This ambitious book, the fruit of a doctoral dissertation approved by the universities of Fribourg and Brno in 2019, seeks to explain how relic containers figured in the controversial Christian practice of dispersing the bodily remains of holy persons to communities far from their places of burial. The church at Rome notably dissented from this practice, insisting well into the Middle Ages that bodies once interred remain undisturbed in their graves, but it was permitted in the eastern parts of the Empire from the mid-fourth century and was enthusiastically adopted in the west by Bishop Ambrose of Milan (374–397). Because Adrien Palladino’s inquiry is confined to boxes made or found in the Western provinces, Ambrose plays a large role.

Within the parameters of this study, which also impose a chronological limitation to the fourth through sixth centuries, are some of the finest and most intriguing artifacts of late antiquity, including the silver casket from San Nazaro in Milan, the fragmentary ivory box found in Pula, the pieces of a disassembled container with Passion scenes in the British Museum, and the large, enigmatic relief-covered ivory casket in Brescia. All have attracted art historical interest for decades, but it is not the author’s intention to solve the problems vexing the long art historical bibliographies that have accrued to them, nor to produce a synthesizing corpus. One of the starting points of his book is the frank acknowledgement that many of the late antique containers we call reliquaries cannot be shown to have served that function from the outset, still less to have been designed or intended to do so; on the contrary, some were clearly made for another function and reused. Since the purpose of relic-holding is the only characteristic that would link these objects otherwise diverse in material, form, and decoration, subtracting it leaves no criterion on which a corpus could be based. The author turns this situation to his advantage by making the containers’ heterogeneity his subject, asking, “What could be reused and adapted [as a reliquary]? . . . What made it possible to distinguish an ordinary box from a reliquary? . . . How did reliquaries . . . contribute to . . . the translocation of site-bound sanctity, the fragmentation of the sacred, and the bypassing of the primordial stability of sacred space?” (17).

The answers to such questions, according to Palladino, can be found by taking the interdisciplinary approach of material and object studies pioneered in the fields of archaeology and anthropology. In that vein, he proposes a “prehistory” of the reliquary, which “examines how boxes decorated with Christian imagery came to be invested with meaning through their matter, images, movement, rhetorical and metaphorical construction, ritual use, and associations with physical and mental spaces” (18). The challenge in writing such a prehistory is the phantom of the history we already know, which threatens to drive the inquiry and ultimately to corral it within the confines of its own limitations; the same phantom confronts the reader. The methods of prehistory are necessary when history is unknown, objects are its primary testimony, and they must be interrogated for what they can tell us about the culture in which they were produced. In the case of the late antique boxes, we already know about the culture, its images, spaces, rituals, and materials from historical (written) sources. Art historians can produce perfectly valid accounts of the meaning of these boxes by inference from the abundant historical evidence available to them.

“Meaning” is the crux of Palladino’s project. The problem is not that valid art historical inferences are incorrect—as they often are, absent the specific data points needed for certainty—but that even correct ones are incomplete. The meaning of a carved box is unstable, continually altered or enriched by new values and expectations as it passes from one owner or beholder to another from the time it leaves the hands of its maker until its final loss or demise. Palladino aims to recapture those contingent supplemental (or perhaps in his view, essential) meanings by overlaying categories deemed meaningful in object studies (mobility, memory, networks, identity) on the histories of the boxes within the purview of his book. This is not a new approach; by Palladino’s own account, art historians have been using it since the “anthropological turn” of the discipline thirty years ago (57), but the book stands out in complexity and scale. It is important for the scope of its methodological aspirations (the bibliography is enormous) and for the explicitness with which it marries the fundamentally different tools of prehistory and history. It is a good test of whether such marriages can work and for whom.

Decades ago, when I sat down to write my dissertation, I vowed to use every scrap of primary evidence I had uncovered in my research. However laborious, this was not intellectually very difficult to do, because I was writing a monograph. Coherently assembled, the pieces of evidence told the story of the subject (a building) and I had only to write it. Perhaps Palladino had a similar ambition, to use every insight gained from his prodigious reading; in any case, the difficulty of assembling them was of a different order of magnitude. Juggling the histories and character of many disparate artifacts, some meriting monographs themselves, with reams of theory about how objects and things in general interact with human agents and become agents themselves, alone was a formidable feat. But fixing and combining the products of two seemingly immiscible bibliographies, one specific and empirical, the other ideal and abstract, in the nonsimultaneous form of a book was even harder.

The solution is something like a reliquary itself. The book has three long chapters, each comprising three or five sections that in turn have multiple subsections. The chapters are containers, the sections are their compartments, and the subsections filling the compartments are like relics, entities ranging from closely related to nearly miscellaneous but all united in value. Structurally, the last chapter is the most straightforward, with five sections devoted to four major objects (the Pula and Brescia caskets, the plaques in the British Museum, and the wooden box from the Sancta Sanctorum in Rome) and a theoretical category that joins three of them (memory and mnemonics). The first chapter is historiographic and begins with a chronological overview, in two sections, that spans the study of reliquaries from Vasari’s dismissal of small artifacts to the realm of “minor arts” to the development of the “problematic tools” of standard art history: mechanical reproduction, stylistic categorization, assignment to “schools,” and the search for programs. A third section covers the anthropological turn inaugurated by Hans Belting in the 1990s; the history of early Christian archaeology and its imbrication with art history; the debates on the character and direction of late antiquity stimulated by the works of Peter Brown and the exhibition Age of Spirituality at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (1977–78); the emergence of reliquaries as a category; and the place of reliquaries in late antique material culture, i.e., their relation to non-Christian containers produced before or alongside them.

The second chapter, though coherent in purpose (as laid out in its first two pages) is kaleidoscopic in effect, at least for this reader. The overarching question is how boxes became reliquaries, not only in fact but in terms of the “socio-anthropological postulates” that describe the “adjustments, transformations, and subversions made by Christians to adapt the existing material culture . . . to the needs of the cult of relics” (75–76). Its first section treats the cult of relics and the form, decoration, contents, and production of early reliquaries. The second presents the need to speak of reliquaries in non–Manart historical terms: invisibility, concealment, spatiality, praesentia, the creation of the sacred, materiality, mental images and networks of associations, sacrifice, gift-giving. This is obviously the most important chapter methodologically, though methodology itself is never discussed. The final three sections treat “case studies” of reliquaries discovered in archaeological contexts: the San Nazaro casket and the capsella of Manlia Dedalia, the Pula casket and the containers unearthed in Novalja (Croatia), and the containers found under the main altar of Sant’Eufemia in Grado in 1871.

Socio-anthropological postulates like those invoked by Palladino describe characteristics common to large numbers of objects for the purpose of detecting patterns of cultural behavior. Art history has its own such postulates, more narrowly geared to artifacts culturally defined as “art”: baroque, minor, late antique, or—to take one with which I am especially familiar—spolia. These postulates may offer unexpected perspectives on single artifacts and galvanize scholarly discussion when they first appear, but they often fray or even disintegrate as the analysis of those artifacts strains their limitations. In the case of spolia, the interpretive bias inherent in the Latin word (“trophies”) quickly led many scholars to prefer the supposedly neutral term “reuse,” which itself has been deconstructed by archaeologists and resituated in the larger category of recycling.¹ The silver of which the reliquaries treated in this book were made may well have been recycled, but that is not the kind of cultural value the author seeks to demonstrate.

The “test cases” in Inventing Late Antique Reliquaries exemplify the challenge of the particular to the general. It is not a fault if the challenge sometimes succeeds; on the contrary, nearly every challenge is usefully thought-provoking and offset by instances in which the postulate prevails by offering satisfying new insights. Determinations of which fail and which succeed will vary from reader to reader according to their experience, intellectual formation, and how much they happen to know about any given object and its context. To illustrate the nature of my own reactions I offer a brief look at two cases, the San Nazaro casket and the capsella of Manlia Dedalia.

The casket and the capsella are discussed in chapter 2 as instances of a theme of this chapter, subversion. They were found together when the altar of the Basilica Apostolorum (San Nazaro, Milan) was moved in 1578; the casket contained contact relics (presumably of apostles) and the capsella a bit of bone. Both are of silver, a precious material favored for gifts by the emperor and elites like Manlia Dedalia, a consecrated virgin from a newly aristocratic family, “potent in wealth.”² A scene depicted in relief on the rear of the cubical casket, showing two men wearing a worker’s garment (exomis) presenting what look like platters or bowls to Mary and the infant Jesus, is subversive in its recall of imperial iconography. A thin, gold-leaf Christogram pinned to the inner side of the lid, interpreted as a sign of the casket’s “conversion” from a previous use, links the casket to the Eucharist, so the burial of the casket under the altar “must be understood in the light of a subversive propitiatory sacrifice” (137). The quasi-spherical capsella is inscribed dedalia vivas in cristo. Palladino endorses Elisabetta Gagetti’s argument “that this inscription could also be imbued with . . . [marital] overtones, but in a subversive manner,” marking not a worldly marriage but Dedalia’s consecration as a virgin wedded to Christ (138). The capsella was her personal reliquary. Its subsequent donation to the Church and burial under the altar created “a situation of subversion on several levels”: the value of the silver was permanently withdrawn from the general economy; the silver was used to glorify Christian subjects rather than the emperor; and Dedalia’s consecration was itself a withdrawal from the social contract that bound women to “female vanity” and child-bearing, making her as inaccessible as the capsella itself.

Elisabetta Gagetti did argue that dedalia vivas in cristo commemorated Dedalia’s consecration as sponsa Christi, but she did not say that the inscription, or the marriage itself, was subversive. “Subversion” is Palladino’s overlay; he associates it especially with reuse. While he defines it as “expressing the idea of turning around, of reversing the actual values and meaning of a given idea or material” (20), in practice he often uses subversion synonymously with conversion, or in the ordinary sense of undermine or overthrow. He even implies that subversion could have been intentional (“might these objects not be traces of a more conscious subversion of form and content?” [148]). At this level I find “subversion” unconvincing. It is not that the idea itself is wrong. On the contrary, the donation of objects made of precious materials did play a role in the massive transfer of wealth from secular elites to the Church that occurred in late antiquity, but this was a multi-century process of which its participants were largely unaware. From their perspective the gifts of silver vessels were investments in the betterment of their souls.

Subversion, reversal, and conversion all have roots in the language of the human actors in this story. For them the words had distinctly different denotations: subversio, overthrow, destruction; conversio, moral change, change of view; reversio, return, turning back. To late fourth-century Christians, only conversio would have seemed appropriate to the gifting of silver objects, reused or not, to the Church. In Christian usage conversio meant turning to God. In 386, the same year that the San Nazaro casket was deposited under the altar of the Basilica Apostolorum, Milan’s professor of rhetoric, Augustine of Hippo, experienced conversio in a garden. He was baptized by Ambrose the following year. Like Manlia Dedalia, Augustine willingly shed the desires and distractions of the flesh and, though not wealthy himself, later preached the necessity of donating wealth to the poor (Dedalia too was mater egentum).³ Some non-Christians undeniably considered such actions anti-social (thus, subversive), but Augustine believed that they turned souls to God.

To us “subversive” is an appealing word; I have used it myself in publications. In an age of rising autocracy, it is nice to think that objects can undermine existing orders. We are surrounded by intentionally subversive works made by artists in our own time. Examining my resistance to Palladino’s use of the term, however, led to wariness of imposing the positive connotations apparent to twenty-first-century writers on specific situations in the past. Postulates are broad brushes, incapable of painting fine detail. What is true for late antiquity as a whole may not be at all accurate as an account of its individual artifacts or their human makers and users. Provoking such reflections was, for me, the greatest contribution of chapter 2, and I am grateful for it.

Inventing Late Antique Reliquaries will be greeted, deservedly, as a milestone in the study of its subject and of late antique art. It will be a shame, however, if it sinks into the pool of publications received as simply true. It rewards critical examination and questioning that may produce as many new advances as the book itself. For that reason alone, it augurs a bright and influential future for an author at the beginning of his scholarly trajectory.

Dale Kinney

Dale Kinney is Eugenia Chase Guild Professor Emeritus of the Humanities and professor emeritus of history of art at Bryn Mawr College, Pennsylvania.

1. 1 Michael Greenhalgh, “Spolia: A Definition in Ruins,” in Reuse Value: Spolia and Appropriation from Constantine to Sherrie Levine, ed. Richard Brilliant and Dale Kinney (Ashgate 2011), 75–95; J. Theodore Peña, “Recycling in the Roman World: Concepts, Questions, Materials, and Organization,” in Recycling and Reuse in the Roman Economy, ed. Chloë N. Duckworth and Andrew Wilson (Oxford University Press 2020), 9–58, esp. 12, 26–28, 36–38.
2. 2 Clara genus censu pollens, according to the epitaph composed by her brother. Elisabetta Gagetti, “La teca di Manlia Dedalia: La devozione di una nobildonna mediolanense,” in Il Tesoro di San Nazaro: Antichi argenti liturgici dalla Basilia di San Nazaro al Museo Diocesano di Milano, ed. G. Sena Chiesa and Cinisello Balsamo (Silvana Editoriale, 2009), 73–95, at 82–84.
3. 3 “Mother of the poor”: Gagetti, 83.