December 3-5, 2025
Louvain-la-Neuve
From December 3 to 5, 2025, in Louvain-la-Neuve, an interdisciplinary conference will take
place: “Sanguis Christi. Visual Culture / Visionary Culture (13th–18th Centuries).” This
conference contributes to a reflection on how devotion to the Holy Blood—in its many forms
and manifestations (relics, sacrament, miracles)—shaped and nourished the emergence of a
visual culture in Europe from the Middle Ages to the eighteenth century. Through the lens of
the visual—whether visible and/or visionary—the conference contributes to deepening our
understanding of the connections between theological inquiry, the development and
transformations of devotional culture (including its social and political dimensions), and their
effects on modes of representation in iconography. By visual / visionary culture, the
conference thus seeks to foreground an approach that questions what is made visible of the
Blood of Christ, exploring the articulation—or even the tension—that emerges between what
the miracle renders perceptible to the senses and what, by its very nature, escapes perception.
In doing so, it opens the believer to a spiritual and sacred dimension, as well as to new ways
of making the divine visible.
For full conference program, please click here.