Art imitates architecture: the Saint Philip reliquary in Renaissance Florence

The formal discrepancies between the Saint Philip reliquary and Florence Cathedral will come as no surprise to students of medieval art and architecture for, more often than not, copies of specific buildings or monuments deviate from their sources rather than reproduce them with precision. In his classic study of the iconography of medieval architecture, Richard Krautheimer demonstrated the variety of form that characterizes copies of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, concluding that "the mediaeval beholder expected to find in a copy only some parts of the prototype but not by any means all of them." (58) The fifteenth century did not necessarily bring with it a greater desire for formal accuracy in replicas of the empty tomb of Christ, as Leon Battista Alberti's "copy" of the Holy Sepulchre for the Rucellai Chapel at S. Pancrazio in Florence attests. (59) Examples of the inexact reproduction of architecture abound in other media as well. Felicity Ratte has recently shown that although "architectural portraits" became increasingly common in trecento frescoes, the descriptive accuracy of these images was often sacrificed. This, however, did not prevent them from being readily recognized or from communicating a specific message. (60) The same must be true of late medieval and early modern metalwork, and the Saint Philip reliquary is just one of a number of significant reliquaries whose form was inspired by, but does not exactly reproduce, specific buildings. (61)

The many small cupolas on the reliquary of the tongue of Saint Anthony in Padua (1434-36) resemble those of the basilica of Sant'Antonio, as well as the dome of Florence Cathedral (Fig. 11). The author of this reliquary, Giuliano da Firenze, as his name indicates, was from Tuscany, and while its style has been associated with the work of his Florentine contemporaries Ghiberti and Brunelleschi, the goldsmith also seems to have been responding to the Byzantine-inspired architecture of the Veneto and to the cupolas of Sant'Antonio in particular. (62) The similarities between this reliquary and the church in which it is located places it in the category of architectural reliquaries that were made to imitate the buildings in which they were housed, just as most body-part reliquaries served to "flesh out" the particular relic they were made to contain. One of the best examples of this type of architectural metalwork is Ugolino di Vieri's exceptional reliquary of the Holy Corporal at Orvieto (1337-38). Its gabled form, which echoes Lorenzo Maitani's design for the facade of Orvieto Cathedral, led John White to describe it as "a facade in little" (Fig. 12). (63) Another object whose shape was inspired by its architectural and decorative setting is the reliquary of Saints Lucianus, Maxianus, and Julianus, three martyrs from Beauvais, created for the Ste-Chapelle in Paris (ca. 1261). This gilded silver casket (now in the Musee de Cluny) was made in the form of a Gothic church that echoes the design of both the Ste-Chapelle and the baldachin that sheltered the grand chasse containing its rich treasure of relics (Fig. 13). (64)