Blood is unsightly in the flesh. Witnessing a bleeding person, one might turn away—or worse, be overcome with nausea and faint. For a substance essential to our functioning, to life itself, its image provokes extreme distress. If we were to trust our physiological responses to it, we’d think that blood is meant to remain hidden beneath the skin. Nevertheless, its representations are omnipresent. At its most basic, blood animates our bodies, and in Western traditions, it is the seat of spiritual and political life. In the 19th century, bloodletting was a common medical practice, while in the 20th century, it became a prime vector for disease. In our own century, a fixation on vampires, which closely associates blood with death, grips popular culture. “Blood: Medieval/Modern”—currently on view at the Getty—endeavors to outline such themes in blood’s significance from the premodern era to today.

The exhibition makes clear that tension between the necessary and the unbearable animates so much of blood’s representative, didactic and ritual use throughout history. The curators have opted for a thematic, rather than chronological structure, sectioning the exhibition into categories including devotion, medicine, genealogy and violence. Throughout the galleries, significant works of modern and contemporary art by Andres Serrano, Nan Goldin, Ana Mendieta, and others mingle with illuminated manuscripts, books of hours and medieval medicine didactics. The walls, bathed in deep red, not only recall blood but moreover instill a solemn and contemplative tone for what proves to be a sacred substance, in religious and nonreligious contexts alike.

This transhistorical approach illuminates how enduring blood’s fraught status remains. In the genealogy section, for instance, the significance of blood and biology perseveres, even as models of kinship expand beyond patrilineage. The curators juxtapose Glenn, Dario, and Tyrone (1998) by Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle with The Third Generation, Friedrick Derrer, a German genealogy of the Derrer family from the end of the 17^th century. In the latter genealogical portrait, a lavishly costumed woman and man float on an abstract ground as a many-tendrilled plant snakes its way from the man, through the woman’s robes, out her breast and sprouts above them. Several coats of arms representing their children’s marriages adorn the plant’s leaves, highlighting the family’s political positions derived from their biological lineage. Manglano-Ovalle’s three-paneled family portrait, by contrast, literalizes its subjects’ biologies by representing only their DNA structures in irradiant blue and white chromogenic prints on acrylic. Glenn, Dario, and Tyrone are not related by blood but chose to present themselves as a familial unit. The work therefore challenges ideas of belonging and biology foundational to older conceptions of family. By opting to represent their DNA rather than their likenesses, however, Manglano-Ovalle highlights the endurance of the past in the present. Their difference, encoded in blood, persists despite their attachment.

If representations of family structured by—but reaching beyond—blood incorporate non-figural elements, other works are direct and confrontational. In the medieval era, suffering endured by Christ and the saints were entry points for meditative identification, while violence in recent contexts often serves a more radical political function. In Nan one month after being battered (1984) by Nan Goldin, the photographer turns the camera on herself, capturing her face after being hit by her partner. She embodies a classically seductive femininity in the photo, donning red lipstick and jewelry, and maintaining a direct gaze at the camera. But her left eye is clouded over with blood, forcing viewers to confront gendered abuse in domestic settings, and their potential complicity as bystanders to such violence. Blood takes on a different significance in a 15^th-century book of hours displayed nearby, which captures a well-known theological narrative while draining it of brutality. The work depicts St. Sebastian (a Christian saint martyred by Romans during the Great Persecution of 303) in a richly illustrated, timeworn illuminated manuscript. Here, the nearly nude figure—placid as if dreaming—stands on a tiled floor, bound to a wooden pole and flanked decoratively by two men pointing arrows at him. Blood trickles gently out of wounds where other arrows have already pierced his body. Rather than a grotesque rendering of humiliation and attrition, this work asks viewers to encounter Sebastian’s placid transcendence evident not only in his expression but also in the slightness of his blood, as evidence of his connection to God.

Throughout these nuanced explorations of blood’s changing significance, certain works emerge as piercing through the veil of representation to convey the striking impact of encountering blood firsthand. Notable among them are ひろしま/ hiroshima #69 by Abe Hatsuko (2007) and Queer Blood America (2021) by Jordan Eagles. Both works eschew conventional figuration while highlighting the trace of blood: Hatsuko’s hyperrealistic photograph depicts blood stains on the shirt of a Hiroshima victim, while Eagles’ wall relief showcases a vial of actual blood set within a Captain America comic. These works recapture art’s aura, a quality often thought lost in our modern era, as they remind us of the sanctity of blood and thus of life. Echoing the meditative resonance found in many medieval artworks, they affirm that blood continues to hold a profound, almost spiritual significance, even as we’re confronted by its minimization every day.