Reliquary Box with Scenes from the Life of John the Baptist (1300s): Art, History and Details

Reliquary Box with Scenes from the Life of John the Baptist (1300s) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

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

John the Baptist--the first person to recognize Christ as the promised savior and the one who baptized him in the Jordan River--was one of the Byzantine Empire’s most revered saints. This box shows four scenes from the saint’s life: John’s martyrdom, Christ’s baptism, John’s birth, and the announcement of his birth to his parents. It probably once housed one of the saint’s relics; several were kept in churches and monasteries in Constantinople, including fragments of his skull and right arm and locks of his blood-clotted hair.

Object facts

• Title: Reliquary Box with Scenes from the Life of John the Baptist
• Date: 1300s
• Culture: Byzantium, Constantinople, late Byzantine period, 14th century
• Type: Wood
• Technique: tempera and gold on wood
• Dimensions: Overall: 9 x 23.5 x 9 cm (3 9/16 x 9 1/4 x 3 9/16 in.)
• Collection: MED - Byzantine
• Department: Medieval Art
• Accession number: 1999.229.a

Collection credit

Gift of Bruce Ferrini in memory of Robert P. Bergman

Further reading listed by the museum

• 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.
• Bagnoli, Martina. Treasures of heaven: saints, relics, and devotion in medieval Europe. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 2010.

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.