The placement of different kinds of materials together, and the multiplication of media and materials including both artists’ materials and holy matter in a single tabernacle, has a number of aspects and creates a number of opportunities. There is the effect of age and antiquity, and the collapsing of temporality with the synecdochic presence of the saints, and of key locations of sacred history, in the form of the material relics, the spolia of the Christian past. There is also the visual varietas, which has been described in itself as ‘a reliquary effect’, creating an appropriate aesthetic environment for the relics. The visual variety can also aid the tabernacles’ ductus, and can help to move the viewer’s attention around the tabernacle in devotionally productive ways. But there is also a further effect to the visual variety in these tabernacles, and to the contrasts that are set up between the artists’ materials used in their making and the matter of the relics, visibly incorporated within the surfaces of these tabernacles. This effect pertains to reality and representation, and to the ways that matter can be transformed and be transformative.

The materials used in these tabernacles often make reference to the kinds of media used in earlier reliquaries – gilded wood standing for fashioned gold, gilded glass standing for enamels, embedded glass standing for jewels. However, the materials in the new type of reliquary tabernacles do not strictly simulate the materials in whose place they stand. Rather, they make reference to them, speaking, as it were, in a recognised visual language, but often clearly transforming them by using different materials. This representation of one type of material by means of another has sometimes been characterised as a means of achieving an effect of splendour but with cheaper materials, in other words as a kind of ‘cut-price’ aesthetic. And it is surely true to say that this kind of consideration might well have been partly in play when wall paintings began to replace mosaic as a means of covering large expanses of wall in Christian basilicas in Rome and central Italy, and when large metalwork altar frontals were replaced by painted and gilded wooden altarpieces. But here, with these tabernacles, there is probably something more at work.