Image by Vidar Nordli-Mathisen.
Pittsburgh, the city where I live, has some very good art museums. The Carnegie Museum of Art has a large collection, focused on contemporary art. Thanks to the Carnegie International, this institution regularly has good presentations of present day artworks. There is, also, a branch of that museum, the Warhol, which has a display of his art and, also, an archive devoted to his studio. And the Frick museum, the smaller branch of the museum in New York, has a distinguished, small old master collection. I value these local institutions, and so I have often reviewed their displays. But right now for me the most interesting museum here is St. Anthony’s Chapel. This church display of sacred works was founded in the late nineteenth-century by Suitbert Goedfried Mollinger, a priest. Pastor of the Most Holy Name Parish, he used his family inheritance to build this church and collect relics. At that time, in Europe often the collections of relics were being dispersed. And so it was a buyer’s market.
Interested in this church because I have written a great deal about art museums, I was, still, unprepared for my experience of its fascination. In an earlier essay published in this journal, “Relics/Icons/Paintings: A Very Short History of Venetian Painting” (March 10, 2026) I compared and contrasted the sacred uses of relics and paintings. Here, extending that discussion, I focus on one important contemporary presentation of relics. St. Anthony’s contains more than 4200 relics, more than any other single place, it’s claimed, except for the Vatican. It has relics of the apostles, martyrs, virgins and saints, Popes who have been canonized, as well as bits of the true cross. Documentation in the church gives exhaustive information on their arrangement in the reliquaries, which are handsome walnut cases. There are many relics gathered here.
As I found by asking around to my religious friends, relics have a mixed press in the world of contemporary Christian believers. Some Orthodox people and, also, some Catholics, admire them greatly, while many believers think them merely artifacts of interest only to the superstitious. One Episcopal priest whom I asked about this church seemed almost alarmed that I was interested in it. It’s true that judging the authenticity of relics is not easy. How can we really tell if a bone fragment comes from an apostle, or a piece of wood from the true cross? The test of an old master sacred painting is visual. A genuine Giorgione looks very distinctive; and so that attribution can be tested. Judging relics is tricer. One believer told me that the test of authenticity was the ‘feeling’ generated by true relics, which obviously is a hard test to judge critically. And when the practical incentives to forge relics were obvious, it’s hard to know how to respond. Myself, I liked the claim that whether or not the relic is authentic, still it serves equally well as a stimulus for prayer. But obviously this analysis doesn’t respond to the skeptic.
For me as an historian interested in art museums, I found St. Anthony’s was most instructive. What we see in this late nineteenth-century Pittsburgh church is a monument to pre-modern ways of thinking. Before there were public art museums, there were collections of relics. But the problem with relics, for an audience of believers, is that normally there’s nothing of the relics themselves to be seen. What you see here at St. Anthony’s are the reliquaries, the mere cases, not their contents, the relics. And they have even less relationship to the relics they contain than do picture frames to the paintings they frame. (After all, often the artist considers the visual aptness of the frame, which can compliment the effect of the work it contains.) But the saints or other people whose relics are housed in St. Anthony’s were not involved in choosing these decorative reliquaries, which house their remains. The art world is a site devoted to visual thinking; that’s the basis of aesthetic pleasure, fascination with what’s seen. A sacred scene by Titian, like a secular subject by Manet or an abstraction by Sean Scully pleases us to be seen.
And so, it seemed to me, to pray in this setting, where the focus is not on sight, required faith— a belief that you truly were in the presence of remains of holy figures or artifacts associated with them. You need to trust the judgment of the priest who collected them. In a way, then, this museum devoted to relics is an anti-visual place, unlike a church containing valuable old master paintings, which is a proto-art museum, just waiting to be secularized. When you go to see the Grottos in Padua or the Caravaggios in Rome, you visit churches which have become art museums. That’s why you pay for admission. In such churches, some people come to pray, but others just look at the art. And that’s why, to go back to the account in my “relics/icons/paintings” it was important for medieval believers to replace the relics with visual representations. Then, I believe, prayer was easier. And this is why the life world of medieval Europe is difficult now to reconstruct.
To me, then, St. Anthony’s felt like a remnant from a vanished world, like the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park, which has survived into an era when we take for granted the power of visual images. No wonder after Venice acquired (by theft) the relics of Saint Mark, in 828, that their artists went on to depict him and their other holy figures in San Marco, making pictorial supplements to the relics housed there. But I am entirely unsure whether the many contemporary believers, who crowded this church the day when I visited, would agree with me. For them, I think, the power of these relics remains very real. The world of the medieval believers continues to exist in St. Anthony’s museum of sacred relics.
Note:
Christopher J. Nygren, who is an art historian at the University of Pittsburgh, drew my attention to St. Anthony’s. There is literature about this institute at the gift shop, as well as fuller information on-line. See also Joan Carroll Cruz, Relics: What They Are and Why They Matter (2015) and Caroline Walker Bynum, Dissimilar Similitudes: Devotional Objects in Late Medieval Europe (2020).
