Nicolas Sarzeaud

Nicolas Sarzeaud has a doctorate in medieval history, specialising in art history, and is an associate researcher at the University of Lyon 2/Ciham. Nicolas Sarzeaud defended his thesis at the EHESS under the direction of Étienne Anheim and Pierre-Olivier Dittmar, on the subject of the holy shrines of Christ venerated at the end of the Middle Ages.

He is interested in a history of relics and images, and more particularly in the imprints of Christ’s body considered as “true images” and receiving a cult between the end of the Middle Ages and the First Modernity; He is also working on the reproducibility of contemporary heritage from an anthropological approach to art through investigations of facsimiles in contemporary heritage (Chauvet, Lascaux, Versailles casts, Notre-Dame in the framework of the CNRS project).

Project at Villa Medici: The Roman reception of the Shroud of Chambéry-Turin between the end of the Middle Ages and the First Modernity

The Shroud of Turin, while regularly at the heart of media attention due to more or less serious studies on its authenticity, has long been left aside by academic historians, favouring a social approach to the cult of relics and images. However, research has increased in recent decades with the work of Andrea Nicolotti and Paolo Cozzo, who have written the history of this object that appeared in the 14th century in Champagne, was acquired in 1453 by the Dukes of Savoy, and was venerated in Chambéry and then, from 1578, in Turin. The Shroud is part of a global boom in imprinted images in the West, which began in the thirteenth century with the success of a saint imprinted with the face of Christ in a cloth, preserved in the Vatican, the “Veronica”, which quickly became the most famous image in the Christian West.

The Shroud, long in the background, became a major holy image in the course of the 16th century, celebrated by northern Italian high priests such as Alfonso Paleoti and Carlo Borromeo. The cult of the Veronica was then in decline, particularly following the sack of Rome in 1527, when the relic seemed to have disappeared. How did Roman circles (the curia, but more broadly the main scholars of the city) view the success of this new image?

In the context of my reflection on the copy, I will be particularly interested in the Roman copies of the Shroud: one of them, the Shroud of Alcoy, is reputed to have been commissioned by Pius V in 1571, while a church of Santa Sindone dei Piemontesi, rebuilt under this name in 1605, also preserves a reproduction of the relic. Did the Shroud of Turin have a Roman life between the late Middle Ages and the Tridentine period?

Image: Cardinal Paleotti praying the Shroud, copperplate engraving (Alfonso Paleotti, Esplicatione del sacro lenzuolo ove fu involto il Signore e delle piaghe in esso impresse col suo pretioso sangue confrontate con la Scrittura sacra, Bologne, Rossi, 1599).