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Updated: May 12, 2025
At daybreak next day, the mob swept upon the churches and stripped them to the very walls. Pictures, statues; organs, ornaments, chalices of silver and gold, reliquaries, albs, chasubles, copes, ciboriea, crosses, chandeliers, lamps; censers, all of richest material, glittering with pearls, rubies, and other precious stones, were scattered in heaps of ruin upon the ground.
Every valuable article which they contained, the ornaments of altars, the reliquaries, chalices, embroidered curtains, and carpets of velvet or damask, the golden robes of the priests, the repositories of the host, the precious vessels of chrism and extreme unction, the rich clothing and jewellery adorning the effigies of the Holy Virgin, all were indiscriminately rifled by the Spanish soldiers.
The shrines and gospels, the reliquaries and missals, the crosses and bells that are still existent, many in Ireland, others in every country in the world, attest beyond any dispute that Irish art-workers held a preëminent place in the early middle ages, and that works of Irish art are still treasured as unique in their day and time.
Here are many things familiar through books, Michelangelo's bust of the Virgin; a cabinet full of reliquaries and profane vessels in crystal, gold and enamel done by Beuvenuto Cellini; the bronze Bacchante with silver eyes which was dug up in the gardens of the Persian embassy at Stamboul, and which dates from the Third Century B. C.; the famous portrait bust in rock-crystal of an Egyptian king of the Eighteenth Dynasty; madonnas and saints by Fifteenth Century painters; a complete garden set, fountain, statues and all, from a Pompeiian villa; Greek bronze and silver vessels and statuettes; Bernini's bust of the Cardinal de Medici; Fifteenth Century tapestries, and so many other objects of mediaeval and ancient art that a special catalogue has been prepared to describe them.
The treasure contains also some of the most highly venerated icons, crosses, and reliquaries in Russia. As regards many of these it is difficult to assign a date or a place of production.
The depredations were irreparable; they razed, burned, or ruthlessly shattered shrines, statues, or even reliquaries, as at Reims, where the Sainted Ampulla, which contained the miraculous oil brought by a dove from heaven, now preserved in reconstructed fragments in the sacristy, was dashed to pieces in a fury of uncontrollable wrath.
After all, it was impossible to have this impulse in Greek and Latin, dead languages shut up in books as in reliquaries peris et mises en reliquaires de livres.
After dinner we were led round the churches; and if you are as much tired with reading my voluminous descriptions, as I was with the continual repetition of altars and reliquaries, the Lord have mercy upon you! However, your delivery draws near.
The treasury contains some exceedingly interesting objects, and is rich in reliquaries. It is kept in the wall between the body of the cathedral and the baptistery in a rather evil-smelling vault, which opens into the latter building.
The floor of the cathedral was strewn with "pearls and precious stones, with chalices and reliquaries of silver and gold;" but the ministers of the reformed religion, in company with the magistrates, came to the spot, and found no difficulty, although utterly without power to prevent the storm, in taking quiet possession of the wreck.
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