Real contact slowly replaced monstrous depictions but did not end them.

Evidence

Some Muslim monsters—Saracen giants and Black Saracens, Jewish and Muslim cynocephalie—disappeared from texts and paintings. In particular cases, cultural types replaced the families of Muslim monstrous races that medieval artists painted. For example, the foreign characters in Giotto’s frescoes were patterned after Mediterranean and Asiatic peoples, “[i] n all these cases the representatives of historically and geographically distant countries no longer appear as monsters, masks, or puppets, but as human beings, sometimes of authentic portraiture.” However, this did not entail an end to Muslim monsters. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 240

Categorization

• QUESTION: What specific mechanism converted monsters into human portraiture in Giotto? Was it actual travel, trade, diplomatic contact? And why did some monstrous figures persist even as Giotto’s register shifted? Worth chasing.
• XREF: Directly serves the reader’s third guiding question — what the monster lets makers avoid seeing. When real people are seen, the monster fades; the persistence afterward is the residual need for the projection.