Images of the Prophet Muhammad in the Late Medieval West: From Joachim of Fiore to Dante Alighieri

This dissertation explores European manuscript and frescoed images of the Prophet Muhammad from c. 1140-1440. It first examines a pejorative rendering of the Prophet Muhammad, and of Islam, in a series of picto-diagrams attributed to the abbot Joachim of Fiore and produced in Calabria, c. 1200-20 (Oxford, Corpus Christi College Library, MS 255A, folios 4v-17v), giving specific emphasis to his painted depiction in a diagram of a seven-headed dragon inspired by the Book of Revelation. It shows that the use of the dragon form, and other appropriations of medieval apocalyptic artistic motifs, were common vehicles of slander in the twelfth- and thirteenth-centuries. Apocalyptic content was preferentially employed in the visual defamation of non-Christians due to a perceived monopoly on the veridical nature of the divine. In so doing, it demonstrates the direct intersection between medieval apocalyptic and eschatological artistic vocabulary and defamatory prophetic iconography. This dissertation then reveals how later paintings of Muhammad encompassed diverse iconographic formulae deployed across disparate literary texts. It emphasize that, with the exception of one identifiable sub-category, and of the repetition of compositions illustrating specific passages across multiple manuscript versions of the same text, images of the Prophet Muhammad of Christian European production fail to exteriorize any fixed visual typology governing his depiction. It argues that this variation is related to the fact that the pictorialization of the Prophet was primarily experienced by the uppermost strata of medieval society. Access to written materials, and advanced literacy in Latin and one or more vernacular languages, were the preconditions governing their consumption. Finally, close study of the evisceration of the character Maometto in Canto XXVIII of the Inferno by Dante Alighieri reveals that his depiction further involved malicious manipulations of both the face and the body, challenging normative modes of medieval portraiture. By examining images of the Prophet Muhammad across various media, this study demonstrates the manner in which images of the Prophet of Islam rendered by European artists constituted rhetorical and reactionary responses to the ever-present threat of expanding Muslim empires, ideology, and religious dissimulation, resulting in localized anxieties.