RICHES REVEALED

Good morning to the day, and next my gold!/Open the shrine, that I may see my saint." With the miser's first lines in Volpone. Ben Jonson put his finger on it: that deep connection between the two aspects of precious metal, as crude capital and as metaphor of heaven, that so long existed in Christian art.

Gold was the root of evil. But it was also the Apollonian ore, incorruptible and glittering, that elegantly symbolized the sempiternal radiance of God. Now that paper money and computer records have replaced the feel and ring of heavy metal, most of this symbolism is lost to us. But it remains physically preserved in the sacristies and vaults of Roman Catholic churches throughout Europe, and visitors to Italy this Christmas may get a strong sense of it from an exhibition organized at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome to mark the end of the Holy Year. Entitled "Treasures of Sacred Art," it has been culled from normally inaccessible church collections in Rome and nearby Latium. eluded in brilliant array are coffers, crosses, monstrances, ostensoria, chalices, candlesticks, vestments.

It goes without saying that Rome, as the capital of Christianity, was destined to become a thesaurus almost indescribably rich in these cult objects. Money, talent, raw materials and the competitive pride of rival orders abounded there over the long centuries and spread through the churches of the neighboring Papal States. Despite theft and fire and the plunderings of tourists from Alaric the Visigoth to Hitler's Waffen SS, a stupendous amount remains. In this show, more than 500 examples have been assembled by a group of scholars headed by Art Historian Paolo Cercato.

The earliest is a battered 5th century silver votive lamp, dedicated to St. Sylvester and found, half eaten away by corrosion, in a church garden in the 17th century. From such crude, fragile souvenirs of primitive Christianity, the range expands: 10th century enamels, 11th century ivories, medieval reliquaries of silver and gold containing various fragments of sanctified bodies, and so on, to the ecclesiastic baroque and rococo confections produced from the metals of the New World.

Among the extraordinary works in this collection are a 14th century processional cross decorated with an enthroned Christ and symbols of the Evangelists from Borbona (see cut); and a superb 13th century Limoges enamel casket, borrowed from the Roman church of Santa Maria in Via Lata (see color pages). There are a number of pieces that, regardless of their function, are extremely beautiful as sculpture. One is an angel from the cathedral of Vetralla, carrying relics of St. Andrew. Made in the early 15th century by the Viterban goldsmith Pietro di Vitale, it has a severe columnar air that distantly suggests the figures of Piero della Francesca.

A candlestick-cum-reliquary depicting the flight into Egypt, borrowed from a church in Gaeta, is an exquisite example of how late medieval French styles penetrated into Italian taste at the end of the 14th century. Bernardino da Foligno's late quattrocento bust of St. Balduino has a grave nobility and an intensity of modeling that, one supposes, the saint's living features could not have had. (The actual head of St. Balduino, like a stone in a peach, lies encased within the sculpture.)

In this area of reliquaries one realizes most vividly how church practice, including art, has changed across the centuries. What were once objects of universal veneration are now, to most people, oddities. The less intrinsically dignified the relic, the truer this seems to be. One cannot re-experience the feelings with which a devout Roman borghese of the 17th century might have knelt before the reliquary of Mary Magdalene's foot in the church of Sts. Celsus and Julian. To him it would have been an object dense in its reality and hallowed in association: one of the actual feet that propelled the repentant whore of Judea to her meeting with the Saviour, a direct link across a vaguely understood gulf of time to a crucial mythic event. Its apparent value as evidence was large.

To us, the reliquary has no such value. We do not know whether the wizened and musty tissue that presumably lies inside the silver casing was ever attached to a historical personage named Mary Magdalene. The odds are against it, since the relic has no written history older than the 17th century. Instead, the quasi-magical object has become a fine piece of mannerist silverware, culturally almost as distant from us as an African nail fetish.

Deprived of its meaning in this way, the reliquary takes on odd similarities to modern art. The plain metal foot borne upward on its ornate, gilded and enameled pedestal Is surrealist in its incongruity. Our uncertainty about its contents--not only whether Mary Magdalene's foot is in it, but also whether it contains a real foot of any kind--recalls Marcel Duchamp's A Bruit Secret, two metal plates sandwiching a ball of twine inside which a small "thing," forever unidentified, rattles when shaken.

Such is the fate of culturally stranded objects. Perhaps the most extreme example of it in "Treasures of Sacred Art" is a 16th century reliquary from the Collegiate Church of Calcata, north of Rome. Two elegantly slim silver-gilt angels hold up a casket surmounted by a crown, studded with rubies and emeralds. It is traditionally believed to contain the only relic left on earth by Jesus Christ. True, Christ ascended bodily into heaven before the eyes of the astonished Apostles after his resurrection. But he had been circumcised in the temple as an infant, and the Holy Foreskin, preserved by a succession of devout guardians, is said to have found its way eventually into the sanctum sanctorum of the Vatican. A German mercenary laid his rude hands on it during the Sack of Rome in 1527 and stole it away; it was lost for 30 years and then turned up in Calcata, where this new reliquary was made for it. It has been there, but not on public view, ever since. How edifying, the accidents of history!

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.