Online Lecture: ‘The Blood of His Flesh? Controversial Relics from Byzantium in Venice’, with Karin Krause, 10 April 2025, 12–1.30 pm (ET)

10 April 2025 | Zoom | 12:00–1:30 pm (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC -4)

This lecture will take place live on Zoom, followed by a question and answer period. Please register to receive the Zoom link.

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The Mary Jaharis Center is the next lecture in our 2024–2025 lecture series: The Blood of His Flesh? Controversial Relics from Byzantium in Venice. In this lecture, Karin Krause, University of Chicago, will trace the history and veneration of two relics of the Holy Blood of Christ kept in the church of San Marco in Venice.

This lecture examines the history and shifting interpretations of two relics of the Holy Blood of Christ in the Church of St. Mark’s in Venice between the late Middle Ages and the Baroque era. 

One is kept in a Byzantine rock crystal pyx bearing a Greek inscription that identifies its contents as Christ’s carnal blood. Although the artifact is listed in an inventory drawn up in 1325, Venetian sources before the seventeenth century are suspiciously silent about the veneration and whereabouts of this relic. Evidently, the reliquary remained concealed in the Santuario, the relic chamber of St. Mark’s, until its miraculous rediscovery in 1617.

Drawing on sources from Venice and elsewhere, I argue that soon after the arrival of the pyx, its contents must have become part of the theological controversy over the bodily blood of Christ, a Catholic debate questioning the authenticity of such relics. Because of its problematic contents, I conclude, the doges decided not to make the pyx available for public veneration for several centuries. The theological disputes surrounding the relic inside the pyx can be better understood in light of the fate of a second reliquary of the Holy Blood of Christ from Constantinople, which has been in the same church since the thirteenth century.

It was only during the Baroque era that the relic inside the Byzantine pyx was rehabilitated as authentic resulting from the efforts of Giovanni Tiepolo, an accomplished theologian and ecclesiastical leader. I examine the strategies Tiepolo employed to establish the relic’s cult, strategies that illuminate the scholar’s familiarity with Byzantine history and religious culture.

Karin Krause, University of Chicago

Karin Krause is an Associate Professor in the University of Chicago Divinity School. Trained as an art historian, she specializes in the Christian visual cultures of Byzantium and the premodern Mediterranean region. Her research interests include visual hermeneutics, Byzantine manuscript culture, the cult of relics, and cultural exchange between Byzantium and the West. She has published extensively on the reception of Byzantine art and artifacts in premodern Venice. In her most recent book, Divine Inspiration in Byzantium: Notions of Authenticity in Art and Theology (Cambridge University Press, 2022), she examines the intersecting conceptions of divine inspiration and authenticity in the literature and visual arts of Byzantium.