Holy Thorn Reliquary
The Holy Thorn Reliquary was probably created in the 1390s in Paris for John, Duke of Berry, to house a relic of the Crown of Thorns. It is one of a small number of major goldsmiths’ works or joyaux that survive from the extravagant world of the Valois royal family around 1400. The front view shows the end of the world and the Last Judgement, with the Trinity and saints above and the resurrection of the dead below.
About Holy Thorn Reliquary in brief
The Holy Thorn Reliquary was probably created in the 1390s in Paris for John, Duke of Berry, to house a relic of the Crown of Thorns. It is one of a small number of major goldsmiths’ works or joyaux that survive from the extravagant world of the Valois royal family around 1400. The front view shows the end of the world and the Last Judgement, with the Trinity and saints above and the resurrection of the dead below. The rear view has less extravagant decoration, mostly in plain gold in low relief, and has doors that opened to display a flat object, now missing, which was presumably another relic. It was in the Habsburg collections from at least the 16th century until the 1860s, when it was replaced by a forgery during a restoration by an art dealer, Salomon Weininger. He was later convicted of other forgeries, and died in prison in 1879, but it was still not realised that he had returned one of his copies to the Imperial collections instead of the original. The Viennese Rothschild family bought the original reliquary by 1872, in ignorance of its provenance; it was inherited by Ferdinand de Rothschild, who moved to England, and built Waddesdon Manor in Buckinghamshire. One of the copies in the Ecclesiastical Treasury in Vienna, where the deception remained undetected for several decades, reached the British Museum in 1899. The first publication to assert that the London and Vienna versions were one and the same was in 1927; the matter was not settled until 1959 when the British experts assembled a close comparison from Vienna and London to enable comparison of the two versions to be made.
The original was a highlight of the exhibition Treasures of Heaven: Saints, Relics, and Devotion in Medieval Europe at the British museum from June 23 to October 2011, and featured in the BBC’s A History of the World in 100 Objects, in which Neil MacGregor described it as ‘one of the supreme achievements of medieval European metalwork’ It is now thought to have been made before 1397; based on the heraldic forms used, the museum now dates it to 1390–97. It was probably made a few years before he commissioned his famous Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, and some years after he commissioned the Royal Gold Cup, also in the Britishuseum. It remained in Vienna until after 1860, and then it was sent to be restored by Salomons Weineder, who secretly made a number of copies. It has remained in the Imperial Museum ever since, and is now one of the most valuable pieces of medieval metalwork in the world, with a collection of more than 2,000 pieces. It also features in the National Gallery of Art in London, where it is on display alongside the Queen’s bust of Queen Elizabeth II and the bust of Charles VII of England, among other items from the Middle Ages.
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This page is based on the article Holy Thorn Reliquary published in Wikipedia (as of Oct. 31, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
