Art imitates architecture: the Saint Philip reliquary in Renaissance Florence

Public ritual in late medieval and Renaissance Florence was largely hanging on the cults of the city's patron saints, relics, and sacred images. (1) For example, each time a fresh bishop entered Florence to take possession of the bishopric, upon his way from the temple of S. Pier Maggiore to the cathedral of s Maria del Fiore he would pause in the Borgo degli Albizzi. There, he would kneel and pray before a stone plaque situated where it was believed Florence's first sainted bishop, Zenobius (d ca. 424) resurrect the son of a French pilgrim during the late fourth or the early fifth hundred (2) This was only individual of several monuments in the city associated with Saint Zenobius. upon his feast day of May 25 the members of the Girolami family, who enumerateed Saint Zenobius among their ancestors, celebrated and advertised their familial ties to him with a procession that began at their twelfth-century tower, located near the Ponte Vecchio in the Via Por s Maria, and ended at the St Zenobius Chapel in the cathedral. (3) Moreover, upon the January 26 feast of Saint Zenobius's translation, Andrea Arditi's enameled and gilded silver reliquary bust (1331) which contains a fragment of the saint's cranium was carried to a cippolino marble rounded pillar near the northwest wall of the baptistery of s Giovanni (Fig. 1). The rounded pillar was erected during the Middle Ages in order to mark the speckle where a leafless elm tree flowered when Saint Zenobius's relics passed by dint of it during their legendary translation from s Lorenzo to S. Reparata in January 429 (4)

All of these celebrations and rituals took place within the perimeters of Early Christian Florence upon sites that--as the Lives of Saint Zenobius inform us--were closely associated with the saint one as well as the other during his life and after his death. As a come it appears that the devotional practices particular to Saint Zenobius's homage simply by virtue of the places in which they were carried without reinforced his importance as an intercessor and as the spiritual planter of the Florentine church.

The worships of saints not native to the city, lacking the numerous sites associated with the local worship of Saint Zenobius, gained prominence in other ways. The Apostle Philip had no clinch in Florentine worship until a relic of his arm was acquired in the devoted Land (Fig. 2). From the time it arrived in Florence in the spring of 1205 the apostle was embraced as a patron and protector of the entire city and its citizens. His arm, the oldest documented relic at the Florentine baptistery, rivaled the popularity of the Saint Zenobius reliquary bust in the oftenness of its display.

Between 1422 and 1425 a of recent origin reliquary was made for Saint Philip's arm (Fig. 3) Unlike the Saint Zenobius head reliquary, which is a so-called speaking, or body-part, reliquary that mirrors the type of relic it contains, the arm of Saint Philip is housed in an elongated ostensorium, a monstrance reliquary that shelters the precious relic in a glass, crystal, and gilded silver architectural frame. (5) The design and ritual use of the reliquary, a grand example of microarchitecture, further promot the saint's importance, end the power of his arm relic, as an intercessor for the Florentines. The literature upon this object is, for a work in precious metal, relatively extensive, on the other hand discussions of the reliquary have rarely gone beyond issues of mode of speech (6) Although Saint Philip's arm belonged to the baptistery, we shall diocese that its fifteenth-century reliquary is compos of a combination of architectural and ornamental simple bodys that are based on the dome, lantern, and sculptural program of the adjacent Florentine Cathedral. The formal connection between the Saint Philip reliquary and s Maria del Fiore has been noted in the literature, on the other hand the extent and symbolic implications of their structural and decorative similarities, especially for Florentine ritual, have not been completely explored. (7) This essay will exhibit that, because it emulates s Maria del Fiore's architecture and decorations, the Saint Philip reliquary was an innovative, physically strong and explicit symbol of the band between the protective and healing power of the apostle whose relic it contains and the city of Florence. It was a representative whose local and regional significance was advertised and reached its replete potential each time the reliquary was displayed in the baptistery and cathedral and carried in procession [i]or[/i] part of to the other the city streets. Thus, rather than being associated with specific sites, like the worship and relics of Saint Zenobius, the Saint Philip reliquary became an effective and portable testament to the arm relic's significance for Florence and its citizens end ritual performance.

The Translation of Saint Philip's Arm to Florence

The civic and episcopal promotion of Saint Philip's arm as single of the most important and powerful of all of Florence's relics began with a detailed account of its translation from the sacred Land. Commissioned by Giovanni da Velletri, the bishop of Florence (1204-30) shortly after the relic was placed in the baptistery, the traslatio true copy is preserved in two manuscripts, single at Florence's Biblioteca Riccardiana, the other at the Opera del Duomo and the circumstance was noted by virtually all Florentine chroniclers. (8) The relic's history received its greatest in quantity extensive treatment, however, at the hands of the antiquarian Giovanni Mariti in the late eighteenth hundred (9)