Theater and painting rendered Muslim faces from an identical mold as Satan’s

Evidence

Black Muslim characters appear in venues other than painting, including the African Muslim monsters featured in Shakespearean-era drama and the Austrian theater masks depicting Satan as a Black Saracen. In some of these masks, the physiognomy of Satan was replicated in an exact fashion in a representation of a Black Muslim. Late medieval theater masks of Satan feature black skin with warts, a large hooked nose, and a crown. In a detail from the painting Resurrection of Christ, a Muslim is depicted in just that way, with black skin, a wart on his cheek (the other cheek is hidden), a large, hooked nose, and a turban (see Figure 3.2). — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 269

Categorization

• XREF: This physiognomic overlay of Muslim onto Satan directly serves the reader’s monster/demon figure question, and the shared visual template echoes how medieval bestiaries packaged all Saracens as variants of one archetype.
• SEED: An angle: the visual recycling of Satan’s exact face for Muslims, across stage masks and paintings, as evidence that the monster preceded any encounter — the template was fully pre-made.