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Lamp or perfume-burner in shape of domed building
Treasury of San Marco Venice.
Sicily or Southern Italy, late 12th century

A detail of the figures on the doors

Lamp or perfume-burner in shape of domed building
Southern Italian(?), end of 12th century
Silver, partly gilt. Height 360mm, width 300mm
Tesoro, no. 142 (adapted after 1231(?) to serve as a reliquary of the Holy Blood and listed thus in the 1283 inventory: no. 1)

The “reliquary”, which is of unusual type, has the shape of a small building, square in plan and with four projecting apses crowned with four domes alternating with four triangular towers with pyramidal roofs. In the centre is a higher dome surmounted by a lantern of arches. Each dome is topped with a bulbous pointed finial. (The crosses on the triangular towers are not original.) The building rests on a narrower base. Two handles are attached to the object, the attachments terminating in bearded masks.
The cylindrical Fatimid rock-crystal flask which, according to tradition, held the “miraculous blood” which fell from a crucifix struck by an infidel in Beirut in AD 320, was still in the domed silver-gilt casket in the nineteenth century.

This precious object in San Marco, whether lamp or perfume-burner, was made at the end of the twelfth century in a milieu open to strong Byzantine but also Oriental and Western influences: Sicily or the Bari area, or perhaps Venice itself.
Source: "Western metalwork" by William D. Wixom, in The Treasury of San Marco Venice, The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York