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The presentation addresses the social function of painted wood caskets for corpisancti in the medieval Venice. Wood caskets belonged to the public sphere of receptions and processions, cemetery inventions and translations, and as art-like objects embedded in human and commercial activities, they carried a degree of transiency and commonality. Yet, they marked an important, constitutive phase in the history of a respective cult. In various textual narratives, a shipping crate acted as a locus dramaticus where human remains manifested their posthumous powers to the constituency that at that moment formed itself as a worshipping community, and whose names and testimonies were tied to these containers passed into memory as the ‘first’ or ‘authentic’ tombs of respective saints. For that reason wood caskets were not discarded with subsequent changes of artistic preferences. As privileged yet transferrable building blocks of the altar structure, wood caskets were used as an altar, retrofitted within newer altar structures, moved to the vicinity of an altar, and were eventually kept as ‘icons’ in some instances. |
