A Matter of Faith: Relics & Reliquaries in the Middle Ages

FAIN: GE-50028-08

Cleveland Museum of Art (Cleveland, OH 44106-1711)
Timothy Rub (Project Director: September 2007 to August 2009)

Planning of a traveling exhibition, catalog, introductory film, symposium, website, and public and educational programs exploring relics and reliquaries from Late Antiquity to the end of the Middle Ages.

The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, Ohio and the Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, Maryland will join together to plan and organize an international loan exhibition entitled "A Matter of Faith; Relics and Reliquaries in the Middle Ages." The planning team will work to organize an exhibition of approximately 80 medieval reliquaries and related artifacts drawn from collections in the United States and Europe. By exploring the cult of relics from its humble beginnings in Late Antiquity to its height at the end of the Middle Ages and its evatual demise during the Reformation, "A Matter of Faith" will investigate the role and function of the visual arts in conveying the holy and examine the means by which the visual arts were employed to represent the divine on earth. The exhibition will consider the crucial role reliquaries played in the revival of three-dimensional sculpture in Western Europe. Venues will include the CMA, the WAM, and potentially the Vatican Museum, Rome, Italy.