Nicolas Sarzeaud

Nicolas Sarzeaud (1992, France) is a graduate of the École du Louvre, with a doctorate from the EHESS, and an associate member of the Centre de Recherche Historique. In 2021 he defended a thesis on the cult of the Shrouds of Christ from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century, to be published by Cerf in 2024. He has taught at the University Lumière Lyon Il and the University of Lorraine and has published numerous articles on the cult of images in the late Middle Ages and the way they were shown, looked at, and disseminated through intensive production of copies, which he resituates in a long history of facsimiles.

His residency project, Sur les traces du Christ à Rome (XlV^e‑XVI^e s.) : culte des images et vérité visuelle à la fin du Moyen Âge [On the Traces of Christ in Rome (14th–16th Centuries): The Cult of Images and Visual Truth in the Late Middle Ages], centers around the traces of Christ in Rome. In Rome, Christ can be tracked: as well as the Veronica, an imprint of the face of Christ on a cloth, several other Holy Faces coexist there with traces of his feet, left on the stone when he appeared on the Quo Vadis path, and other relics stained with his blood. Through this investigation of the intense devotion they received from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century and the discourses surrounding their dissemination in the form of representations and reproductions, Nicolas Sarzeaud aims to show the mutations at work in visual culture between the Middle Ages and the Modern Era.

Portrait © Nicolas Sarzeaud