they settled in St. Louis in 1824. The pioneering
Pierre Jean De Smet, S.J.—treasurer of St. Louis
University, missionary to the Native nations in
the northern Rockies, and frequent transatlantic
traveler—wore a small reliquary from his belt that
contained the relics.
There are four classes of Catholic relics. A first-
class relic is either part of the body of a saint
or an instrument of Christ’s Passion. An object
closely associated with the saint in his/her lifetime
constitutes a second-class relic. Third- and fourth-
class relics are contact relics; that is, a substance—
usually a piece of cloth—that has been in contact
with respectively a first- and second-class relic,
and to which the full holy power of the original
has transferred. It is likely that the relic of Christ’s
Crown of Thorns displayed in the exhibition is
also third-class relic. A study in 1904 identified as
many as 700 thorn relics. The original was once
in the possession of the Byzantine Emperors.
Appropriated by crusaders during the Fourth
Crusade (1204), pawned, and later redeemed by
King Louis IX of France, it is now kept at Notre-
Dame du Paris.
Christians have expended considerable love and
labor to construct beautiful settings in which
to house and venerate holy relics. To contain
his collection of Passion relics, Louis IX built
the Sainte-Chapelle, a masterpiece of Gothic
architecture and stained glass, and the model
for Chicago’s Quigley Chapel. In the D’Arcy
Collection, there is a piece of stained-glass from
the Trinity Chapel at Canterbury Cathedral (ca.
1200). The chapel was designed to house the
reliquary of St. Thomas Becket. His life story—his
gruesome martyrdom in that very church and
the many miracles he effected for pilgrims—
were recounted in stained-glass. The D’Arcy also
contains several reliquaries, including a 12th-
century enamel casket or
châsse
from Limoges.
Displayed alongside it is a hollow cast column
and capital from an ornate reliquary made in the
workshop of Nicholas of Verdun (1130–1205).
Nicholas was the finest goldsmith of his age. He
created the famous Shrine of the Three Kings for
Cologne Cathedral. The D’Arcy column must come
from a similar type of reliquary. The column was
part of an arcade that decorated the sides of a chest
that probably contained, as at Cologne, the body of
a saint.
The D’Arcy has a constant heavenly visitor in
the person of St. Christina, one of whose bones
is encased at the base of a Baroque house altar.
In accordance with Church stricture, the bone
is identified by an attached label. Just which
St. Christina this is is not clear. The Roman
martyrology lists two Christinas, one from Persia
and another venerated in Tiro, Italy. A third was
born near Liège, Belgium in 1150. She claimed to
have died, visited purgatory, and returned to life to
pray for the souls there.
A second D’Arcy piece contains an assortment of
relics in its base. The accompanying label simply
states,
Incognite Reliquiae Sanctorum
(
sic)
, (the
unidentified relics of saints). The devotional piece
is associated with the Augustinian monastery at
Aldersbach, Germany. Swedish Lutheran forces
sacked the monastery in 1635, during the Thirty
Years’ War. A glorious new monastic church was
built in the 1720s by the Asam Brothers, masters
of the German Baroque. It is my conjecture
that the nine pieces of bone were salvaged from
the wreckage of the ransacked monastery. The
identities of the saints were lost, and so they
were placed within the base of this sculpture and
remembered simply as the unknown saints.
Saints are the subject of this year’s Medieval
Studies lecture series. Most of the lectures will be
given in the Crown Center on Loyola’s Lake Shore
Campus. The list of talks can be found at LUC.edu/
medieval/lecture_series.shtml. However, as part
of the series, Roger Wieck, Curator of Medieval
and Renaissance Manuscripts at New York’s famed
Morgan Library & Museum will speak at LUMA
on March 31, 2015.
Images:
Reliquary Châsse
, ca. 1180, French (Limoges), copper gilt with champlevé enamel, and cabochon crystals, Gift of Mrs. Eugene Raymondaud in
memory of Commandant Raymondaud, 1973-04; House Altar, late 16th century, German (Augsburg), ebony and silver, Museum purchase, 1982-16
