A golden man clad in church vestments faced visitors as they entered Treasures of Heaven: Saints, Relics, and Devotion in Medieval Europe at the Walters Art Museum this spring. Refulgent against the deep blue walls of the entry room, the metallic statue extended his hands in a communicative gesture. His eyes of polished ivory and horn appeared to be alert, seeing. This was not an art installation so much as an interpersonal encounter. A text panel on his pedestal introduced him as the reliquary bust of St. Baudime, who, according to legend, was sent to Gaul by St. Peter for missionary work in the first century CE. The reliquary, which dates to the twelfth century, had once housed a vial of the saint’s blood. A pronouncement on the room’s rear wall intimated a link between that bodily matter, the ancient saint, and the bust: “For the perishable body must put on imperishability, and this mortal body must put on immortality” (I Cor. 15:53). These words might have alluded to Baudime’s celestial self or to the radiant effigy that gave it an enduring presence in this world. The phrase could also be read as a directive carried out by artists throughout the Middle Ages as they transformed the remnants left behind or touched by the holy deceased into spiritually charged experiences for the countless Christians who believed such remains to be divinely powerful. The multivalence of the golden image and the plurivocality of its setting were but a preview of the impressive trajectory that followed.

Treasures of Heaven traced a complex history of the visual communication of divine power in medieval Europe and beyond, a story that highlighted interactions between sacred objects and the cultural contexts in which they functioned. The exhibition’s more than 130 reliquaries and related objects spanned nearly 2,000 years, from the second century CE to the twentieth. Dozens of them traced back to the early Middle Ages, though examples from the twelfth to fifteenth centuries were especially abundant. Reliquaries made in Byzantine and Western European regions were prominent. The show also incorporated objects from Bohemia, North Africa, the Levant, and elsewhere. The international contributors to the exhibition included nearly thirty museums, as well as private and public collections, religious organizations, cathedrals, churches, monasteries, and the Vatican. The catalogue contains ten illuminating essays by leading experts in the field, entries by twenty-six specialists, and a wealth of beautiful illustrations. A convergence of efforts and objects of this scope and magnitude is extraordinary. As was the result, thanks in no small part to curators Martina Bagnoli (Walters Art Museum), Holger A. Klein (Columbia University), C. Griffith Mann (Cleveland Museum of Art), and James Robinson (British Museum).

Among the splendors of Treasures was its material breadth. Well-lighted displays invited visitors to examine containers fashioned in marble, terracotta, ivory, wood, silk, precious and semi-precious metals, gems, enamel, rock crystal, mosaic, tempera, and gold leaf. Exemplars of the multi-mediality of medieval art, reliquaries often combined and occasionally repurposed a variety of materials. Even so, the prevalence of gold and silver surfaces in the exhibition signaled the particular importance of metalworking for nourishing medieval desires for proximity to the holy. Figural representation also came into view as a crucial aspect of reliquary art. Narrative scenes and solitary saints, from minute bodies made of niello or cloisonné enamel to larger three-dimensional busts, articulated the elevated nature of the matter they encased. The versatility of the medieval reliquary also appeared in the variety of object types: pilgrims’ flasks, precious pendants, portable altars, ornate triptychs, frames, bells, boxes, and vessels, many of the latter taking the shape of body parts, crosses, or churches. Some reliquaries were contained within larger ones in nested arrangements. As houses of relics and reliquaries, medieval churches were reliquaries themselves. A wall text noted that the resemblance of these monumental containers to their smaller relatives would have enhanced perceptions of the formers’ spiritual significance. Interpretive panels elsewhere in the exhibition underscored the potential of reliquaries to generate meaning for their possessors, who looked to their contents for spiritual benefits, physical protection, and worldly status.

Across its seven galleries, Treasures of Heaven unfolded a loose chronology that began in Late Antiquity, when relics became important in Christendom, and ended with the Protestant and revolutionary iconoclasms that permanently diminished their place in worship. Setting aside the traditional style-based periodization of medieval art, the curators subdivided their materials thematically with concepts and practices as the organizing principles for each distinctively appointed room (and for the catalogue). Wall texts introduced those themes in relation to two overarching issues of investigation: art as communication and artists as master communicators. The first two rooms, “From Tomb to Altar” and “Pilgrimage,” traced early inventions of new types of reliquaries in relation to sarcophagi and holy sites. The next three galleries looked at elaborations of reliquary forms in later centuries. “Ritual Space and Sacred Matter” featured an array of church-shaped reliquaries and assorted objects ranging from bell shrines to a fragment of a relic shroud. “Collecting the Saints,” which included a variety of vessels reputed to contain fragments of the cross upon which Jesus was crucified, discussed the movement of relics and reliquaries from the Levant into the hands of clergymen, nobles, and other wealthy parties in the West. The show’s visual climax, “Display,” concerned reliquaries from the late twelfth century on that exposed their relics and/or assumed anthropomorphic forms in order to meet worshippers’ desires for visual, emotional, and imaginative connections with the sacred past. In doing so, the containers vied with their holy contents for attention. The rest of the exhibition explored how understandings of relics changed, especially after the thirteenth century. “Image and Relic” demonstrated a blurring of categories, spotlighting the veneration of images as relics and also showing how painters depended on relics to validate their craft. Materiality took an abrupt turn in “Beyond the Middle Ages,” where the role of fifteenth-century prints in spreading the power of relics, reliquaries, and reliquary collections came to the fore. This last section also touched on challenges that power faced later in the Reformation and French Revolution, the effects of which reverberated in the visual restraint characterizing reliquaries of fairly recent manufacture.

Making such a trove of materials speak to contemporary viewers without overwhelming them is an art in itself. To this end, the exhibition minimized the amount of verbal discourse in wall panels (instead, excellent in-depth discussions are available in the catalogue essays) and varied the “volume” of its different themes. Using language friendly to a broad audience, the texts appealed to both non-specialists and medievalists. A history of medieval art emerged that put value on artists responding thoughtfully and inventively to the changing desires and practices of their devout contemporaries as well as to relics and other reliquaries. That narrative, however, was somewhat muted; object-centered devotions and practices held the spotlight visually and discursively in the first four galleries. But this dynamic prepared visitors to appreciate the tensions between relics and art that arose in “Display” where reliquaries took center stage through theatricality and mimetic virtuosity. A silver gilt Reliquary with the Man of Sorrows (1347–49) from Bohemia, for example, exposed a thorn (now lost) that was prized for reputedly belonging to the Crown of Thorns, but its visually arresting element was a Christ who stood humbly amid instruments of his suffering, his polished surfaces marvelously imitating both fleshy suppleness and the taut skin of emaciation. Contrasts between attractive artifice and modest materiality are vital not only to understand later medieval art and devotion but also to appreciate the complicated nature of a question the St. Baudime reliquary bust tacitly posed at the show’s entry: What does it mean to behold the sacred? Through its kaleidoscopic lens, Treasures of Heaven revealed the answers to be broadly human as well as culturally, historically, materially, and artistically contingent and specific. That’s a view worth enshrining. It is also an idea that shines light on more recent art. A catalogue essay by Alexander Nagel entitled “The Afterlife of the Reliquary,” for example, discusses the return of “the logic of the relic” in works by Marcel Duchamp, Kurt Schwitters, and Robert Smithson. Meanwhile, upstairs from Treasures, a related exhibition of works by students at the Maryland Institute College of Art (Relics and Reliquaries: Reconsidered) imaginatively explored the present-day relevance of different reliquary traditions.

The diverse reception anticipated by Treasures’ curators extended to visitors who continue to see sacrality in medieval relics, as was evident in the careful language of interpretive materials, and to viewers who had never given relics any thought. A video console dedicated to issues of artistic technique, an insightful audioguide, and engaging interactive software increased the exhibition’s accessibility. An introductory text panel set a tone of inclusiveness by observing that “in all cultures, people cherish the memory of those they loved who have died.” “Conversation Cubes” in the galleries prompted passers-by to think of themselves as pilgrims who had their own ideas of sacred sites and their own experiences of transformative travel. The exhibit also solicited reflections on “contemporary relics” in visitors’ own lives. An album near the exit contained dozens of responses from adults and children who wrote movingly about holding onto baby teeth, a teddy bear, photographs, stones gathered during travels, a crucifix, jewelry, a mother’s diary, a father’s fire helmet with hairs still inside, and other mementos. In their own way, these personal notes attested to the curators’ success in fostering audience connections with the medieval past and with the memorable encounters that its reliquary splendors had shaped.