What distinguishes a reliquary pendant from a locket?

The reliquary pendant is religious in function: it contains a relic - a fragment of a saint's bone, a piece of cloth from a saint's garment, a splinter from the Cross of Christ (a particle of the True Cross) or the like. The locket is secular and personalised: it contains a lock of hair, a photograph or a portrait miniature of one specific deceased person. Historically, the locket is a direct secular derivation of the reliquary pendant.

Are reliquary pendants still made today?

Yes, in two contexts. Catholic-religious - as modern pendants holding a saint's relic or a Marian fragment, above all in Italian, Spanish and southern German workshops. Secular-historicising - as pendants built in reliquary fashion (hollow setting, rock crystal, gold mount) but with personal remembrance objects as their content: a lock of hair, a fingerprint element, a small quantity of ashes.

Who wears a reliquary pendant today?

Catholic believers (often as a keepsake of a particular saint or a place of pilgrimage), collectors of historical pieces (documented from the sixteenth century onwards and available at auction) and individual modern workshop clients who take the construction as the model for a historicising keepsake.

Reliquary Pendant

The reliquary pendant is the religious ancestor of the remembrance locket - a pendant worn at the neck with an interior compartment that originally held the relics of saints and, from the seventeenth century onwards, was secularised into a keepsake of deceased family members.

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