Furtum Sacrilegum: The ‘Holy Heads’ of Peter and Paul and Their Reliquaries in the Lateran

Abstract

In what follows here, I shall be outlining the processes involved in the revaluation, ‘iconisation’ and ‘image loss’ associated with the Sacred Heads of Peter and Paul. The heads represent an important reliquary complex in the Lateran over a period of several centuries (the basis for the analysis is provided by an extensive range of treatises written by Christian antiquaries, including the main authors Soresini (1673) and Cancellieri (1806)). After a description of the lost late Gothic reliquaries, I shall go on to discuss a little-known, similarly lost fresco cycle in the north transept of the Lateran basilica, which commemorated a notorious event: the theft of several jewels from the reliquaries of Peter and Paul and the punishment assigned to the perpetrators. To anticipate the conclusion: the two half-length busts that can be seen today in the monumental late Gothic tabernacle above the main altar of Saint John Lateran, in ‘constant ostension’ (Figs 17.1 and 17.2), are only a modest replacement, dating from the early nineteenth century, for the formerly much more magnificent late Gothic bust reliquaries. These goldsmithing works, made to the highest standards, dated from a joint endowment by the French pope Urban V (Guillaume de Grimoard), who had brought the Curia back from Avignon to Rome for a short period in 1368 (Fig. 17.3). The king of