Renaissance art placed Muslim villains beneath Christian saints as symbolic enemies.

Evidence

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

• SHARE: A poet/art historian would delight in the detail that Averroes’s text is literally flipped upside down on the canvas as a blasphemy marker.