French Visiting Scholar Lecture Series: Eric Palazzo (University of Poitiers)

The Department of Art History is pleased to present the next installment of our French Visiting Lecture Series, featuring Eric Palazzo (University of Poitiers).

When: Monday, March 3, 2025 - 5pm
Where Paul Cadario Conference Centre, UC

PLEASE NOTE: Registration required for this event. Please visit this link to register.

Sanctity Distilled: The Visual Articulation of Liturgical Theology in the Mixed Sacramentary

During the early Middle Ages, the liturgical book named «Sacramentary» was on the top of the hierarchy of manuscripts used by the celebrant within the celebration the Eucharist. It only contained the prayers the priest had to pronounced in the course of the liturgy of the Mass, including the «Canon Missae», i.e., the group of prayers dedicated to the consecration of the host and the wine. Two particular versions of the text of the sacramentary have been in competition: one which was supposed to have been composed by Pope Gregory the Great (590-604) and the other attributed to Pope Gelasius (492-496). Many manuscripts form the early Middle Ages containing one or the other version of the sacramentary show an illumination with the depiction of the portrait of the author of the text while composing or writing his sacramentary. In the second half of the century at the monastery of Fulda (today in northern Germany), of particular interest is the iconography of the double portraits of the two popes on the same painted folio. The lecture will explore in details some extraordinary iconographic features of that double papal iconography and their theological significance in relation to the evocation of another iconographic theme intertwined with the portraits of both Gregory the Great and Gelasius.

Eric Palazzo is professor of Medieval Art History at the University of Poitiers and member of the Centre d’études supérieures de civilisation médiévale (CNRS-Université de Poitiers). He was Director of the CESCM (2000-2007) and Senior member of the Institut universitaire de France (2011-2016). His has been invited to numerous Universities and research Centers over the world as a speaker or Vistiting Professor in countries in Europe, in the United States of America, in Canada, in Argentina, Chile, Australia among other. Professor Palazzo was a senior scholar at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles (2006-2007) and at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton (2018-2019). In 2025, he has been elected « Corresponding Fellow » of the Medieval Academy of America. He published numerous articles on the relationship between art and liturgy in the middle ages and edited volumes on the history of liturgy and history of art. Professor Palazzo published ten monographs among them « L’invention chrétienne des cinq sens dans l’art et la liturgie au Moyen Âge » (2014), « Le souffle de Dieu. L’énergie dans la liturgie et l’art au Moyen Âge » (2020), « Broder la splendeur. La théologie chrétienne de l’ornement dans l’Antiquité et le haut Moyen Âge » (2024), « De l’autel à la peinture. L’oeil médiéval de Piero della Francesca et Vittore Carpaccio » (2024). His next book project is dedicated to Cassiodorus’s visual language and its influence in the Middle Ages. 

This lecture is part of the Canada-France Cross-Cultural Exchanges in Music and Art History program, supported by Fondation DRG.