Nicolas Sarzeaud

Nicolas Sarzeaud (1992, France), is a graduate of the École du Louvre and EHESS, associate member of the Centre de Recherche Historique and FRS-FNRS research fellow at the Université catholique de Louvain. In 2021, he defended a thesis on the cult of the Shrouds of Christ between the 14th and 16th centuries, published by Cerf in 2024 under the title Les Suaires du Christ en Occident”. He has taught at the Université Lumière Lyon II and the Université de Lorraine, and published numerous articles on the cult of images in the late Middle Ages and the way they were shown, viewed and disseminated thanks to an intense production of copies, which he places in a long history of facsimiles.

His resident project, Sur les traces du Christ à Rome (XIVe-XVIe s.) : culte des images et vérité visuelle à la fin du Moyen Âge, focuses on the traces of Christ in Rome. In Rome, Christ can be traced: in addition to the Veronica, an imprint of Christ’s face in linen, several other holy faces cohabit with traces of his feet, left in stone when he appeared on the Quo Vadis trail, and other relics stained with his blood. Through this investigation into the intense devotion they received in the 14th-16th centuries, 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 Modernity.