Christian art ranked its enemies through physical canvas placement

Evidence

In Renaissance art, the placement of figures, as in earlier centuries, spoke volumes about the themes being communicated. In some cases, Jewish and Muslim villains are shown actively participating in crimes against Christians; in other cases, they are presented as the enemy through their placement on the canvas, even when the figures are inactive. In the Triumph of Saint Thomas Aquinas (c. 1340, Pisa, Santa Caterina), Averroes (Ibn Rushd), the great Muslim philosopher, appears below the Saint’s feet, and his text is turned upside down to symbolize its blasphemous status. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 248

Categorization

• DEFINE: Explains the spatial-convention device by which art communicated hierarchy — enemy figures literally placed beneath the feet of saints, text inverted as emblem of blasphemy.