Pilgrim's Medallion with St. Symeon the Younger (c. 1100): Art, History and Details

Pilgrim's Medallion with St. Symeon the Younger (c. 1100) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

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

Saint Symeon the Younger was a stylite saint, an early Christian ascetic who fled the world for the desert and, perched on a column, spent his days fasting and praying. The site of Symeon’s column attracted many pilgrims during and after his lifetime. Medallions like this one, showing Symeon atop his column on one side and a cross on the other, were taken home by pilgrims in commemoration of their visit and were believed to serve their owners as protective talismans.

Object facts

• Title: Pilgrim's Medallion with St. Symeon the Younger
• Date: c. 1100
• Culture: Byzantium, Syria
• Type: Metalwork
• Technique: lead
• Dimensions: Diameter: 5.7 x 0.4 cm (2 1/4 x 3/16 in.)
• Collection: MED - Byzantine
• Department: Medieval Art
• Accession number: 1972.52.b

Collection credit

Norman O. Stone and Ella A. Stone Memorial Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Verdier, Philippe. "A Medallion of Saint Symeon the Younger." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 67, no. 1 (1980): 17-26.
• Evans, Helen C., and William D. Wixom. The Glory of Byzantium: Art and Culture of the Middle Byzantine Era, A.D. 843-1261. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1997.
• Cleveland Museum of Art, and Holger A. Klein. Sacred Gifts and Worldly Treasures: Medieval Masterworks from the Cleveland Museum of Art. Cleveland, Ohio: Cleveland Museum of Art, 2007.

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.