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)
The Miracle of the Black Leg is a medieval Christian legend of a miracle performed by two doctor saints that explicitly mentions race. From the 14th through 16th centuries it appeared frequently in European Catholic art. Stories that people find appealing can tell us a lot about social and cultural values. Because they select specific moments from a story and render details vividly, visual representations of those stories can reveal further unspoken cultural beliefs and assumptions. The Miracle of the Black Leg’s popularity in visual art coincides with the beginning of the transatlantic slave trade, but the story’s origin predates race-based slavery, raising questions about the connections between cultural ideas and historic practices.
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)
The earliest surviving artistic rendition of The Miracle of the Black Leg can be found on a 14th-century altarpiece painted by Matteo di Pacino, also known as the “Master of the Rinuccini Chapel.” The altarpiece features a larger main panel with Saints Cosmas and Damian, twin doctor saints, standing against a gold leaf background facing the viewer as was common in Italian depictions of devotional figures. At the bottom of the altarpiece are two smaller narrative panels making up the predella. Predella panels typically depict stories from the life of the devotional figure in the main panel above. On this altarpiece, we see the Miracle of the Black Leg and a second panel showing the martyrdom of Saints Cosmas and Damian by beheading.
Many Catholic saints achieved martyrdom through beheading; only Cosmas and Damian performed the miracle of interracial surgical transplantation. According to the Golden Legend (Legenda Aurea), the authoritative 13th-century compilation of lives of saints, Cosmas and Damian were born in the 3rd century C.E. in the area of the Roman Empire that is now modern-day Turkey. [1] Instructed in medicine by the Holy Ghost, the two Christian physicians refused payment for their services.
The miracle
The Miracle of the Black Leg was a posthumous miracle—it was performed by Cosmas and Damian in the 6th century C.E. hundreds of years after their deaths. A pious man who worked as a verger caring for a church dedicated to Cosmas and Damian unfortunately suffered from a cancerous leg. One night while the verger slept, Cosmas and Damian came to his room, amputated the verger’s painful leg, and replaced it with the leg of a recently deceased man who had been buried in a nearby cemetery. In the Golden Legend and most visual representations, the deceased man is pictured as Black.
Miracle of the Black Leg using continuous narrative (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)
Pacino’s panel uses continuous narrative to show the viewer both the placement of the Black leg on the verger and the graveyard where the Black man’s body can be seen lying in the exhumed coffin. The Golden Legend says the verger’s friends were skeptical of the miracle and went to the graveyard where they found that indeed the deceased Moor’s removed leg had been replaced with the verger’s diseased leg. The contrast between the skin colors is amplified by the markedly diseased state of the verger’s leg attached to the unblemished Black man’s body.
Miracle stories involving bodies made whole are common in Christian medieval hagiographies, but most miracle stories did not involve racial or ethnic designation of the participants the way the Golden Legend specifies in the Miracle of the Black Leg. The Greek version of the Cosmas and Damian miracle does not specify a race, religion, or ethnic group for deceased man whose leg is taken. The Golden Legend text refers to as both a “Moor” and “Ethiopian,” a term used in Europe to broadly refer to anyone of African descent.
During the Middle Ages and Renaissance, Europeans frequently used the terms “African,” “Black,” “Moor,” and “Ethiopian” interchangeably. As Europeans began enslaving Africans in large numbers, they began associating Blackness itself with slavery. [2] The racial and ethnic terms and their meanings vary, but consistently frame Blackness as the Other, a binary idea of the “not us.” Nevertheless, multiple iterations of the Miracle of the Black Leg including the Golden Legend text source, Pacino’s predella panel, and part of an altarpiece by Fra Angelico all predate the transatlantic slave trade and even the Portuguese introduction of West Africans they enslaved into Europe.
Fra Angelico, Miracle of the Black Leg, part of the San Marco Altarpiece, tempera on wood, 37 x 45 cm (Museum of San Marco, Florence)
In nearly all depictions of the miracle, the transplanted limb has Black skin that contrasts visually with the verger’s skin. The story’s text does not specify the verger’s race; in art he is portrayed as light-skinned. The coloristic contrast, prominent compositionally, emphasizes race as an important element of the legend.
Blackness in late-medieval Europe
European attitudes towards Black people and Blackness during the late medieval and Renaissance periods varied. Early instances of anti-Blackness include negative depictions of demons, Jews, and Muslims with dark skin. The term “Moor,” which can mean both Muslim or a person with dark skin, further suggests a correlation between dark skin and a person who is not Christian. Conversely, medieval European Christian practice also venerated Black figures including Saint Maurice, the Black magus who visited the infant Christ, and various Black Madonna figures. Ethiopian ambassadors emphasized their common religion of Christianity when practicing diplomacy at European courts.
An Adoration with Black Magus, part of The Salzburg Missal, c. 1478, ink and gold on parchment, 38 x 28 cm (Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich, volume 1 Clm 15708 I, folio 63 recto)
Interestingly, the Golden Legend implies that the Black man whose leg was taken by Cosmas and Damian to heal the verger was Christian even if the text refers to him as a “Moor.” According to the text he was buried in the cemetery of San Pietro in Vincoli, a Christian church. Representations that attach the verger’s diseased leg to the Black man’s corpse attends to contemporary Christian concerns that a body needed to be “whole” for the promised resurrection at the Last Judgement. [3]
Isidro Villoldo, Miracle of the Black Leg, c. 1547, polychrome carving on wood, 88 x 80 x 17 cm (Museo Nacional de Escultura, Valladolid; photo: Jl FilpoC, CC BY-SA 4.0)
The structure of the story both in the Golden Legend text and in multiple visual representations appears to use racial differentiation between the healed man and the unwitting donor as justifying logic for the saints’ miraculous action. In other words, his Blackness makes his body available for use. Some renditions of the story even depict the Black man as awake and in pain in the verger’s bedroom (such as Isidro de Villoldo, Miracle of the Black Leg). [4] Contemporary viewers would have read these later representations that eliminate the graveyard and turn the corpse into a “mutilated living African man” as portraying an enslaved man. [5] The taking of a Black man’s limb without consent for its utility unsettlingly parallels future instances of medical experimentation and exploitation of Black persons. [6]
Fernando del Rincon, Miracles of the Doctor Saints Cosmas and Damian, c. 1510, oil on panel, 188 x 155 cm (Museo del Prado, Madrid)
Ideas of race and racial categories are determined not by biology but by cultural and historical ways of thinking. Thinking about race as a system of organizing people into groups and distributing power—often unequally—helps us understand historical ways in which cultures thought about categories. [7] While late medieval and Renaissance European notions of race differ from 21st-century categories of race, they nevertheless form the history of contemporary thought.
