CHRIST IS THE figure most commonly associated with blood in early modern Italian art. Painters drew on the five occasions that Christ shed blood: at his circumcision; in the Garden of Gethsemane; during the flagellation; at the Crucifixion; and at the opening of his side by Longinus. Paintings of Christ on the Cross and as the Man of Sorrows are among the most consistently bloody images in Christian art. Blood piety was a means through which worshippers could contemplate the effect of their sins and articulate their devotion, and depictions of Christ's bloody wounds provided viewers with a powerful visual focus for emotional and affective responses. In paintings of Christ's Passion, his salvific blood was the most compelling symbol of his Incarnation and sacrifice, and in popular textual sources his physical agonies and the shedding of his sacrificial blood are recurrent themes for contemplation. The account of the Passion in the Legenda aurea, for example, enumerates Christ's multiple sufferings in explicit detail. The early fourteenth-century Meditations on the Life of Christ enjoins devout readers to immerse themselves in affective descriptions of Christ's pain-racked body. For early modern devotees, texts and images reflecting the blood of Christ aided contemplation and understanding of Christ's sacrifice.

Blood as object and as textual and cultural metaphor has become an important area of research, and in an early modern context, scholars, most notably Caroline Walker Bynum in her widely acclaimed Wonderful Blood, have explored the cultural constructions of blood and blood relics. The fluidity of the connections between notions of body and blood and the importance of blood in literary texts and historical contexts have also been the subject of research. Blood in visual images, however, has less often been explored; moreover, such studies have concentrated almost exclusively on the bodily fluids of Christ. Although saints also shed blood, rarely has their spilt blood been a focus of inquiry. In this chapter I would like to further the discussion by examining the depiction of blood in painted images of saints— in particular, three saints who, I will suggest, were perceived as alter Christus.