Bestiary of Christian Saints: When Holiness Takes Strange Shapes
This lecture explores how medieval Christian art repeatedly crossed the boundarybetween the sacred and the monstrous, the bestial, and the unsettlingly grotesque. Long before modern debates about blasphemy and provocation, artists freely depicted holy figures as monstrous, hybrid, or disturbingly bodily: Christ as a Lamb with seven eyes, Moses with giant horns, saints with the heads of lions, horses, bulls, or eagles, angels as multi-faced chimeras, sacred scenes now precepted as being with shocking details. Far from being marginal curiosities, these images belonged to the core visual language of medieval Christianity and were deeply embedded in theology and devotion.
By tracing examples from manuscripts, sculpture, and church frescoes, the lecture asks why monstrosity was not a threat to holiness but one of its most powerful tools. We will see how medieval viewers understood these “deviant” images not as mockery, but as ways to think the unthinkable: divine transcendence, incarnation, suffering, and salvation. In doing so, the talk challenges modern assumptions about religious imagery, censorship, and offence – and shows that the Middle Ages were far stranger, freer, and more visually radical than we tend to imagine.
Speaker Bio:
Sergei Zotov is a historian of science and visual culture specialising in alchemy, magic, and iconography in medieval and early modern Europe (c. 1400–1800). He received his doctorate from the University of Warwick and is currently an Associate Fellow at the Warburg Institute (University of London). His research has been supported by major international fellowships held in Baltimore, Glasgow, Berlin, Gotha, Wolfenbüttel, and Überlingen, and has involved extensive archival work across more than 100 collections worldwide. Sergei has published in leading journals, including Nuncius and the British Journal for the History of Science, and is the author of five books on early modern iconography, two of which have received prestigious prizes and others shortlisted for major awards.
Curated & Hosted by:
Lena Schattenherz Heide-Brennand is a Norwegian lecturer with a master degree in language, culture and literature from the University of Oslo and Linnaeus University. She has been lecturing and teaching various subjects since 1998. Her field of interest and main focus has always been topics that others have considered strange, eccentric and eerie, and she has specialised in a variety of dark subjects linked to folklore, mythology and Victorian traditions and medicine. Her students often point out her thorough knowledge about the subjects she is teaching, in addition to her charismatic appearance. She refers to herself as a performance lecturer and always gives her audience an outstanding experience
don’t worry if you miss it – we will send you a recording valid for two weeks the next day
