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Updated: June 12, 2025
The two artists looked at the altar with its dark tapestries, and its candelabra, crosses and reliquaries, of dull, old gold that seemed to absorb the light rather than reflect it. Nothing was lacking.
First he and his companions met a procession of the priests who serve the gods of the Nile valley, carrying reliquaries and sacred vessels, with images of the gods and sacred animals, and tending towards the Serapeum which towered high above the streets in the vicinity.
Here, hidden from the world in this obscure little gorge, far from any railway-station, is one of the most remarkable collections of ancient reliquaries in France. The chief treasure is the very ancient gold statue of St. It is a seated figure nearly three feet in height, and its appearance is thoroughly Byzantine; indeed, one may go farther, and say that it looks much more pagan than Christian.
And who substituted for the ancient gothic altar, splendidly encumbered with shrines and reliquaries, that heavy marble sarcophagus, with angels' heads and clouds, which seems a specimen pillaged from the Val-de-Grace or the Invalides? Who stupidly sealed that heavy anachronism of stone in the Carlovingian pavement of Hercandus? Was it not Louis XIV., fulfilling the request of Louis XIII.?
Every body of ecclesiastics was there: monks and friars, black, white, and gray; nuns, black, white, and blue; the clergy in their richest robes, with costly crucifixes of gold, silver, and ivory held aloft, and reliquaries of the most exquisite workmanship, sparkling with precious jewels, diamond, ruby, emerald, and sapphire flashing in the sun; the fifty-two guilds in gowns, each headed by their Master and their banner, gorgeous in tint, but with homely devices, such as stockings, saw and compasses, weavers' shuttles, and the like.
As with books, so with reliquaries, crosses, and bells. When the Island of Saints and Scholars could produce books, it could make shrines and everything necessary to stimulate and hand down the piety and the patient skill of a people steeped in art-craft and religious feeling. Of this earlier work a word must go down.
"Yes, he travelled in relics; he picked up a living by supplying relics on commission to convents in France and Switzerland; and he had launched quite a business in false relics with the help of some Jews here who concocted little ancient reliquaries out of mutton bones, with everything sealed and signed by the most genuine authorities.
The objects are scarcely so interesting as those at the cathedral, but include several fine fourteenth-century reliquaries as well as one or two which were made, or remade, in Renaissance times. The reliquary of S. Gregory has on the front Christ enthroned between standing figures of SS. Mark and John beneath a round-arched arcade on twisted columns.
The treasury contains a good many rather uninteresting objects, such as arm and leg reliquaries of the fourteenth century, or later rather, decorated with nielli and bosses in relief, and a few others shaped like vases borne on stems; on some of them the date 1483 can be traced.
To dream of the indefinite prolongation of defunct things, and of the government of men by embalming, to restore dogmas in a bad condition, to regild shrines, to patch up cloisters, to rebless reliquaries, to refurnish superstitions, to revictual fanaticisms, to put new handles on holy water brushes and militarism, to reconstitute monasticism and militarism, to believe in the salvation of society by the multiplication of parasites, to force the past on the present, this seems strange.
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