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 Imag…, loc. 240