Introduction: The Matter in the Margins

Summary

This book seeks to bring to light, and explore, a group of fascinating and enigmatic objects. These are gilded and painted panels, designed to hold relics within their surfaces, arranged around the margins of the panels. They appear to have originated around 1340 in the central Italian city-state of Siena, one of the dominant artistic centres in the early fourteenth century. While most of the surviving Sienese examples are dateable to the fourteenth century, production seems to have continued at least through to the early fifteenth century, with one example surviving from c. 1450. Some twelve examples survive of a similar type: painted wooden panels with relics of the saints, or of locations connected with Christ’s life and Passion, embedded into their surfaces. These were produced by Sienese artists, and/or for Sienese patrons, but can now be found in various museums and private collections across Europe and the USA. These tabernacles – for so they are termed in the rare documents that appear to describe objects of this type – house relics in a new way. Whereas formerly relics were hidden within containers that kept them enshrined, and out of sight, these tabernacles display relics alongside painted images, in a series of chambers around the edges of the panels. These chambers were designed to enshrine the relics in a different way by making them visible beneath glass or crystal discs.

The relic chambers were part of the design of the tabernacles from the start, which distinguishes these objects from a number of other paintings that seem to have had relics embedded into their surfaces after they were made. The forms of these fourteenth-century tabernacles are varied: there exist eight single-panel tabernacles and three triptychs. The iconography is varied also: the three triptychs have, in their central fields, an image of the Virgin Enthroned (plate I), a standing image of Saint Dominic and a half-length figure of a male saint above a pair of inserted ivory panels (plate II). The main image fields of the eight single-panel tabernacles have one example of a Virgin Enthroned with a lost Crucifixion formerly on the reverse (plates III, IV and V), an image of a standing male saint (plate VI), two examples of the Standing Virgin (plates VII and VIII), three examples of the Madonna of Humility (plates X, XI and XII; Fig. 1), and a Crucifixion with St Francis on the reverse.