The assemblage of treasures in this British Museum blockbuster would have made the mouths of medieval royals water. Though no arduous journey is required to reach the show, the feeling of participation in a medieval pilgrimage is palpable as one enters through a curving, darkened corridor into the quasi-ecclesiastical space of the domed former reading room. Our movements within the circular space emulate those around the ambulatory and side chapels of the churches that housed these reliquaries. Ethereal chants by a 12th-century master accompany us throughout, becoming loudest at the climax of the exhibition: arguably the central section, which displays the variety of precious materials and forms of the reliquaries.

The scope of the exhibition is comprehensive, beginning with Roman burial customs and concluding with the Protestant rejection of relics, a section which is characterised by white walls and bright lighting, reminiscent of a Lutheran church’. In contrast, the atmospheric darkness of the rest of the exhibition provides optimal conditions for these treasures to sparkle. The organisers have created an aesthetic experience akin to their medieval counterparts, seeking not to make these objects seem absurd and inaccessible to modern sensibilities. The reliquaries are instead framed as part of the perennial human impulse to venerate the dead.

Although chronological and thematic in organisation, the exhibition thankfully evades imposing an art-historical metanarrative on the objects it highlights, focusing instead on their role as conduits of divine power. The belief that these bodily fragments had transcended death through suffering lends a sense of the uncanny to later reliquaries, which often take the form of their contents, especially in the case of busts of saints, which seem to communicate directly with the viewer. Morbid curiosity will not be satisfied, however, as the display focuses not on the grisly remains of dismembered saints but rather on the beautiful containers made to house these spiritual treasures; microcosms of the heavenly Jerusalem, the vessels afforded these fragments a substantial presence and generated a spiritual and aesthetic experience befitting of their contents.

Until Oct 9

NIAMH BHALLA