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Updated: May 21, 2025
From the organ-loft the Magnificat resounded. The priest took the ciborium, gave the benediction and with stately tread descended the altar-steps. In his slender fingers he held the Sacred Host, that small white disk which stood out sharply above the silver vessel against the rich violet of his chasuble. The children's heads by turn dropped backwards and fell upon their breasts, in ecstacy.
A globe-shaped ciborium, with cresting and knop of the fourteenth century, is interesting. Upon the globe a pattern with beasts and leaves is chased; the foot is conical and sexfoil in plan, with little niello medallions and piercings on the perpendicular parts of two steps. The knop has pinnacles and pierced gables.
The skull of S. Christopher was exposed on the altar, but the shrine was locked up, and the parroco had gone into the country to visit a sick man, with the key in his pocket, while the ciborium was swathed in festival draperies.
And all passed away, as the Cardinal bent above the grating, with the ciborium in his hand. All was so rapid that he asked himself if he were not dreaming; the mass was over. Behind the iron grating resounded mournful psalms, slow chants drawn out, weeping, always on the same notes, wandering lights and white forms passed in the azure fluid of the incense.
It is fitting that Desiderio should be here, for he was Donatello's favourite pupil. The S. Lorenzo ciborium is wholly charming, although there is a "Deposition" upon it; the little Boy is adorable; but one sees it with the greatest difficulty owing to the crowded state of the altar and the dim light. There is nice colour in the predella.
A priest was one day fording on horseback the mouth of a river in order to carry the eucharist to a dying person, when his beast stumbled and the ciborium, falling open, the Hosts fell out and were carried off by the current.
His work in the Bargello is of little account. He died in 1464, and his work, so rare, so refined and delicate in its beauty, comes to its own in the perfect achievement of Benedetto da Maiano, born in 1442, who made the pulpit of S. Croce, the ciborium of S. Domenico in Siena.
You think of a clothes-press that hasn't been open for years, and, somehow, of incense. This square is in perfect harmony with the houses in the decayed streets around here, with the shops where religious paraphernalia are sold, the image and ciborium factories, the Catholic bookstores with books whose covers are the colour of apple seeds, macadam, nutmeg, bluing.
There are also a prehistoric oven, bronze vases found in the well at Tivoli, near Pola, fragments from S. Maria in Canneto and other destroyed churches; and here also the chapter of the cathedral has deposited portions of the cathedral ciborium and other architectural fragments. Pola was founded as a Roman colony in 129 B.C., at the same time as Trieste.
The connection appears clear. The ciborium was a tomb generally erected over a martyr's grave or the relics of a saint to whom the altar was dedicated, and the form of these tombs appears to have thus been perpetuated. That there were links between North Africa and the Adriatic towns is suggested by various facts.
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