20 - The New Passion Relics at the Lateran, Fifteenth to Sixteenth Centuries: A Translocated Sacred Topography

Summary

Compared to St. Peter’s, the privileged Roman pilgrimage destination since Early Christian times, the story of relic veneration at the Lateran is more ambiguous. There was no saint’s sepulchre as the devotional and liturgical focus of the church, and its principal relics had a strangely "abstract" character. Throughout the Middle Ages, different strategies were used to improve the reception of the Lateran relics, focusing principally on increased visibility. The peak of "making present" relics was reached with the fifteenth century, when a singular "reliquization" of several objects in the old Lateran palace took place, overlapping the abandoned patriarchíum with a new, sacred memorial topography (the palace of Pilate and other Holy Land sites). Many of these new relics were venerated in a particular performative and haptic way by the pilgrims who compared for example, their bodies’ height to the mensura Christi, passed the "doorways of the palace of Pilate" and progressed on their knees up the "Scala Santa", kissing the bloodstains which the Saviour had left on its steps. The chapter places the palace relics into the Lateran’s traditions and analyzes the reception strategies and veneration practices related to them, focusing especially on the role of materiality and physical approach as devotional means.