London – Kensington and Chelsea (Borough of) – Victoria and Albert Museum (Reliquary Diptych)

This rather lovely item (or, to be precise, two items as it’s two halves of a folding reliquary and has two catalogue numbers) is in the collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum. And, whilst I’m wittering on, I’m very impressed at the level of information about this item (and I’m hoping many others) on their web-site, there are tens of paragraphs of information about these reliquaries and far more than I can ever really understand.

I like reliquaries, especially personal ones which would have been deeply important to their owners, although this was likely made for a monastery. This one is thought to have been made in Spoleto, a town nearby to Perugia in Italy, in the 1320s. Some of the relics are still in the recessed area, although others are missing or have moved about. It’s not entirely clear who each item was associated with, but there are a few bone fragments.

There’s lots of provenance for this item, something I’m nearly always intrigued by, I quite like how ownership of items has worked out over time. It was owned by Serafino Tordelli (1787-1864) who was a collector of items who lived in Spoleto, and it was purchased by the dealer Giuseppe Baslini (1817-1877) after Tordelli’s death. The museum then purchased the reliquaries for £4 (£250 in today’s money according to the National Archives) on 17 July 1868.

The number of faked relics reached the point in the medieval period that there were more body parts for some saints than the individual had limbs for. Many of relics were destroyed during the Reformation and there’s no evidence for many relics at all, other than hearsay. But, at the time it was a personal connection which would have been important and the destruction of so many relics during the Reformation must have caused some considerable distress.