Abstract
This review considers the British Museum’s exhibition, Thomas Becket: Murder and the Making of a Saint, curated by Lloyd de Beer and Naomi Speakman. Following a brief description of the show and its relationship to current art-historical scholarship, I offer a detailed study of one exhibit, a late-twelfth-century font from Lyngsjö in Sweden, and briefly sketch the significance of Becket for the historiography of medieval art in Britain.
Highlights
This review considers the British Museum’s exhibition, Thomas Becket: Murder and the Making of a Saint, curated by Lloyd de Beer and Naomi Speakman
1171 of Canterbury cathedral, ‘locked down’ following Becket’s death in December 1170. Those unable to travel to the exhibition have been able to make a kind of virtual pilgrimage there thanks to a series of extremely successful online lectures and curators’ tours that will, one suspects, help to reshape future thinking about how museums can expand their reach
The exhibition ends with a flourish with Henri de Flemalle’s large Baroque sculpture of Becket with a sword wedged in his head, his cope originally held in place by a large morse containing a relic of his skull
Summary
Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Measuring 295 mm × 344 mm × 124 mm and generally dated to the 1180s, this is the largest and perhaps earliest of over 50 surviving enamel reliquary caskets showing Thomas’s martyrdom and burial It focuses attention on two key themes of the exhibition: the story of Becket’s murder and his transformation into a saint. Prayers to Thomas have been removed but not the accompanying images; in another, Becket’s image is crossed out but still clearly visible; in a third, ink has been smeared across the entire page, creating a striking sea of red, punctuated by golden initials It is a particular strength of this exhibition that the Reformation is not portrayed as the endpoint of devotion to Becket, and a case entitled ‘Martyrdom and memory’ shows how Thomas’s memory resonated afresh in disputes between the English Crown and Catholic communities in sixteenth-century. The exhibition ends with a flourish with Henri de Flemalle’s large Baroque sculpture of Becket with a sword wedged in his head, his cope originally held in place by a large morse containing a relic of his skull
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