Chiara Franceschini and Cloe Cavero participated in the VI Seminario de Arte y Cultura en la Corte, which took place in Madrid at the Casa de México, El Escorial and the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid.

Organized by professors Luisa Elena Alcalá and Juan Luis González García, “Redes artísticas, circulación y exposición de reliquias en el Mundo Hispánico” brought together scholars from Chile, Brasil, Ecuador, Colombia, Mexico, France, United Kingdom, Germany and Spain to discuss the centrality of artistic issues in thinking about relics and their circulation, display and ritual use in the early modern period.

Chiara Franceschini presented a paper entitled “Pictorial relics: substitution and the normativity of Marian images in the Mediterranean”, where she analyzed a series of painted images of the Virgin Mary that were considered as relics and the case of the Letter handed in by the Virgin Mary to the Ambassadors of the city of Messina, to discuss how the geography of such “pictorial relics” and their substitutive powers can extend beyond the Mediterranean world. Following, Cloe Cavero explored the status of contact relics in early modern religious painting in her paper, entitled “‘No lo leemos en los libros, mas lo vemos con los ojos’: Los santos Justo y Pastor y las reliquias pintadas”.