When the bones of King Arthur were digged up, the old Race might think, they beheld therein some Originals of themselves; Unto these of our Urnes none here can pretend relation, and can only behold the Reliques of those persons, who in their life giving the Laws unto their predecessors, after long obscurity, now lye at their mercies. But remembring the early civility they brought upon these Countreys, and forgetting long passed mischiefs; We mercifully preserve their bones, and pisse not upon their ashes.
Thomas Browne, Urne Buriall1
The gentlemen at Christie’s had obviously taken the greatest trouble to hide both their own embarrassment and to spare their readers. The delicately phrased entry in the sale catalogue of Wednesday 29 October 1969, dealing, among others, with ‘The Celebrated Vignali Collection of Napoleon Relics’ eventually read:
A small dried-up object, genteely described as a mummified tendon, taken from his body during the post-mortem. (The authenticity of the macabre relic has been confirmed by the publication in the Revue des Mondes of a posthumous memoir by St Denis, in which he expressly states that he and Vignali took away small pieces of Napoleon’s corpse during the autopsy.)
There was no lot number and no estimate. In the event, the ‘mummified tendon’, the great man’s most private of private parts, did not reach its reserve price and was returned to its owner, an American book dealer.
Mr St Denis, who had been able to authenticate Napoleon’s last indignity in his banishment on St Helena, had been his ‘personal valet and mameluke’ on the island and stood in as his accountant and chasseur. The exiled emperor had ordered that a post-mortem should be performed on his body as soon as possible and the procedure was duly undertaken on the afternoon of his death. The billiard table had to double as a mortuary slab. The doctor who had been sent to look after him came into his own. Two years earlier, when Napoleon felt his health failing, he had asked for a priest (‘an educated man, under forty, easy to get on with, and not prejudiced against Gallican principles’) and a doctor. He had been sent two men of the cloth from his home island of Corsica, one infirm after a stroke and barely able to speak, the other a young man who could hardly read or write. The requested doctor appeared in the shape of a thirty-year-old dissecting-room assistant, one François Antommarchi, who was only too happy to acknowledge that until then he ‘had had only corpses to deal with’.2 Not having been of great help to his ailing patient while he was alive, Antommarchi could now spring into action and demonstrate his expertise in front of the British officers and doctors looking on. After the autopsy, during which Antommarchi had located ‘a very extended cancerous ulcer’, the emperor was laid out in his green Chasseur’s uniform, which had been turned inside out recently because it was so faded. The whole English garrison came to pay their last respects. It was generally agreed that the emperor looked very beautiful with a fine, regular and placid countenance.
It seems likely that Napoleon had not yielded to stomach cancer, but had died a slow and painful death from arsenic-poisoning, administered, it has been suggested, in the emperor’s almond milk by the British governor of the island, Hudson Lowe, who was terrified of his prisoner and of the responsibility placed upon his shoulders, and who may have acted on higher orders.3 A more likely, and less dramatic, explanation is that the real and unwitting murderer was a Swedish chemist by the name of Scheele, who had invented a dye containing copper arsenic, which was used in wallpaper in Napoleon’s quarters. When damp, the wallpaper emitted vapours that may well have killed the exile over the months and years of his stay there.
The course of the emperor’s physical decline, the remarkable state of preservation of his body when it was finally transferred to the Pantheon in Paris, and the levels of the poison found in various locks of hair that were taken from the corpse all indicate arsenic rather than cancer as the cause of death. For the dignitaries who saw at that time the body of the greatest Frenchman who had ever lived, it seemed little short of a miracle that it had hardly decomposed, a fact reminiscent of stories of saints who, when exhumed, often centuries after their burial, were found to be perfectly preserved and smelling of sweet flowers and incense. Those who wanted to believe simply took it as one more indication that Napoleon had passed into the pantheon of the immortals, the secular saints of the Grande Nation. The Christian idea of the body as being impervious to decay and corruption formed a link to a powerful tradition that seemed both logical and natural. Arsenic may thus have contributed to the myth of the emperor’s supernatural powers, a man of providence, an incarnation of the universal spirit itself driving forward history. This was no mere mortal and what had once been his, or had been in contact with him, duly achieved the status of a holy relic to be revered.
The abbé and Mr St Denis, the late emperor’s valet, were not left incapacitated by their grief for a fellow Corsican and went about discreetly cementing his legacy by capitalizing on the solid demand for Napoleonic mementoes, in which there was already a robust trade throughout Europe. In his will, Napoleon had left his chaplain the stately sum of 100,000 francs. The abbé now saw the opportunity of multiplying his benefactor’s generosity. During the autopsy, he removed some of Napoleon’s beard and body hair, as well as bits of his skin, generously dividing some of these between his friends. The ‘mummified tendon’ later to reappear at Christie’s was part of his spoils, as was one of the death masks made by the good doctor Antommarchi.
Their collection of Napoleon memorabilia stayed in Corsica until the London firm of Maggs Brothers bought the relics from Vignali’s collateral descendants. From there they went to a Dr Rosenbach, a New York bookseller, along with the emperor’s letters and documents confirming the authenticity of the ‘mummified tendon’.
The Christie’s experts, having overcome their scruples about this most unusual of lots, had hoped to sell it for up to £30,000. Bidding started at £10. Only one bidder, however, was willing to go as high as £14,000. He was Mr Brian Gimelson of Fort Washington, Pennsylvania, who was particularly interested in relics of Napoleon because his own wife was called Josephine. (The Times of 30 October 1969 carried a photograph of Josephine Gimelson holding a pair of the emperor’s breeches.) Earlier that year Christie’s had successfully sold the dead emperor’s hat, and the Hôtel Rameau in Versailles had sold some locks of Napoleon’s hair, his spectacles, straw from his coffin, and a willow tree that had been planted near his tomb.
The veneration of and trade in relics sacred and profane had a long pedigree in France and throughout Europe and every collection is, to some extent, a reliquary preserving fragments of a realm beyond our reach. During the Middle Ages this passion blossomed in its purest form.
By an appropriate coincidence, Monsieur St Denis shared his saintly surname with one Abbot Suger, who had documented his passion for collecting holy relics some 800 years before Napoleon was mutilated in the interest of pious greed and the burgeoning cult around his legend.
Suger, born in 1081, was an avid relic hunter and had assembled a treasure for the greater glory of God in the royal Abbey of St Denis, near Paris. Not only was the treasure documented, but he himself also recorded in his autobiography the motives for its creation:
To me, I confess, it always has seemed right that the most expensive things should be used above all for the administration of the holy Eucharist. If golden vessels, vials and mortars were used to collect ‘the blood of goats or calves or the red heifer’, how much more should gold vases, precious stones and whatever is most valuable among created things be set out with continual reverence and full devotion ‘to receive the blood of Jesus Christ’ (Heb. 9:1 3f.).4
Suger had been dedicated to the abbey at the age of nine, like many younger sons of the minor nobility. He was appointed abbot in 1122 and held the post until his death in 1155.
One of the most important and influential men in France, Suger believed that the glory of God was also the glory of his country and that God should be worshipped as King Solomon had worshipped him: in a sanctuary resplendent with gold, silver and precious stones. He therefore set about renovating the somewhat dilapidated abbey and equipping it with statues, holy vessels and reliquaries made by the best workmen. Suger presided over an astonishing collection of relics and half-relics, the latter being objects of uncertain origin but unquestionable appeal that had found their way into the treasure. Among these were a Greek vase with Bacchic scenes, a Sassanian bowl thought to be the cup of Solomon himself, a Roman stone bathtub that was placed behind the high altar, a unicorn’s horn, the teeth of an elephant, and a gryphon’s claw, as well as other curiosities. Though these had unpleasantly heathen connotations the sanctity of the other relics could not be doubted, for they included items once belonging to the Saviour Himself: his swaddling clothes, parts of his crown of thorns, nails from the Holy Cross, etc.
Already at this time the somewhat uncritical attitude Suger displayed towards his treasures’ provenance did not go unnoticed. He, however, remained firm:
Some of our intimates cautiously suggested that it might have been better for our reputation and that of the church as well if we had chosen to investigate the truth of the inscriptions [i.e., the provenance of relics] in private. Fired by my own faith, I replied that, if the inscriptions were true, I would rather have it discovered publicly than check it secretly and invite the skepticism of those who had not been present. Thus we brought the aforesaid altar into our midst and summoned goldsmiths, who carefully opened the little compartments containing the holy arms, upon which sat the little crystals with their inscriptions. God granting, just as we had hoped, with all looking on, we found everything there.5
Among the holy relics held by the abbey was a set of remains described as follows in ‘… un coffre de bahut d’environ deux pieds et demy de long et un pied de large … dedans icelluy coffre les ossemens du corps Monsieur St Louis’6 (‘… a coffer, about two-and-a-half foot long and one foot broad … inside this coffer the bones of the body of Monsieur St Louis’). Les ossemens du corps Monsieur St Louis had found their way to France after a long and adventurous journey. The saint had died in Tunis in 1137. As was the medieval custom in cases of eminent and holy men dying while abroad, the flesh was boiled off their bones in a large cauldron of wine and water. The crusaders had practised this technique for some time. Unable to preserve and take back home entire bodies of knights fallen in the holy war in the heat of the Middle East the bones would suffice. They had seen the holy sites, after all, had died for Christ himself, had been martyred in the name of God at the hands of infidels. One obvious problem with this practice was that, once divided from the flesh, the bone of a saintly knight of Christ was impossible to tell apart from that of a commoner, a thief, or even an infidel, a fact used to best effect by relic merchants specialized in supplying Europe with Middle Eastern venerabilia.
In the case of Monsieur St Louis there were no such doubts. His soft tissue was buried in Monreale in Sicily, while his bones and heart were transferred, wrapped in scented silk, to St Denis. But his posthumous journeys had not ended. In 1305, the abbey swapped his skull, minus the jawbone, for a box of pious allsorts – a reliquary containing specimens from all the relics held in the Sainte Chapelle – while the jaw was given a special reliquary all of its own. Later abbots were to find themselves equally unable to resist the temptation to exchange interesting relics for parts of the saint’s skeleton.
Suger may have been the Middle Ages’s most enthusiastic hunter and embellisher of relics but his love of saintly remains was shared by many. Following the access to the Middle East gained by the crusaders, the trade in relics blossomed when body parts of innumerable saints and objects connected to them were venerated, bought and sold, disputed and forged on a staggering scale. Such was the potential value of relics that when St Francis of Assisi, exhausted by fasting and strenuous penances, was nearing his death, he was put under round-the-clock armed guard to prevent the rival city of Perugia from snatching his precious body. To this day Assisi, the second most-visited gravesite in the Catholic world, benefits from a steady stream of pilgrims.
The first great reliquary of Christendom was the Rome of the East, Constantinople, which had in its walls not only the body of St Stephen, but also the headdress of the prophet Elijah and the very tablets of the law received by Moses on Mount Sinai, the manna given to the Israelites in the desert, the trumpet blown by Joshua outside the walls of Jericho, the chains of St Peter, and many other precious and holy objects. Indeed, most items of significance from the life of the Saviour Himself were also here. Along with the column at which Jesus was flagellated, Anthony, Archbishop of Novgorod, tells us in 1200 that he saw slabs from Christ’s tomb and the table at which he had celebrated the Last Supper, as well as a chart used to measure the height of Jesus as a growing boy.
The Saviour posed a dilemma to relic lovers. While martyrs generally left behind remains that could be venerated, his own body, having ascended into heaven, was beyond the reach of both the pious and the greedy. The significance of the Holy Cross was therefore all the greater. It had been fortuitously found, along with the nails, the title tablet and the crown of thorns, by Empress Helena, who had sent half of it to Constantinople while leaving the other half at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, where it remained, until it vanished when Saladin took the city in 1187. Throughout the Middle Ages, fragments of the True Cross appeared all over Europe. Some have survived to this day.
Sceptics have pointed out time and again that whole forests were felled in order to satisfy the demand for pieces of the cross. To the faithful, however, there was another explanation, which had been supplied by Bishop Nola, who had written in the fifth century that the cross would keep renewing itself whenever pieces were cut away from it.
Where the Holy Cross itself was not available, the nails that fastened the Saviour’s body to it were a good substitute. No fewer than twenty-nine places in Europe alone claim to possess a holy nail: Apache, Ancon, Arras, Bamberg, the convent of Indecision in Bavaria, Carpentras, Catana, Colle in Tuscany, Cologne, Compiègne, Krakow, the Escorial, Florence, Livorno, Milan, Monza, the Monastery of St Patrick in Naples, Paris, both Santa Croce and Santa Maria in Campitelli in Rome, Siena, Spoleto, Torcello, Torno on Lake Como, Toul, Trèves, Troyes, Venice (three nails) and Vienna. Most early Christian writers assume that Jesus was nailed to the cross by four spikes, though others, such as Gregory Nazianzen and the fifth-century Greek poet Nonnus, believed that the Saviour had been crucified with his feet crossed and a single nail driven through them. This caused some consternation: it may be true that not all the nails in existence were whole, but the inherent difficulty was still not easily explained away.
Constantinople, that great repository of sacred bric-à-brac, was unperturbed by such quibbles. Empress Helena, who seems to have spent much of her reign locating holy relics, once cast a nail from the Holy Cross into the sea to calm a storm. Another one was fitted to the head of a statue of the Emperor Constantine, while a third was incorporated into his helmet. In an effort to fulfil an ancient prophecy, the emperor had another one fashioned into a part of the bridle for his horse as a bit, after Zechariah 14.20, which reads, cryptically, ‘In that day that which is upon the bridle of the horse shall be holy to the Lord.’
Constantine also understood the value of these objects in diplomacy. A fifth nail from the cross was sent to Russia, and is now in Moscow. Yet another one was given to Pope Gregory, who passed it on to the Frankish Princess Theodolina. She used her nail as part of her crown, the famous Iron Crown of Lombardy, which she later donated to the church at Monza in Italy, where it remained from 628 and was used for the coronation of Charlemagne. When Napoleon Bonaparte, neither immune to the allure of relics nor ignorant of their symbolic power, crowned himself King of Italy he used the Iron Crown.
More immediate relics of the Saviour were harder to come by, and the faithful were reduced mainly to venerating nail parings, hairs plucked from his beard, strands of hair, loincloths and tears wept by Christ on various occasions. One such tear, in the Church of the Holy Trinity in Vendôme, could be seen quivering continuously in its crystal vial. It was shed for the last time when the relic was destroyed during the French Revolution. During the twelfth century, a supposed tooth of Christ caused a theological dispute when the theologian Guibert de Nogend pointed out that the Lord could not have left teeth behind. The owners of the relic, the monks of Saint-Medard-de-Soisson, however, countered that this was a milk tooth.
In the thirteenth century, the town of Lucques in the Auvergne attracted pilgrims with a crucifix that was said to contain the navel of the infant Jesus. A second holy navel was venerated in the Roman church Santa Maria della Popolo, later to be the scene of the meeting of two artistic geniuses who jointly worked on a commission there, Annibale Carracci and Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio. A third holy navel was exhibited at Chalons-sur-Marne. This miraculous multiplication was explained by the original navel having been divided into several relics, but the faithful of Chalons-sur-Marne eventually had to face the reality that their reliquary, when opened, was found to contain nothing but gravel.
The breast milk of the Blessed Virgin Mary was spread throughout Christendom, leading Calvin to point out later that, even if she had been a professional wet-nurse, the Mother of Christ could not have produced so much of it. Sixty-nine churches claimed to own some drops, forty-six of them in France alone. Even Eton College possessed two. Other lesser relics were the stool on which Mary had been sitting during the Annunciation, the bucket and pail that were to be found near by, and a stone on which she rested during the flight to Egypt.
The desperate search for relics of the Saviour reached its apotheosis in a cult that was very popular during the Middle Ages: the veneration of the Holy Prepuce. There was bitter rivalry between no fewer than eight places in France that claimed to have the true foreskin of Christ. One of them, Charroux, even derived its name from the proud possession: chair rouge – red flesh. Asked to adjudicate on this delicate matter, Pope Innocent III flatly refused, ruling that only the Saviour Himself was likely to know which one was genuine. As the papal delegate Arnaud-Amaury had said, in very different circumstances, during the Albigensian crusade in 1206: the Lord will recognize his own. His successor, Pope Clement VII, had no such scruples and issued a bull promising indulgences to all those going on a pilgrimage to Charroux to venerate the relic.
The prepuce at Coulombs, near Nogent-le-Roi, was especially renowned for making the infertile fertile again, and was even lent to King Henry V of England when he found it difficult to sire an heir in 1422. As late as 1872 the parish priest of Coulombs would, it is alleged, take the twelfth-century ivory cross containing the relic into the presbytery, where he would allow the women of the parish to kiss the reliquary in holy devotion.
One great centre of relic worship and trade owed its wealth in sacred objects to an erroneous translation. Cologne is the resting place of many relics, among them the Three Kings and those of St Ursula and her 11,000 virgins. Ursula’s legend is one of the oldest of Christianity. Famed for her beauty, she was the daughter of a British king, Deonotus, in the early third century ad. When a barbarian king asked for her hand, adding that in case she chose not to accept he would lay waste her father’s lands, she consented, provided her new husband would accept her religion, and that her father would first allow her to make a pilgrimage to Rome. Ursula and her retinue of virgins sailed down the Rhine to Basle, where they disembarked their eleven ships and were joined by the bishop of the city. In Rome, Pope Ciriacus welcomed the pilgrims. He felt strangely touched by the princess and had a dream commanding him to return to Cologne together with the virgins. He then resigned from his office and joined the girls, much to the horror of his cardinals, who were so angry with their pope joining a band of young girls that they struck him off the papal register. As the eleven ships sailed into Cologne, they were already expected ashore: the Huns had got word of the huge party of virgins coming their way. An epic bloodbath followed, leaving 11,000 decapitated virgins, enough martyr blood for any Catholic story. Amid all the butchery, the leader of the Huns was so stricken by the beauty of the princess that he offered to marry her. She refused and he shot her with an arrow. One of the virgins miraculously managed to hide from the blood-thirsty men. Disconsolate at the fact that her companions had tasted martyrdom and she had not, she killed herself the morning after the massacre.
Ursula and her maidens were all canonized (apart from the one who committed suicide) and allocated a feast day, the 21st of October. They were buried in a Roman cemetery, which was fortuitously rediscovered almost a thousand years after her death, in 1106. It was not just the virgin saints who were exhumed: apart from the saintly girls the graveyard happily yielded a good number of ancient bishops and other Christian worthies, all still clearly identified. Fifty years later, in 1155, Abbot Gerlach would further substantiate the claim by manufacturing 200 headstones with the virgins’ names on them. The legend of Ursula comes to us through a Latin inscription installed in the church dedicated to her by a Roman senator named Clematius, who renovated the sacred building and recorded her legend. Ten lines in Latin relate the tragic story.
The Huns, of course, never reached Cologne, and there never was a pope called Ciriacus in third-century Rome. It is likely that St Ursula is the Christian incarnation of a Teutonic moon goddess named Hörsel, who travelled in a boat and held dominion over the souls of dead maidens, 1,000 of whom formed her retinue. The number of Ursula’s companions may originate from a Latin abbreviation used in the original inscription: XI.M.V. It was read to stand for undecim millia virgines, though scholars have long argued that it is much more likely to be short for undecin martyres virgines, ‘eleven virgin martyrs’.
This scholarly dispute, however, does little to discourage the faithful. St Ursula’s Church houses a profusion of relics even today; not only the skull of the saint herself on the altar, but also those of many of her sweet maidens, and of others found with them. The so-called Gold Chamber in the church contains a whole congregation of saints, some of which are kept in precious reliquaries and wrapped in embroidered cloths, while others are arranged along walls, protected by wire netting. Some bones are arranged to spell out the name of the saint. For a time, Cologne even became a successful exporter of relics, which it willingly supplied throughout the Christian world until, in 1300, Pope Boniface IX issued the bull Detestandae feritatis abusum, which put an end to the worst excesses of the trade.
In the late twelfth century, St Ursula and her virgins did not prove enough for Reinald von Dassel, the Archbishop of Cologne, a man of God gluttonous for saintly bones. He succeeded in securing one of Christianity’s greatest prizes: the bones of the Magi who had worshipped the infant Jesus and brought him their well-known gifts.
The Magi themselves have a history at least as peculiar as that of St Ursula. Early Christian writers found it impossible to agree on either number or names of the holy men who had found their way to the manger. Zarvanades, Gusnaphus, Kagba, Badalima and Bithisaria were touted as likely names until Caspar, Melchior and Balthasar finally emerged from the field and came home by a nose. Over the centuries, this version became accepted as fact, and by the eighth century the Venerable Bede could describe Melchior as ‘old and white-haired, hairy with a long beard and long locks’ with all the confidence of one who had known him personally. The bones of the holy men reached Cologne (how could it be otherwise?) via Constantinople, where emperor Constantine had brought them after a visit to the Holy Land. The Cologne Dome was erected in their honour, a shrine designed to be worthy of them.
Today, packs of pilgrims beat their path to the golden reliquary in the cathedral, dressed much like tourists everywhere. They capture their spiritual experience and the sartorial inadequacies around them on video. In the nineteenth century, the German poet Heinrich Heine recorded his own visit to their shrine in a poem. Having converted to Christianity for social reasons, he described his own visit to Cologne Cathedral, a huge space dimly lit by oil lamps. He paid his respects to the chapel in which the Magi are housed, and found them not lying in their sarcophagi, but sitting upright and lecturing him on why exactly they ought to be respected: firstly because they were dead, secondly because they were kings, and thirdly because they were saints. Heine remained resolutely unimpressed and gave voice to his hope that the cathedral would eventually be converted into a cavalry stable.
Few people are immune to ancestor worship and the magic of physical closeness across time: holding a Roman coin in one’s hand and wondering what it might have bought, visiting historic sites, seeing Mozart’s violin, a manuscript by Beethoven, a poem in Shelley’s hand, Churchill’s slippers, a baseball autographed by Babe Ruth or a letter written by a great man and dealing with matters that are small and intimate. These objects seem to contain the past, are mute witnesses to history, bearing within them the immediacy of touch preserved over years and centuries.
Ancestor cult is one of the very oldest forms of religious observance and evidence of it dates back to the earliest finds of human cultural activity. Even the mightiest regimes and ideologies have been powerless to eradicate it while others, such as Stalin’s USSR, found it expedient to encourage it. No amount of atheist rationalism, though, has been able to expunge it altogether; when the Red Guards smashed China’s great heritage during the Cultural Revolution, even the zealous mobs of youngsters driving the destruction did not dare lay a finger on the tombs of the Ming emperors, which still stand today as they were hundreds of years ago, protected by an avenue of mythical beasts in stone, untouched by the hammers of ideology, staring at the visitors, exactly as they did centuries ago.
Many religions venerate relics, and they are important in some Buddhist traditions, but nothing can equal Christian fervour in this respect. Being an important part of Christian worship, relics were treated very seriously by theologians. Scholastic writers classified relics into reliquiae insignes, those that included either the entire corpse or at least head, arms or legs, and reliquiae non insignes, lesser relics. The division was carried further when the faithful came to distinguish between notabiles, large and significant body parts, and exiguae, such as fingers and teeth. Even today, the relics of the Catholic Church are officially classified as being first class, i.e., insignes, second class, exiguae, and third class, i.e., objects merely touched by or belonging to a saint.
To the mind of the believer, relics are imbued with talismanic qualities. It is a curious fact that they who want to be closest to the life of those they venerate often find themselves involved in the most gruesome aspects of decay and death. Relics, however, are both dead and alive – parts of dead bodies or inanimate objects, but alive with the aura, the spirit of something greater, and more holy, than we are. They may appear to be shrivelled, desiccated body parts and bones, or objects such as chains, nails or clothes, but at the same time they are a link to a world beyond, carriers of a living force, emissaries from a world capable of overturning the laws of our own.
Relics touch on a curious dialectic of collecting: whatever we collect we have to kill; literally in the case of butterflies or beetles, metaphorically in the case of other objects, which are removed from their usual surroundings, functions and circulation, and placed in an artificial environment, bereft of their former usefulness, turned into objects of a different order, dead to the world. No stamp collector will plunder his albums for his correspondence, even if some of his stamps might still be valid. No collector of teacups scours markets and antique shops simply for cups from which to drink his tea. Even the occasional use of objects in a collection, musical instruments, books or vintage cars, is incidental, and not what the collection is about.
At the same time these objects have taken on a new life, as part of an organism, as part of the collector’s mirror image, entities that place their own demands on his life and that create their own rules, exude their own power. Like relics they are dead and yet very much alive in the mind of the believer, the collector, the devotee. In being so, they form a bridge between our limited world and an infinitely richer one, that of history or art, of charisma or of holiness – a world of ultimate authenticity and thus a profoundly romantic utopia. Through them, the collector can live on after his own life has come to an end; and the collection becomes a bulwark against mortality.
The double nature of the relic, dead matter and living promise, is illustrated in a secular setting in one of the most affecting museums in Europe, the Museo Belliniano in Catania, Sicily, a city of a softly decaying, continuous past.
Outside the museum dedicated to the opera composer who was born here is the Piazza San Francesco. The Baroque church opposite has a fluorescent Ave Maria above the door and a St Francis with fluorescent halo. Inside, a mummified corpse of a saint is decked out in festive clothes while a gory display of St Lucy’s eyes and St Agatha’s breasts all painted in vivid colours keep alive the memory of martyrdom. The museum itself is situated in an old apartment house and can be reached only through a courtyard with washing flapping in the breeze. Mementoes of Bellini’s short life are crowded together, seemingly untouched for decades, a secular pendant to the church across the square. No exhibition designer or education consultant has ever been allowed to disturb its timeless peace. In the alcove in which he was born (a plaque on its back wall reads In questo alcove vene alla luce Bellini, ‘Bellini saw the light of the world in this alcove’) is his piano, unrestored, as if he had been the last person to touch it, the keys discoloured with age. The chair in front of it in the form of a shell with dolphin legs has been allowed to rot away like its owner, like its owner’s city. That is its charm.
In a niche of the museum is the coffin in which Bellini’s corpse was transferred from Milan to Catania, forty-one years after his death in 1835. The purple velvet is bleached and torn, a tin laurel wreath is lying on the lid, and a gilt lyre. A death mask taken from the corpse, so many years afterwards, is displayed here – the nose was all but gone. On the walls of the niche, contemporary photos in tasteful gilt frames show a corpse as it appeared after the exhumation and the opening of the coffin, in an advanced state of mummification, more pharaoh than romantic hero. On the opposite wall is the dead composer in the ‘official version’ of a century in love with genius: Bellini as youthful genius with translucent skin and visionary gaze, still covered by his shroud but already embraced by adoring angels carrying him to the pantheon of opera, to immortality. Death and transfiguration.
The secular religion of romanticism uses the same language as the official religion of the Catholic Church, as indeed does every collection. In undergoing this transformation, the objects thus sanctified remind us of the very beginnings of our civilization: of fetishes and totems, of headhunters, of the scalps triumphantly displayed by Indian warriors, and to the ancestor cult which is at the beginning of every religious understanding of the world. Just as cannibals who would consume the flesh of their enemy during ritual meals ingested part of his prowess and élan vital, relics, both secular and sacred, allow us to tap into a power and into a realm otherwise closed to us.
In Melanesian cultures Mana, the mysterious life force pervading every aspect of the living world, is believed especially to reside in the skulls of ancestors and of enemies killed in battle. Such skulls are often kept in spirit houses, together with ritual objects.7 Mana, ‘holiness’, that powerful presence where there is an absence, has lost little of its force in our rational world. Let him or her who is unmoved by the history contained in a small object that has survived for centuries cast the first stone.
Collecting relics is a kind of collecting that is very much alive in a time in which pop and film memorabilia are the single biggest growth area in the international art market. In the minds of those devoted to them, many historical figures that are collected, among them Diana, Princess of Wales, the Kennedys and Elvis Presley, have stepped across the boundary that divides mere mortals from secular saints, and their remembrance from religious worship.
There are hybrids between reliquaries and collections. The virgins, kings and assorted minor saints in Cologne have important elements of a collection in their arrangement and classification, and in the way in which they form and define a space and a class of things. The same phenomenon can be observed in catacombs and ossaries often found in Catholic countries, in Palermo, Rome, Vienna and Paris, for instance, in which the decayed bodies of the dead (not relics, as these were ordinary mortals), are put on display, used as parts of works of art (such as the skulls in the danse macabre frieze in Wolhusen in Switzerland, which are let into the walls to form the heads of the painted figures) or arranged into elaborate displays of geometric patterns and allegorical tableaux made of skulls and bones. They speak at the same time of the inevitability of death and of the transience of human life, and, by virtue of the fact that they are all the bones of believers, all to be rescued and restored on the Day of Judgement, of eternal life. Like relics, they thus become instruments of salvation.
Such instruments are not always so dramatic. By surrounding ourselves with objects we hope to immerse ourselves in what is represented by them, with what they represent to us who are unwilling to accept that it will always remain elusive and cannot be locked into things. Instead of shooting the messenger we stuff him, believing him to be the message.
A different, more meaningful, more ordered world can speak out of things as humble as old shoes or bottles, out of autographs or first editions, which, in their pleasing arrangement, in their structure and variety, tell of beauty, of security; and every object we so crave is in fact an attribute of what we are craving for. Even the sanitized miniature world of a train set with its polished engines and little station houses, its evergreen trees and its tiny rosy-cheeked passengers can thus become a utopia that holds a powerful attraction above the world outside, and the control over the timetables of an old Märklin set stands in stark contrast to the powerlessness we cannot help but feel when faced with time itself. It embodies the simpler passions and the smaller world of childhood, even though the very need for it testifies to the complexities, the innumerable failures and compromises of adulthood.
Too many shamans have ruled over our ancestors for us to recognize that the paraphernalia of a kind of happiness do not contain that happiness within them, that they are expressions of a state, not its agents. The man who finds himself a job, a wife, a house with a garden with apple trees in it, a child, a family car and a big, bounding dog, and then discovers that all this does not amount to the happiness he had dreamed of and had identified with these things, falls victim to it just as much as another who cannot resurrect a glorious past out of a collection of uniforms from the Napoleonic Wars. Conquest is followed by disillusionment and the necessity for further conquests. We were wrong, a voice within us says, it was not this one after all, while we already identify everything we find wanting in our life in an object as yet outside our magic circle. This must be it. The most important object of a collection is the next one. Possession may be able to shore us up against having to face the world without all defence but only the next conquest will finally bring with it contentment. While the hands still grasp one thing, and while the mind still determines its place in the order of our chattels, the hungry eyes are already far ahead.
A curse seems to overshadow this pursuit of life through the material world. Medusa, the beautiful maiden famous for her lovely tresses, was made into a monster with serpents for hair as a punishment for violating the Temple of Minerva. From then on, she suffered terrible loneliness as nothing living could abide her sight without being turned into stone. Surrounded by a sculpture garden of death, and craving the fulfilment she had known but was never to experience again, she fell into a mad rage searching for lovers and killing them instantly with her approach. Those who, like her, seek transcendence through things alone are condemned to suffer the same fate.
