The Black executioner

Medieval artists depicted bodies as vehicles for politics and hierarchy. Repeated enough, these roles began to appear natural

by Denva Gallant + BIO

The vault of the Zen Chapel in Saint Mark’s Basilica in Venice, Italy. Photo courtesy the author

is assistant professor of art history at Rice University in Houston, Texas. Her work spans manuscripts, painting, sculpture and performance to explore how images shape cultural imagination, devotional practice, and the visual construction of race.

We are used to reading pain on the face. A grimace, a cry, a body bent inward. In the gold mosaics on the Zen Chapel vault at Saint Mark’s Basilica in Venice, the evangelist Mark is dragged across a rocky ground by chain and rope. Yet he does not scream. His mouth is closed. His features are steady. Two figures at his feet pull the rope, looking at each other, while another, nearer his head, lifts a stick as if he intends to strike the saint. But Mark appears composed. One hand rises slightly. Whether this gesture halts, blesses or merely acknowledges is unclear. What is clear is the contrast: the exertion of his handlers against the saint’s iconic stillness. The image stages violence, but it does so through a carefully calibrated tension between movement and composure. Medieval images do not simply represent events. They distribute roles across bodies. When those roles are repeated often enough, they can begin to look like qualities of the body itself.

Mark’s martyrdom, detail from the Zen Chapel, Saint Mark’s Basilica, Venice, Italy

If pain does not register on the saint’s face, where are we meant to find it? Modern viewers expect suffering to distort the body – to carve agony visibly into flesh. Medieval martyrdom scenes were not designed to record suffering in the modern sense. The saint demonstrates his faith and his power through an immutable silence before his pain. A saint’s refusal to cry out was a sign of spiritual mastery. Silence reversed nature. It showed that faith could govern the body even under torture. In images, this composure becomes a visual convention. Suffering is acknowledged, but it is disciplined. The body becomes the site where faith is made visible.

Created in the mid-13th century, the mosaic in the Zen Chapel narrates the Life of Saint Mark: his missionary journey to Alexandria in Egypt; the miraculous healing of the cobbler Anianus; his arrest during Easter Mass; his martyrdom in Baucalis, where he was dragged through the city street; and finally his entombment by monks and clergy. Mark’s body is at the centre of the cycle, anchoring the visual narrative. It first appears at rest, reclining as an angel flies towards it. The folds of his garment pool around a figure momentarily untroubled. In repose, his body is set apart. Before Mark blesses, heals or endures violence, the saint’s body is marked as divinely appointed. After his angelic visit, he stands in the stern of a small boat bound for Alexandria. One hand is raised in blessing, fingers extended, in a gesture that will recur in different forms throughout the cycle. The gesture does not simply signify piety; it activates the body as a conduit of sacred authority. When Mark reaches the city, that same hand stretches toward the wounded cobbler Anianus. The saint points toward the cobbler’s open, injured hand, and the miracle is enacted in the space between them. Divine power moves through the saint’s body.

Mark with the cobbler Anianus, detail from the Zen Chapel, Saint Mark’s Basilica, Venice, Italy

In the bottom register, Mark stands in the centre of a church, his hands raised. Even before violence overtakes him, his body organises the composition. It is the axis around which other bodies turn. In the next scene, in which Mark is dragged to his martyrdom, violence is directed at the body, yet it does not break, bruise, bloody or disfigure it. The saint’s form remains formally undisturbed. It remains recognisable, capable. This is the same body that has blessed and healed; the same body through which sacred power has moved. It retains its status as the locus of sanctity. Finally, Mark lies entombed, stilled and intact. The body is enclosed within architecture, framed and presented. The narrative ends with preservation.

The saint’s body appears privileged – central, continuous, preserved. Yet its prominence does not spare it from use. It is the body through which faith must prove itself. It must heal. It must endure. It must remain recognisable even under assault. Through it, divine power becomes visible; upon it, mortal violence is tested. The narrative depends upon a body that can carry divine authority and survive its testing. In doing so, it secures the claim that sanctity resides here – in this flesh, in this church.

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Mark’s composure is only one element in a larger visual system. Around him, other bodies strain, bind and strike. At the centre of the martyrdom scene stands a Black would-be executioner, his arm raised to deliver a blow. He is visually arresting – the only Black figure in the composition – but he is not unprecedented. By the 13th century, the Black executioner had become a recognisable type in Western art. Often shown carrying out the violent commands of rulers, his body performed the act that others authorised. In such scenes, violence is routed through him.

In the mosaic at the Basilica in Piazza San Marco, that flow is made visible. The executioner’s chain is wrapped around Mark’s neck. He lifts a stick, his hand positioned in suspended animation. Will he hit Mark? That moment has been delayed because, as the written narrative of the saint’s life narrates, the air had suddenly gone turbulent: a manifestation of God. Although the storm halts the blow, it does not undo the violence the image has already lodged in his figure. The upward glance registers exposure to the sacred.

The contrast between the two bodies is not merely expressive; it is structural. The Black executioner externalises force. Aggression is made legible in the strain of his limbs, the poised blow and the tension of the chain pulled taut across the saint’s body. Mark does not answer this force in kind. He does not mirror it, resist it, or visibly recoil. Instead, he absorbs it into composure. The scene depends upon this asymmetry. Martyrdom unfolds as a public ordeal. One body exerts force; another receives it and transforms it into proof of faith. The executioner’s raised arm establishes the trial that the saint’s composure must answer.

The Muslim figures threaten and restrain; another body carries the lethal force

There are two other figures that participate in the dragging of Mark. Identifiable as Muslim by their twisted cloth headband or toril, in the text above the scene they are described as ‘Saracens’, a derogatory term used to racialise Muslims during the Middle Ages. Two different Muslim figures take part in the earlier scene of Mark’s arrest. We see them entering the church in a posture of aggression, one raising a baton as if to strike and the other with a rope tied around Mark’s neck. The figures foreground the executioner’s later gestures – the raised arm, the rope on the neck. Although those actions stage aggression, these Muslim figures stop short of the lethal role that the Black executioner will assume.

Mark lived during the 1st century CE. By naming his enemies ‘Saracens’, the mosaic pulls that past forward into 13th-century Venice’s present, when Egypt was Islamic and the memory of the crusades still shaped Christian identity. As Thomas Dale has shown, Venice used sacred history to articulate its political ambitions in the eastern Mediterranean. The mosaics, however, do more than situate Venice within crusading memory. They distribute capacities across bodies in ways that exceed local politics. Muslims in Mark’s martyrdom are contemporary types placed inside an ancient story. The violence done to Mark would have been read not only as witness to faith, but also as a commentary on the ongoing struggle over who controls the lands – and the relics – of the Christian past.

The Muslim captors occupy a quieter position within the martyrdom. While one pair takes the dominant position of assault in the first scene, the second pair recede from that role in the actual martyrdom. Although they do not deliver the anticipated decisive blow, their rope binds the saint. They stand at a remove from Mark’s most charged features – his face, his lifted hand, the site where his stoic faith is made visible. Reacting to the moment of turbulence, they turn toward one another, their exchanged glance registering confusion rather than fury. The most intimate violence – the chain at the throat, the suspended strike – has shifted elsewhere. This redistribution differentiates roles within the scene and opens a gradation among the saint’s persecutors. The Muslim figures threaten and restrain; another body carries the lethal force.

Their restraint serves the structure of the pictorial cycle. By withholding the fatal act, the image situates them within a narrative that remains open. The episode of Anianus, in the upper register, establishes why. Having arrived in Alexandria, Mark heals the injured cobbler whose headgear marks him as Muslim, akin to the captors in the scene below. The miracle unfolds through contact: Mark’s hand extends toward Anianus’ own wounded hand, and healing passes through the space between them. The image shows the intimate effects of touch; the written narrative completes the arc. In the Life, marvelling at the wonders that God wrought through Mark, Anianus invites the evangelist to his home where Mark baptises the cobbler and his entire household. Mark’s healing of Anianus does not show his conversion; it stages contact. What the text makes explicit, the image prepares visually: the lighter-skinned Muslims can be reached and transformed. This encounter shapes the martyrdom scene that follows. The captors’ violence is restrained; they bind and threaten, yet they do not actively participate in the imminent killing of Mark. The decisive act is displaced. This deferral is purposeful. It preserves them within the sphere of possible change.

As Suzanne Conklin Akbari demonstrates in Idols in the East (2012), in medieval romances it is the lighter-skinned Saracen who is more assimilable, while the darker or Black Muslim is unrecoverable. In the scene of Mark’s martyrdom, the Black African is used to delay or offset the culpability of the two lighter-skinned Muslims. By making the Black African the would-be executioner, the Muslims retain their assimilability as established by Anianus in the preceeding scene. Among the captors who attack and ultimately martyr Mark, there is a distinction based on their skin. Rhetorically, the Black African allows the viewer to see the comparison, to see his acts in relation to those of the Saracens and to find them, the Muslim figures, more amenable, perhaps even more human than the Black executioner.

And yet the executioner is not entirely insulated from the sacred field the scene constructs. In the martyrdom, he turns his head to the heavens in response to the turbulence in the air. Mark extends his hand upward toward the heavens. The hand is in the trajectory of the executioner’s stick. Indeed, if the stick in the executioner’s hand were to fall, it would be right into the evangelist’s hand, a point of meaningful contact between the two. There is something compelling about Mark reaching in the direction of the Black executioner; it echoes the gesture in the scene between Mark and Anianus. There, a miracle is wrought in the space between Mark’s hands and Anianus’. In the martyrdom, there is a greater distance between the saint and the executioner, but Mark’s reach is no less evocative.

The image trains viewers to see certain bodies as channels of grace and others as the site where violence coheres

The mosaic cycle at San Marco does not merely represent difference; it distributes capacities across bodies. Mark’s body is assigned endurance and miracle-working authority. It blesses, heals and withstands violence. The two Muslim captors occupy a different position. Though they bind and threaten, their violence is restrained, preserving their place within a narrative of possible conversion. The miracle of Anianus is not only proof of Mark’s sanctity; it secures Christianity’s universal reach by staging the assimilation of its adversaries. The Black executioner, by contrast, becomes the scene’s focal point of harm. His body alone inflicts the imminent blow. Through him the scene stages a spectrum – from adversaries who may be assimilated to a figure in whom lethal force is momentarily concentrated. Yet the image does not seal that spectrum entirely. The executioner’s upward glance and the halted motion of his strike place him, however briefly, within the same sacred field that halts the violence. The system distributes capacities; it also reveals their contingency.

Each figure performs a function befitting his place within the visual order. In doing so, the image trains viewers to recognise certain bodies as channels of grace, others as capable of transformation and still others as the site where violence coheres. The organisational pattern demonstrated in the mosaic cycle at Saint Mark’s Basilica does not stand alone. Across manuscripts, frescoes and sculptures, saints are composed under assault; adversaries are marked by animated aggression; darker bodies are frequently assigned concentrated violence. This distribution of roles recurs with striking consistency.

The Black executioner, in particular, became a recognisable type. He appears in Passion images, in Old Testament scenes, in scenes of martyrdom across Europe. On the west portal of the north porch at Chartres Cathedral, France, the executioner awaiting King Solomon’s command is distinguished by black polychromy that marks his face and hands. The tympanum recounts the judgement of Solomon in which two women dispute the maternity of a living child. To expose the true mother, Solomon orders that the infant be cut in half. The Black executioner readies to unsheathe his sword – violence again concentrated in a single figure. Solomon’s virtue is preserved while the brutality of infanticide is displaced onto the darkened executioner. As the art historian Jacqueline Lombard has argued, the selective deployment of blackness in such compositions marks the executioner as the locus of violence within the scene; it is quite literally the executioner who is darkened with the deed.

The Black executioner as a type travels, and with each repetition the association between darkness and lethal agency hardens. Likewise, figures marked as Muslim in medieval romance and hagiography often occupy an intermediate space – threatening yet redeemable, adversarial yet transformable. The saint travels as well. Across altarpieces and frescoes, martyrs endure without losing composure. Even when decapitated or pierced, their faces remain serene, their identities legible, their sanctity intact. These somewhat implacable distinctions do not exist solely in a single monument. They accrue across media and time. No single image produces this effect; it is the work of both accumulation and repetition.

Narrative roles, repeated often enough, calcify. What starts as a function within a story comes to seem like a property of the body itself. Viewers no longer perceive assignment; they perceive attribute. The executioner does not appear to enact violence but to contain it. The saint does not demonstrate faith; faith appears native to him. The shift is subtle but decisive. Story distributes tasks. Repetition recasts them as essence. What was once arranged for the sake of narrative coherence begins to look inscribed in flesh. The body stops participating in an event and starts signifying a condition. Staging dissolves into assumption.

When anticipatory habits of seeing are shared across a culture, they begin to shape institutional judgments

Once narrative differentiation comes to feel inherent, perception turns anticipatory. The body appears already interpreted. Recognition precedes encounter; the eye assigns before it listens. Interpretation and observation begin to blur. We know this shift beyond medieval mosaics. A teenager walking home in a hooded sweatshirt is described as suspicious before he reaches his front door. Motion is read as threat. Judgment arrives ahead of action. Perception moves faster than explanation, attaching suspicion before evidence appears. The body seems to verify what has already been imagined. We like to believe that sight is passive, that the eye simply records what is present. We prefer to imagine perception as reception rather than construction. But seeing is rarely so neutral. It is guided by what we have been trained to recognise.

When such anticipatory habits of seeing are shared across a culture, they do not remain intuitive. They begin to shape institutional judgments – about who appears credible, who appears dangerous, and whose presence requires scrutiny. By the early 21st century, certain identities already occupied the position of credible threat within Western security regimes. In 2004, the FBI wrongfully identified the Oregon lawyer Brandon Mayfield as a suspect in the Madrid train bombings, a conclusion initially grounded in a faulty fingerprint match but reinforced by other markers: his Muslim faith, his military training. Simone Browne has argued that biometric systems are often treated as infallible, yet they are calibrated and interpreted by human actors whose assumptions shape what counts as a match. The error lay in the interpretive frame that made certain bodies appear plausible threats.

The Mayfield case is not an isolated anomaly. Studies have shown that commercial facial-recognition systems misidentify darker-skinned individuals at significantly higher rates than lighter-skinned ones. Predictive policing programs disproportionately target neighbourhoods already marked as high risk. Large-scale language and image models trained on vast online corpora likewise inherit the statistical patterns of the cultures that produced those data. These systems do not operate in a vacuum. They draw on data generated within societies long trained to associate certain bodies with danger.

Artificial intelligence operates at a different scale and speed, but it did not invent this logic. Machine-learning systems detect patterns in large datasets and stabilise them into predictive categories. They sort, rank and flag according to correlations that appear statistically robust. Yet those correlations emerge from worlds already shaped by inherited distinctions and distortions. The algorithm does not create suspicion ex nihilo; it formalises associations that have long circulated within visual, legal and social regimes. Compression becomes codification.

To acknowledge this continuity is not to collapse medieval art into modern technology. The mosaic and the model do not belong to the same epistemic world. Images like the mosaics at San Marco did not invent suspicion of Muslims, nor do contemporary algorithms derive directly from medieval art. But both participate in broader systems that distribute roles across bodies and naturalise those distributions through repetition. Both show how easily recognition can precede encounter. If no body in medieval art was neutral, it was because neutrality would have undermined the image’s purpose. Bodies were vehicles for theology, politics and hierarchy. They carried meaning before they moved. Our own visual culture is less gilded but no less structured. We continue to inhabit systems that distribute expectation unevenly across bodies.

The question is not whether we can eliminate classification. Human perception depends upon pattern. The question is whether we can recognise when pattern has hardened into presumption – when we mistake rehearsal for instinct, correlation for character, anticipation for fact. To recognise that perception is trained is not to abandon judgment, nor to deny the reality of danger. It is to admit that recognition is never purely instinctive. It is shaped by repetition, by the images and narratives that circulate long before any individual encounter. Awareness does not dissolve pattern, but it can interrupt the presumption that pattern is destiny.

The eye cannot operate without categories. Those categories are never neutral; they carry histories within them. They sediment prior distinctions. When we encounter a body and feel that we are simply seeing what is there, we may instead be encountering the afterlife of earlier arrangements. Seeing differently may begin not with new technologies but with an awareness that vision itself has always been shaped, trained and directed. Such awareness does not promise purity. It cannot erase the histories that contour perception. It can, however, open a space between what feels immediate and what has long been rehearsed. In that space lies the possibility of hesitation – the refusal to let recognition harden instantly into judgment. The suspended blow at San Marco offers a reminder: what appears inevitable is often arranged.

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