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Art imitates architecture: the Saint Philip reliquary in Renaissance Florence
Art Bulletin, The, Dec, 2004 by Sally J. Cornelison
Public ritual in late medieval and Renaissance Florence was largely dependent on the cults of the city's patron saints, relics, and sacred images. (1) For example, each time a new bishop entered Florence to take possession of the bishopric, on his way from the church 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), resurrected the son of a French pilgrim during the late fourth or the early fifth century. (2) This was only one of several monuments in the city associated with Saint Zenobius. On his feast day of May 25, the members of the Girolami family, who counted 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, on 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 skull, was carried to a cippolino marble column near the northwest wall of the baptistery of S. Giovanni (Fig. 1). The column was erected during the Middle Ages in order to mark the spot where a leafless elm tree flowered when Saint Zenobius's relics passed by it during their legendary translation from S. Lorenzo to S. Reparata in January 429. (4)
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All of these celebrations and rituals took place within the perimeters of Early Christian Florence on sites that--as the Lives of Saint Zenobius inform us--were closely associated with the saint both during his life and after his death. As a result, it appears that the devotional practices particular to Saint Zenobius's cult, simply by virtue of the places in which they were carried out, reinforced his importance as an intercessor and as the spiritual founder of the Florentine church.
The cults of saints not native to the city, lacking the numerous sites associated with the local cult of Saint Zenobius, gained prominence in other ways. The Apostle Philip had no hold in Florentine worship until a relic of his arm was acquired in the Holy 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 frequency of its display.
Between 1422 and 1425 a new 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 reflects 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 superb example of microarchitecture, further promoted the saint's importance, through the power of his arm relic, as an intercessor for the Florentines. The literature on this object is, for a work in precious metal, relatively extensive, but discussions of the reliquary have rarely gone beyond issues of style. (6) Although Saint Philip's arm belonged to the baptistery, we shall see that its fifteenth-century reliquary is composed of a combination of architectural and ornamental elements 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, but the extent and symbolic implications of their structural and decorative similarities, especially for Florentine ritual, have not been fully explored. (7) This essay will show that, because it emulates S. Maria del Fiore's architecture and decorations, the Saint Philip reliquary was an innovative, potent, and explicit symbol of the bond between the protective and healing power of the apostle whose relic it contains and the city of Florence. It was a symbol whose local and regional significance was advertised and reached its full potential each time the reliquary was displayed in the baptistery and cathedral and carried in procession through the city streets. Thus, rather than being associated with specific sites, like the cult 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 through ritual performance.
The Translation of Saint Philip's Arm to Florence
The civic and episcopal promotion of Saint Philip's arm as one of the most important and powerful of all of Florence's relics began with a detailed account of its translation from the Holy Land. Commissioned by Giovanni da Velletri, the bishop of Florence (1204-30), shortly after the relic was placed in the baptistery, the traslatio text is preserved in two manuscripts, one at Florence's Biblioteca Riccardiana, the other at the Opera del Duomo, and the event was noted by virtually all Florentine chroniclers. (8) The relic's history received its most extensive treatment, however, at the hands of the antiquarian Giovanni Mariti in the late eighteenth century. (9)
