The Visual Rhetoric of the Relic Treasury

Oswald, Julia Marie

doi:https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-cteq-4t53

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The Visual Rhetoric of the Relic Treasury

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This dissertation considers a rich and diverse material record pertaining to the dynamic between art and the relic treasury in the Kingdom of France and the Holy Roman Empire from c. 1100 into the sixteenth century. Across this broad period and region—and even well beyond—real and imagined collections of relics were given form in panel paintings, book arts, and prints, as well as on sculptural objects such as altarpieces and reliquaries. This corpus is examined alongside adjacent cultural practices that negotiated the value and experience of relics, such as theoretical engagements with the relic and its meaning, and practices of inventorying and of ritualized sequencing and display. Within this larger context, art persistently mediated objects understood as singular and precious and thus as in need of enclosure and protection. The project builds upon recent scholarship in revising the historiographical construct of the medieval treasury as a passive “accumulation” of alike things that exists in essential discontinuity with later practices of acquiring, ordering, and displaying objects. This binary paradigm within collection studies resonates with—and in certain art historical scholarship explicitly reinforces—a notion of representation in the medieval period as similarly characterized by a lack of mediation. For several decades, scholarship has asserted a historical rupture in representational-epistemic modes by opposing the medieval “image” to the early modern “work of art.” Within this paradigm, the medieval image is defined through its instantiation of sacred presence, in opposition to the more mediated forms of Renaissance art. By looking at how the relic—the archetype of presence in Latin Christianity—was itself always mediated through visual representation and related discourses of description, organization, and display, this study offers a recalibrated account of medieval art and collecting both independently and in relation to succeeding practices.

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