Wooden reliquaries

The wooden reliquaries were widely spread in Italy and in the Catholic world starting from the provisions, in the matter of devotion of relics, given on the occasion of the Council of Trent in 1563 under the pontificate of Pius V. Because of these ordinances, at the beginning of the seventeenth century, notable becomes the production of sculptures, containers of the antique vestiges of saints. In addition to the creation of wooden sculptures that imitated the saint whose relic was preserved in them with hieratic expressiveness, half-length or full, grew, especially during the seventeenth century, the construction of anthropomorphic wooden reliquaries, whose shape reproduces that part of the body constituting the relic itself. The two works, of the same bill, symmetrically represent two forearms: right and left. After an initial conservative intervention and cleaning, it is now possible to appreciate both the gold leaf film that wraps entirely the handles of the gowns, and the deep and studied carvings that produce an intense light and shades play on both works, and the finiteness with which the hands and the tapered-shapes fingers are executed. The two sculptures can be added to the corpus of the works of Filippo Altieri thanks to the documents present in the expense registers of the Fabbriceria dell'Assunta, which shows that the artist had received for the commission of the two reliquary arms the total sum of 1, 4 ducats.