the Kingdom of Valencia were part of the Crown of Aragon and, given their geographical location in the Mediterranean Sea, they were the Crown’s last line of defense against the Turkish offensive. These territories were in fact under constant attack by Ottomans and many inhabitants were captured and enslaved. Furthermore, in these territories the number of Moriscos (the descendants of the forcibly baptized Iberian Muslims) was high, which is why the issue of the conflict between religions was strongly felt. This conflict between the two religions can also be found in the images of Augustinian devotion. This paper explains how and why a change occurred in the representation of religious Otherness in Augustinian iconography in Sardinia between the 16th and 17th century.

At first glance, religious alterity - in contrast to other concepts of alterity - is not as comprehensively represented in medieval visual arts as it was perceived and discussed by contemporaries. However, in addition to the conspicuous and well-researched development of the Jewish hat, more signs for the visual display of religious difference from Christianity developed during the same period. This essay is devoted to one of these signs, the winged head, which has been little studied and whose semantics are largely underestimated. The geographically wide distribution of the winged head in Northern Europe in the period from about 1200 to 1500 and its meaning as an attribute of pagan belief are outlined. The reshaping of ancient mythological representations with bird’s wings into a medieval symbol can be understood as an appropriation of Antiquity and a creative invention of new signs by medieval artists. The use of the winged head in very different subjects demonstrates that, from the perspective of medieval northern Europeans, paganism remained a flexible concept that did not in every case focus on the contemporary confrontation with Islam, but could designate individuals in geographically, culturally, and chronologically different situations.

The eleventh-century psalter Vat. gr. 752 has four images of saints on pillars, of which only two are of a well-known stylite saint, St Simeon the Elder, while the other two are attributed to Saint Dositheos and Saint Silvester respectively. By examining the miniatures in the context provided by their captions and references to psalm verses, I argue that the identification of the non-stylite saints is accurate, and that therefore there must be a different reason for their being represented on pillars than that of a mistake by the artist or scribe. Through significant comparanda from the iconography of stylites and the representations of some scenes on the Genoa mandylion, I suggest that these non-stylite stylites, and by extension also the images of Simeon, break the adherence of the figuration of saints according to their Lives, and instead present us with representations of monuments to these saints, specifically, as busts on pillars, whether at shrines within churches or as street shrines. This iconography encapsulates the legitimacy of saints' cult and intercession, witnessing to what is perhaps the most ancient form of iconography for saints, as reported by Theodoret for Simeon the Elder.

This article explores the visual and textual representation(s) of St Eugenia of Rome, a cross-dressed saint, as reflected in Spanish and French source material. It builds on previous interpretations in stating that these representations underscore the saint’s womanhood. The chapter also highlights the indispensable contribution that workshops made in generating local iconographies, which were connected to a wider international circulation of patterns and models.

The story of Iphigenia was in wide circulation in the Hellenistic period and then revived in the Renaissance with many later Baroque and Neoclassical additions. Nevertheless, the character of Agame...

In this essay, the iconography of two panel paintings by Johannes Hispanus is discussed. The works, which appear to originate from a Florentine humanistic milieu, depict a few episodes from the childhood and youth of Archilles and are datable to the mid-1490s.The essay argues that the painter and his patron conceived the paintings’ narrative by following the Achilled by Statius quite closely. In addition, they were inspired by a well-established iconographic tradition which can be reconstructed thanks to frescoes, sarcophagi and various items from the decorative arts in the period extending from the Roman Imperial age to Late Antiquity. However, the paintings by Hispanus seem to have relied also on one specific pictorial interpretation which was much more recent, namely a set of two cassone paintings by the Master of Charles III of Durazzo (c. 1390). In the second part of the essay, the question is addressed of why the portrayal of Achilles’ early life was extremely rare in Italian art until the beginning of the 16th century. After presenting an overview of Achilles’ fortuna in literature, ranging from ancient Greek and Roman works to a few vernacular ones, the argument is made that Dante’s Divine Comedy, where the hero was placed in Hell, among its lecherous inhabitants, must have contributed enormously to the reception of Achilles as a despicable ‘slave to love.’ In fact, his reputation as a ’war hero’ was not restored until the High Renaissance thanks to the rediscovery of the Homeric poems.