1 - Relics, Reliquaries and Images

Summary

Before we consider the meanings and connotations of these reliquary tabernacles, or the circumstances of and reasons for their production, we need to investigate more deeply their formal properties, and their lineage and development within the visual culture of fourteenth-century religious devotion. Some commentators have seen these tabernacles as having a strong relationship with earlier metalwork reliquaries. One object in particular that is linked with the Sienese reliquary tabernacles, by Preising, Mann and Brilliant alike, is the reliquary of San Galgano, created by a Sienese craftsman in the second decade of the fourteenth century (Fig. 2). Specific relationships between the San Galgano reliquary and these Sienese reliquary tabernacles will be looked at in detail in Chapter 2. This present chapter will look more widely and generally at the formal and conceptual development of reliquaries in order to consider the connotations that are being evoked when a reliquary takes the form of a painting. Following that, it will look at the development of small-scale paintings and consider how the meanings and functions of such paintings change when they are endowed with relics, visible within their painted and gilded surfaces.

SAINTS AND RELICS

There is an extensive bibliography on the cult of saints and of their relics, and many studies of individual reliquaries and types of reliquaries. Accordingly here I will merely outline the development of practices around the veneration of bodies – and fragments of bodies – that led to the creation of reliquaries, containers for the fragmentary bodily remains of saints, or for objects or materials that had come into contact with the body of a saint. This will give some additional historical context for the development of the Sienese reliquary tabernacles that are the focus of this study, and for the historiography on reliquaries that I will trace later in this chapter. At first, early Christian attitudes towards the treatment of the bodies of the dead did not differ significantly from Jewish or Greco- Roman pagan practice as it was carried out throughout the Roman Empire. Bodies were generally buried intact, and tended to be placed in cemeteries lying on the outer edges of built communities. Religious groups of all kinds, in many parts of the empire, marked the anniversaries of the dead by visiting the sites of their burial, to celebrate their memory and to hold feasts at the tombs of the dead, a practice known as a refregerium.