The Domestication of an Itinerant Object: The True Cross Reliquary from the Louvre Museum

Abstract

The Reliquary of the True Cross from the Louvre Museum serves as a good illustration of some key ideas which are of high interest for modern art historians studying medieval art. These ideas are : hybridity (syncretism, compositeness), portability (mobility), circulation, and transparency (crossing borders). The Reliquary is a product of a complicated cross-cultural exchange with more than one participant. First of all, it is a composite, or hybrid, object. The cross-shaped reliquary was produced in the Holy Land in the twelfth century, most likely in Jerusalem, while the casket, in which the cross is housed, was produced later, probably in a South Italian or Sicilian workshop of the late twelfth or early thirteenth century. Furthermore, the reliquary belongs to a big family of portable objects, which are defined by the feature of portability, and which add to its material value significant symbolical value when they are transported beyond the borders – geographical, cultural, or political – of the region of their production. In order to better understand the reliquary and its value, I answer two sets of questions. First is the set of “ traditional” questions of Western European art history, namely authorship, style, date, and periodization. Then I consider this reliquary as an “ object without borders,” in terms of Jennifer Purtle, and find answers to the kinds of questions related to the specificity of portable objects : What is the object within the context in which it exists ? How and why does an object move beyond borders ? What meaning and what cultural and economic value accrue to an object when it exists without borders ? Answering these questions, I show how the reliquary moved from one cultural and political context to another, being re-shaped and re-considered on the course of its travels.