Devotional Badge with Saint James Flanked by Two Kneeling Pilgrims (c. 1200–1250): Art, History and Details

Devotional Badge with Saint James Flanked by Two Kneeling Pilgrims (c. 1200–1250) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

In addition to vessels, the glass kilns of Venice produced some devotional badges such as this one. These small objects may have been collected by pilgrims as mementos. This example probably recalls a journey to Santiago da Compostella in distant Spain, one of the greatest medieval pilgrimage destinations. Thought to imitate more valuable carved gems, these glass-plate medallions were made in large quantity by pressing a mold over opaque or transparent molten glass.

Object facts

• Title: Devotional Badge with Saint James Flanked by Two Kneeling Pilgrims
• Date: c. 1200–1250
• Culture: Italy, Venice
• Type: Glass
• Technique: molded green glass
• Dimensions: Overall: 2.9 x 2.6 cm (1 1/8 x 1 in.)
• Collection: MED - Gothic
• Department: Medieval Art
• Accession number: 1985.146

Collection credit

Lawrence Hitchcock Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Winter, Patrick M. de. “Recent Accessions of Italian Renaissance Decorative Arts, Part I: Incorporating Notes on the Sculptor Severo Da Ravenna.” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 73, no. 3 (March 1986): 74–138.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.