Reliquary Tabernacles in Fourteenth-Century Italy: Image, Relic and Material Culture, by Beth Williamson

Abstract

The protagonists of this book are eleven fourteenth-century reliquary tabernacles. They all hail from Siena, though have ended up in collections across Europe and the US, from Baltimore and Cleveland to Lyon, London, Florence and Milan. Some are moderately well known and on public view; others are little studied and in private hands. Three-dimensional objects that were meant to be carried in procession or which formed the focal point for intense personal devotions have been transformed into flat things, displayed on walls, and often mutilated in the process. The gilded glass Virgin Enthroned, wrenched from its tabernacle (now in Cleveland), has found its resting place in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. A panel depicting the standing Virgin and Child by Pietro Lorenzetti, acquired by Bernard Berenson in 1903 for the Villa I Tatti, turns out to be the other side of an Enthroned Redeemer, now in private ownership in Milan. All but two of the surviving tabernacles have been denuded of their relics. In this work of impressive scholarship, Beth Williamson reconstructs these fragmented objects as whole pieces, made of paint and wood, of stones and human bones, animated by their materials and by devotion. At the same time, Williamson brings these scattered pieces back into conversation with one another. She argues that they belong to a particular moment of artistic innovation and reveals the importance of multi-materiality and inter-mediality in shaping their distinctive character.