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.
Written by Dr. Helene Vasall
The reliquary pendant is the religious archetype of the remembrance piece worn at the neck. From the high Middle Ages to the early modern period it was the most important jewellery form of Christian piety; it held the relics of saints or particles of the True Cross and mediated a direct bodily relation between the wearer and the venerated figure. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the construction gradually shifts from the religious to the secular sphere - the hollow setting comes to be filled not with relics but with hair, a portrait miniature or an inscription. This secularisation is the direct prehistory of the modern mourning locket.
Currently available
Occasions
Reliquary pendants are commissioned or chosen in several contexts:
- Catholic first communion and confirmation - as a religious gift with a saint's relic or a Marian fragment
- Pilgrimage - a piece acquired on site with a documented relic of a place of pilgrimage (Lourdes, Fátima, Santiago de Compostela)
- Funeral and bereavement - the historicising secular variant, holding a lock of hair or another personal remembrance element of the deceased person
- Collector's commission - for those who own or inherit a historical reliquary pendant and wish to have a matching piece made
- A personal keepsake with a religious dimension - combining a saint's relic with a photograph of a deceased family member
Personalisation
Three paths of personalisation are documented:
A religious relic. The classic function. A small relic - usually authenticated by an ecclesiastical certificate (authentica) - is sealed in the interior compartment beneath rock crystal. Frequent relics: fragments of bone, pieces of cloth from a saint's garment, splinters from liturgical vessels.
A secular remembrance substance. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries a lock of the deceased person's hair or a portrait miniature replaces the religious relic. The construction remains the same; the meaning becomes private.
Combined personalisation. In modern commissions, religious and secular elements are combined - for instance a saint's relic on one side of the pendant and a photograph or lock of hair of the deceased person on the other.
Material
The classic choice of material follows religious tradition:
- Gold 750/585 as the carrier material, often with elaborate Gothic or Baroque goldsmith's work
- Sterling silver in cheaper or more vernacular pieces
- Rock crystal as a transparent window over the relic
- Black enamel as a border, often bearing Latin inscriptions
- Small gemstones (pearls, rubies, sapphires) as symbolic accents - Marian blue, the red of the saints, the white of purity
Modern pieces add stainless steel, platinum and industrially made glass windows.
History and secularisation
Reliquary pendants are documented from the eleventh century onwards as the wearable variant of the larger reliquary. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries they enjoy a heyday with the spread of the veneration of saints across the Catholic world. With the Reformation and its critique of relic veneration, a shift begins in the Protestant sphere - reliquary pendants are reworked into generic keepsake pendants without religious content.
In the seventeenth century (see Baroque (c. 1600–1750)) the first documented secular reliquary pendants appear - pieces of reliquary construction which, in place of a saint's relic, hold a lock of hair, a painted portrait or an inscription with a date of death. In the eighteenth century, in the company of sentimental jewellery, this secular derivation becomes a jewellery form in its own right - the later mourning locket (see Mourning Locket).
The reliquary pendant today
Three fields of application exist in the current jewellery market:
Religious and Catholic. Workshops in Rome, Florence, Toledo, Vienna and Cologne continue to make reliquary pendants for Catholic clients - usually with an authenticated saint's relic or a fragment from a place of pilgrimage. An established niche of the religious jewellery market.
Historicising keepsakes. Individual workshops make secular reliquary pendants holding personal remembrance elements - a lock of hair, a tiny photograph, a fingerprint element, a trace of ashes (see Hair Pendant (Modern Memorial Jewellery), Ash Jewellery). The construction with a rock-crystal window and gold mount is chosen deliberately for its historicising effect.
Collectors' pieces. Antique reliquary pendants of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries form a field of collecting in their own right. Prices range from a few hundred euros (vernacular silver pieces) to six-figure sums for gold pieces with documented provenance and authentica certificates.
Construction and care
The typical construction of a reliquary pendant follows a stable pattern:
- The front with a rock-crystal cabochon and the visible relic or remembrance substance
- The reverse with an engraved inscription (the saint's name, the place of pilgrimage, or, on secular pieces, initials and a date of death)
- A gold mount with a small suspension loop and, in some cases, fine engraved borders
- On hinged variants: a hinged closure system with a second interior compartment
Care is minimal: dry storage, occasional cleaning of the surface with a soft cloth, no interference with the sealed hollow setting. On historical pieces the relic should never be removed or transferred - it is part of the object's authenticity.
Reliquary pendants are today a small but continuous field. Unlike most other jewellery forms, they unite religious and secular meaning, and can be understood as the historical link between Christian piety and modern remembrance jewellery.
Questions about this entry
- 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.
Further reading
- The Reliquary Effect - Enshrining the Sacred Object - Cynthia Hahn (2017)
- Treasures of Heaven - Saints, Relics, and Devotion in Medieval Europe - Martina Bagnoli (Hg.) (2010)
- Sentimental Jewellery - Shire Library - Ann Louise Luthi (2007)
Related entries
- Core conceptsMourning Jewellery
Mourning jewellery is body adornment that signals a death, binds the memory of a deceased person, or does both at once - since the 17th century a jewellery type in its own right, with a material language of its own.
- Core conceptsMemorial Jewellery
Memorial jewellery is jewellery that deliberately binds itself to one particular person - through an inscription, a photograph, hair, ashes or, the defining medium today, a digitally captured fingerprint.
- Core conceptsSentimental Jewellery
Sentimental jewellery is the jewellery of the age of sensibility between 1760 and 1840 - pieces in which love, friendship and grief share the same imagery, and in which hair, miniature painting and personal inscriptions first become the load-bearing form.
- Jewellery formsMourning Locket
The mourning locket is a pendant worn on a neck chain with an interior compartment - a concealed carrier of hair, photograph or inscription that keeps the memento close to the body and has been, from the eighteenth century to the present, the most important private form of mourning jewellery.
- Jewellery formsMourning Ring (Memorial Ring)
A mourning ring - also called a memorial ring - is a finger ring that carries the memory of a deceased person, usually in the form of an inscription, an image, a lock of hair or a fingerprint.
- Jewellery formsFingerprint Pendant
A fingerprint pendant carries the line pattern of a fingerprint, milled or laser-engraved into gold, silver or platinum - today the defining form of modern remembrance jewellery and the technical successor format to the Victorian mourning locket.
- Techniques & craftHairwork
Hairwork is the collective term for all techniques in which human hair becomes the carrier material of a piece of jewellery - from a single lock beneath rock crystal to finely plaited hair weaving in the Victorian showpiece manner.
- Techniques & craftEngraving and Inscriptions
Engraving is the oldest personalisation technique in memorial jewellery - from the Baroque memento mori ring to modern laser micro-engraving, which today inscribes initials, dates of death and even photographed handwriting into metal.
- Symbols & motifsCross
The cross is the most formative Christian symbol of mourning and remembrance - from the medieval reliquary cross via the Victorian jet cross to the modern memorial pendant; in all its formal variety (Latin cross, Celtic cross, patriarchal cross, cross patté) it always points to death, redemption and resurrection.
- People & cultural historyMourning Rituals in the German-Speaking World
German-speaking mourning rituals differ perceptibly from the English court-mourning tradition - shaped by confessional division (Catholic / Protestant), middle-class sensibility, Biedermeier domesticity and an independent culture of memorial jewellery which carried different emphases in Vienna, Berlin and Munich according to region.
- PeriodsBaroque (c. 1600–1750)
The Baroque is the mourning-jewellery epoch of drastic memento mori imagery: skull rings, skeleton pendants, hourglasses, scythes and inscriptions such as *Hodie mihi, cras tibi* define a mourning jewellery that does not euphemise death but makes it visible as a constant, almost gladly displayed admonition.