Holy Thighbone, St. Bernard!

June 13, 2011 1:25 PM

In the Cappella dei Priori in the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence, there is something that's apparently (according to Wikipedia, the local documentation is strangely silent on this) a reliquary of St. Bernard. Here's a picture. I'd like to know more about it - is that a thighbone in there, how did it get there?
posted by themel to Religion & Philosophy (7 answers total)

I don't have personal experience with that reliquary, but the femur is the relic you pay pilgrimage to. Whether or not you believe that the bone is actually from St. Bernard (or the Shroud of Turin is real, or whatever) is a question of faith; I doubt you'll find a detailed provenance of who delivered the bone and where they got it. What information are you looking for?
posted by Admiral Haddock at 1:39 PM on June 13, 2011

Trade in relics was a going concern in medieval Europe. Suggest taking with a grain of salt...
posted by jim in austin at 1:50 PM on June 13, 2011

It seems unlikely that the bone there is Bernard's thighbone (his body's at Clairvaux, the monastery he founded, while his head is at Troyes). Bernard was important to Florence, however, in part, or maybe primarily because, he served as Dante's guide at the end of the Paradiso. Dante's admiration for Bernard made Bernard more valuable to the Florentines (who practically venerated Dante himself), and so a relic (a part of the leg that walked through heaven with their great poet) at the center of government makes a kind of sense. Perhaps they went looking for one.

Here's another source about the trade in relics. If you're wondering how the bone fit into the reliquary, the box would have been designed for it.
posted by Francolin at 2:02 PM on June 13, 2011

Response by poster: I am aware that factual information will probably be hard to come by, but I'd at least expect a record of the story that the owners told themselves, especially as Bernard isn't some obscure martyr who was killed by pagans in a desert at the dawn of time and it thus seems to have required a particularly fervent suspension of disbelief to believe that the thighbone (?) they acquired was actually his.
posted by themel at 2:18 PM on June 13, 2011

It might be a reliquary of San Bernardino di Siena. I looked at a number of italian-language websites about the Palazzo Vecchio and none of them contained more information than the wikipedia page you cite, and they do refer to it as a reliquary of Saint Bernard.

But Siena was very close to Florence geographically and politically, and there was apparently some reliquaries of San Bernardino kicking around Siena for a while.
posted by bq at 3:03 PM on June 13, 2011

There's a bit in this book on St Bernard that says the Chapel was dedicated to St. Bernard of Clairvaux in 1299 (at least I think that's what it says, I can't read Italian). So maybe that's when they got the relic.

There might be more in Italian sources which are harder to google if like me you don't know Italian.
posted by interplanetjanet at 3:57 PM on June 13, 2011

A fervent suspension of disbelief would have been required, but that would have been the case with a lot of relics, and with any miracle. John the Baptist's head was supposed to be in churches all over, for instance, and the people of each place believed theirs was the true relic. This bone could have belonged to another, minor, earlier saint, maybe also a Bernard, or a Cistercian, and in time, a couple of hundred years, because the story was a useful and fitting one, it could have become conflated with the most celebrated Bernard. There may not have been a lie involved, just a belief that transcended the material. Whatever occurred could have happened without conniving. The acceptability of truth in the service of glory was different then. (Vasari's accounts of Florentine artists, in which facts serve rhetoric, are another local example of this.)

I'm sorry if my speculation here seems like a non-answer, but I doubt there can be anything definitive said about this particular example. That there's no fuss locally about the nature of the relic suggests that its identification is likely traditional and not to be found in documents.
posted by Francolin at 5:27 PM on June 13, 2011 [1 favorite]