Radosveta Ignatova

Thesis (working title): Out of Sight: Recovering the Image of “Tartar” Enslaved Women in Northern and Central Italy, 1350-1500

Supervised by Dr Robert Brennan and Professor Guido Rebecchini 

My research brings together approaches from both History and Art History to examine how enslaved women, trafficked across the Black Sea, appeared, or failed to appear, in the visual record of Northern and Central Italy between 1350 and 1500. The study asks how their presence in the Italian city-states shaped the imagery of the period, and how artists, patrons, and viewers negotiated questions of servitude, ethnicity, and gender within established pictorial conventions.

Starting from the second half of the Trecento until the end of the Quattrocento, female domestic slaves accounted for one to two percent of the population of the major northern and central Italian urban centres. Occupying a liminal societal position and logged in tax records next to privately owned riding animals, they were used to perform domestic chores, nurse infants, and endure sexual demands on their bodies in the households of merchants, patricians, and artisans. Their import surged after the Black Death of 1346-1353, with the main flow of enslaved women reaching Northern and Central Italy via the Venetian and Genoese trade channels across the Black Sea.

The last two decades have marked a significant advance by social, political, and economic historians in the collection and analysis of primary sources and data pertaining to the import and exploitation of the  enslaved women from the East in the pre-modern Italian city-states. At the same time, officially, there are no identified visual representations of them in the art production of the period. While they were an integral part of life in the larger cities, there are no works of art that we perceive with certainty as representing them either directly, indirectly, or as a generalised image.

The project asks how far visual culture can register their existence and what kinds of representational strategies were available to artists when depicting figures at the margins of society. I also draw on the social history of art, particularly studies concerned with marginal figures, visual silence, and with the problem of reading experience through images. Some of the questions I explore are: how pre-modern images construct visibility and social hierarchy; how lower-status bodies are represented within the conventions of the period; how hagiography was used to develop the iconography of subordinated women, such as maidservants; and how signs of gender, ethnicity, legal status, and occupation are encoded pictorially.

In doing so, my research aims to broaden our understanding of what Italian images from this period can tell us about social realities, domestic life, and the negotiation of cultural differences in the context of the tension between documented presence of enslaved women and their apparent absence from the visual record.