#Byzantine Marble Reliquary with Pillars

[blueiscoool]

Byzantine Marble Reliquary with Pillars Ca. 300-900 AD

A drum-shaped marble chest in the form of a tholos surrounded by eight columns with simple capitals, arcades between the pillars with elegant openwork foliate tracery; each tiered capital with a vertical socket for the attachment of a lid; the interior showing tooling. Reliquaries were containers for storing and displaying relics, such as bones, pieces of clothing or an object associated with a saint or other religious figure, in a church from the early Christianity onwards. Starting from the simple forms of chests in late Antiquity, they developed to various types depending on the relics they contained. During the Reformation, a large number of reliquaries were destroyed by Calvinists and as a result the number of original, especially early specimens, is limited. Interestingly, our reliquary has a hole in its bottom, which can be related to the practice of pouring oil into a container of relics of a saint or saints, which was then collected into pilgrim flasks.

Size: L:250mm / W:375mm ; 25.35kg.