For the high altar of San Marco in Florence, Fra Angelico painted a scene in which Saints Cosmas and Damian graft the black leg of a deceased Ethiopian onto the body of a white European devotee. The white man, upon awaking, ‘saw nothing wrong’. Did he, or his audience around 1440, really have no objection to his new black leg? It would seem that to them the issue was not that the leg was black, but whether or not it came from a Christian. This essay uses Fra Angelico's image to ask broad questions about the contingency of skin colour and its associations in Florence before the advent of the transatlantic slave trade. It reviews the polarized position of recent scholarship on race in premodern Europe and seeks to follow a middle path. The development of this imagery after 1500, especially in Spain, shows racialized hostility towards the Ethiopian, which was not necessarily the case in the early fifteenth-century examples discussed here. Instead, ideas of unity, rather than difference, will be employed as a framework for interpretation.

中文翻译：

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弗拉·安杰利科的《黑腿的奇迹：1450 年前佛罗伦萨的肤色和埃塞俄比亚人的看法》

在佛罗伦萨圣马可的高坛上，弗拉·安杰利科画了一个场景，圣徒科斯马斯和达米安将一名已故埃塞俄比亚人的黑腿移植到一名欧洲白人信徒的身上。白人醒来后，“没有发现任何问题”。难道他，或者他在 1440 年左右的观众，真的对他的新黑腿没有异议吗？对他们来说，问题似乎不是那条腿是黑的，而是它是否来自基督徒。这篇文章使用弗拉·安杰利科的形象提出了关于跨大西洋奴隶贸易出现之前佛罗伦萨的肤色的偶然性及其关联的广泛问题。它回顾了前现代欧洲最近关于种族的两极分化的立场，并试图走一条中间道路。1500 年后这种图像的发展，尤其是在西班牙，显示了对埃塞俄比亚人的种族敌意，这在此处讨论的 15 世纪早期的例子中不一定是这种情况。相反，统一而不是差异的观念将被用作解释的框架。