MEMS Lecture: "Blood, Artifice, and the Resurrected Body in the Shroud of Turin"

Co-sponsored by Medieval and Early Modern Studies and the Department of History of Art.

Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century devotional texts dedicated to the Shroud of Turin treat the cloth’s traces of blood as evidence of divine artistry, calling the image a painting made by God. I explore how belief in the materiality of blood combined with artistic tropes that associate art-making with the formation of living bodies conspired in creating an artistic/theological explanation for the image of Christ's corpse appearing on the Shroud. The blood-stained imprint of Christ's body came to be regarded as a pictorial and residual record of the Resurrected body, further enhancing the Shroud's prestige as a devotional object.