St. Valentine Reliquary Essay

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The Metropolitan Museum of Art houses the display of the reliquary of the right arm of St. Valentine. This Medieval arm is a silver, sapphire and partial gilt piece of metal-work that was dated to the fourteenth century. It is a Swiss piece of artwork that was intended to house a relic. Reliquaries acted as caskets for greatly valued relics of influential individuals in society such as a religious figure or a saint. They are often an indication of what class or of what hierarchical standing a person was from.
In this reliquary, the limb is reaching upward and only its pointer and middle finger are directed upward towards the sky. The ring finger is accented by a large ring and an elegant cuff. This cuff is attached to a chain which cascades down St. Valentine’s wrist. This reliquary suggests that the individual it was made in reverence to, St. Valentine, was not poor or of a lower class. Rather, a higher level of class can be inferred due to the elegance and the expensive nature of the work.
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Rather than giving more importance to a person’s last words, for instance, people were able to create a way for an individual to live beyond their death through a representation of themselves in addition to their words and actions. In some instances, a person’s actual body parts were contained in the reliquary. There started to be a deterioration in the number of real body parts found in these reliquaries as time passed. Instead, they began to contain “contact relics such as shoes or bits of cloth.” The reliquaries which were shaped like parts of the body had been created in the ninth century, but in the West, they became more common in the “twelfth and thirteenth centuries.” Once this fourteenth-century reliquary was created, this art form had been utilized a multitude of times and was more

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