The Icons of San Marco: Images, Relics, and the History of their Veneration in the Doge’s Chapel, ca. 1100-1500

If one seeks to define two of the principal objects of devotion in the Middle Ages, the icon and the relic, the task may initially appear straightforward. However, previous scholarship has identified a small corpus of images that complicate these seemingly clear-cut distinctions, namely the icons of the Virgin and Child allegedly painted by Saint Luke “from life” and Acheiropoieta, “images not made by human hands.” Both image types feature origin stories designating the works as ‘authentic’ products of sacred contact. Emerging in the Holy Land and Byzantium in Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages, these depictions, much like relics, were frequently the source of miracles, regarded as evidence of their ability to serve as earthly instruments of the divine. Sarah’s dissertation, “The Icons of San Marco in Venice: Images, Relics, and the History of their Veneration in the Doge's Chapel, ca. 1100–1500,” expands the extant corpus of relic-icons by attending to the images housed in Venice’s Basilica di San Marco. This single site contains the largest surviving collection of such authentic icons and works believed to be products of sacred contact, all of which notably arrived in Venice alongside the numerous holy relics acquired by the city’s inhabitants in the aftermath of the Fourth Crusade (1202–1204). Furthermore, the Basilica’s icons, which span painted representations to stone and enamel reliefs, have remarkably never been examined as a group. The dissertation investigates them as such for the first time, attending to their classification, veneration, and, ultimately, their contribution to the construction of sacred space in San Marco, the Doge’s chapel, and the apex of Venetian religious and political authority.