Cultural Encounter, Race, and a Humanist Ideology of Empire in the Art of Trecento Venice

The 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 drawon 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