Florence is famous for it's beautiful cathedral, Santa Maria del Fiore, but what many may not realize is that located outside of the cathedral, situated directly behind the area where the apse is located, is the treasury museum of the cathedral, the Opera di Santa Maria del Fiore. In 2022 we surveyed just some of the treasures found within this museum, treasures that include many architectural remnants of the earlier facade of the cathedral, the original baptistery doors, many sacred vestments, and also a variety of reliquaries and other works.
The reliquary in question is properly called a "stauroteca" meaning that it is a reliquary housing a piece of the True Cross. The reliquary also contains other relics of the Passion of Christ, including a thorn from the Crown of Thorns. Both relics are thought to have been brought from Constantinople to Florence in the fifteenth century.
The treasury museum offers the following by way of commentary about the composition of the reliquary:
The importance of the relics explain the richness and the splendour of their precious container made in different periods by the best Florentine goldsmiths: it is an imposing cross 130 cm high, 74 wide; but its appearance is light, bright and airy. The body is in fact structured by a polylobed frame in gold foil, crossed by thin enamel decorations, interspersed along the edges with oval-shaped gems which encloses the relics inside the arms and the terminals, that are visible through rock crystals.The most noble relic, the wood of the Cross, is enclosed in the intersection of the arms, and around it is a frame crown of thorns shaped and adorned with pearls and garnets. On the top shines a large almond-cut Indian topaz, which reproduces the most important jewel of the Medici treasure, certainly the most extraordinary of all the Florentine collections and one of the biggest of the world: the huge yellow diamond, known throughout Europe as the "Florentine diamond." ... this precious stone disappeared at the beginning of the 20th century and therefore the topaz that reproduces it is the only visual evidence we have of this absolute wonder... From the mid-18th century, the diamond was set in the Habsburg crown, where it remained until the fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1918. Following the imperial family into exile in Switzerland, the gem mysteriously disappeared — until now. On November 8th [2020], astonishing news broke: the legendary Habsburg Treasure has been discovered in a [bank] vault in Canada. The Medici Diamond has survived the ages, still radiant in all its splendour!
The reliquary itself a product of various centuries. At its core, some of the components of the stauroteca were fashioned in the eleventh and twelfth centuries by Byzantine craftsmen before being finally put into its final and current form during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by the goldsmiths Cosimo Merlini (+1641) and Bernardo Holzmann (+1717).
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| Photo credit: Opera di Santa Maria del Fiore |
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| Photo credit: Opera di Santa Maria del Fiore |
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| Photo credit: Opera di Santa Maria del Fiore |
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| The relic of the True Cross with pieces of original Byzantine metalwork around it. Photo credit: Opera di Santa Maria del Fiore |
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| An unidentified relic sitting in the centre of one of the budded arms of the stauroteca. Photo credit: Opera di Santa Maria del Fiore |
Some may be tempted to scoff at such a work as this, feeling it too worldly, however that is to precisely look on this piece with too worldly eyes; as the museum itself reminds us, "the importance of the relics [is what] explains the richness and the splendour of their precious container." Indeed, within the Christian tradition there can be no better use for (what are solely in human terms) precious material goods, than to put them to use in the service of far greater and more precious treasures, treasures of inestimable spiritual and devotional value.
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