The Holy Thorn Reliquary

A gold reliquary just over 30 centimetres high, made in Paris around 1400-1410 to hold a single thorn believed to be from the Crown of Thorns, and one of the finest surviving examples of email en ronde bosse, enamel in the round, at the height of its brief technical peak. Heraldic plaques on its base carry the arms of Jean, duc de Berry, though the piece appears in none of his own surviving inventories.

It passed into the Habsburg Imperial Treasury in Vienna by 1544 and stayed there for over three centuries, until the Vienna dealer Salomon Weininger secretly substituted a copy for the original sometime between 1863 and 1872 and sold the genuine piece, which reached Baron Anselm von Rothschild and then his son Ferdinand, who bequeathed it to the British Museum in 1898 as part of the roughly 300-object Waddesdon Bequest. For decades afterward the London reliquary and the Vienna forgery coexisted, each institution uncertain of its own object's status, until scholarship beginning with Joseph Destree in 1927 established which was which.

The reliquary's own authenticity as a c. 1400 goldsmith's masterpiece is now settled. Its maker is not: unsigned, unmarked, and the subject of one disputed and largely unaccepted attribution. What the thorn inside it actually is remains, as it always has been, a separate question of faith rather than of goldsmith's craft.

What it is

A gold reliquary just over 30 centimetres high, built as a small castle whose towers support a great rock-crystal window, itself crowned by a burst of gold rays holding God the Father in majesty. It is one of the very few surviving goldsmith's works of this ambition and quality from the Valois court around 1400, and one of still fewer made in solid gold throughout rather than the cheaper silver-gilt normal even in royal commissions of the period.

Twenty-eight small three-dimensional figures, most of them in white enamel, cover the piece: Christ in Judgment, the Virgin and John the Baptist kneeling in supplication at his feet, the twelve Apostles carrying their attributes around the rim of the window, God the Father and two adoring angels above, and a crowd of the resurrected dead climbing from their graves below, roused by four angels blowing the Last Trump from the castle's turrets. At the centre of all of it, behind the crystal window, sits a single thorn.

How it was made

The figures are executed in email en ronde bosse, enamel in the round: a technique in which a goldsmith casts or models a fully three-dimensional figure in gold, sometimes on a core no thicker than gold wire, lightly roughens its surface so that enamel will key to it, then coats the figure in enamel paste and fires it. The result is not a flat enamelled plaque but a small enamelled sculpture, and it was, around 1400, a very new and very fashionable thing to be able to do.

The technique had only been developed a decade or two before this reliquary was made, and the goldsmiths working for the French royal dukes were pushing it to its technical limits right at the point this piece was produced. White enamel, the dominant colour on the figures here, was itself a recent achievement. What survives of the technique at this level of ambition is a small, closely watched group: this reliquary, the Goldenes Rossl at Altotting, the Dunstable Swan Jewel, and a handful of others, most of them royal or ducal commissions, because only a court could afford the material and the specialist labour it demanded.

The iconographic programme

The subject is the General Resurrection following the Last Judgment, and the choice of subject is not incidental to what the object holds. Christ is shown seated on a rainbow, displaying the wounds of his Passion, with two angels above him bearing the instruments of that Passion: the same instruments, doctrinally, that produced the thorn enclosed just below. The Virgin and John the Baptist kneel to either side in the traditional Deesis pose of intercession, pleading on behalf of the souls shown rising from their graves at the base, summoned by trumpeting angels standing on the reliquary's own castle turrets.

Medieval belief held that a relic of the Crown of Thorns, and by extension the reliquary that displayed it, was in a sense only on loan to the earthly kingdom that held it, to be reclaimed by Christ at his return. Housing the thorn inside a vision of exactly that moment of return was therefore not simply an attractive subject: it stated, in gold and enamel, what the relic's owner believed the object to be for. On the reverse, two more figures continue a protective and devotional programme: a knight spearing a dragon, and Saint Christopher carrying the Christ child on his shoulder, patron of travellers and, by tradition, a saint whose image was believed to protect against sudden death.

The identity of the dragon-spearing knight is not as settled as the standard literature suggests. Hugh Tait's 1986 catalogue and Renate Eikelmann both identify him as the Archangel Michael, which fits the Last Judgment theme neatly, since Michael weighs souls at the Judgment. But Paulus Rainer, writing in 2014 from the Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien, points out that the historic inventories of the Vienna Ecclesiastical Treasury, where the piece was recorded for over three centuries, describe the same figure as Saint George. Both readings are held by named scholars and this record does not arbitrate between them.

The patron: Jean, duc de Berry

The case for Jean, duc de Berry (1340-1416), third son of King John II of France and brother of Charles V, as the reliquary's original owner rests on physical evidence on the object itself, not on a documentary record of the commission. Enamelled heraldic plaques on the castle base carry his coat of arms, and it is this heraldry, not an inventory entry, that anchors both the attribution and the c. 1400 date.

That matters because the reliquary is conspicuously absent from where a reader would expect to find it. Extremely detailed inventories of Berry's possessions survive from 1401 to 1403 and again from 1413 to 1416, the year of his death, and none contains an entry that clearly matches this object. One item recorded among his goldsmiths' work, 'a thorn in a large gold jewel,' has been proposed as a possible match, but it is dated in the inventory to after 1401, which sits awkwardly against the date the heraldry suggests. Berry was one of the most voracious collectors of the medieval world and gave objects away constantly, including to the Sainte-Chapelle he built at Bourges, so an ungifted attribution absent from his own accounts is not unusual for him specifically. It does mean the object's status as 'the Berry reliquary' is an argument built on his arms, not a chain of custody proven by his own paperwork.

Materials as meaning

Pure gold used through the entire structural framework, not merely in applied decoration, was itself a statement: most goldsmiths' work of comparable scale and even comparable royal status was built in silver-gilt to save weight and cost, gold being reserved for the visible surface. Building the whole object solid was a deliberate extravagance.

The gemstones tell a different story from the gold. Two large sapphires, and fourteen rubies alternating with fourteen pearls, are set around the reliquary, and every one of them is drilled through, as though for threading on a necklace or rosary. That is not how a goldsmith commissioning stones for a purpose-built setting would specify them cut. The drilling strongly suggests the stones were not bought new for this object but taken from an existing piece of jewellery, whether Berry's own or another's, and reset. If so, the reliquary's materials carry two histories at once: the gold built new for this specific devotional purpose, and gemstones inherited from something that came before it and no longer survives in its own right.

Habsburg Vienna, 1544 to the 1860s

Where the reliquary went after Berry's death in 1416 is not documented. It resurfaces in 1544, in an inventory belonging to the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, most plausibly having reached the Habsburgs through the Valois dukes of Burgundy, who inherited much of Berry's collection. From 1677 it is recorded repeatedly in the inventories of the Imperial Schatzkammer, the treasure chamber, in Vienna, and later in the Geistliche Schatzkammer, the Ecclesiastical Treasury of the Hofburg.

Even inside that continuous institutional custody, the object's identity was not stable. An inventory note made when the Ecclesiastical Treasury's holdings were transferred toward the modern Kunsthistorisches Museum dated the reliquary to the nineteenth century. The Treasury's own 1909 guide called it a nineteenth-century work, if an early one; later guides retreated to describing it only as made 'in a late Gothic style.' The institution holding the piece for three centuries had, by the early twentieth century, lost confidence in its own object's age.

The Weininger substitution

The reason for that lost confidence has a name: Salomon Weininger, a Viennese dealer and restorer with a workshop of skilled goldsmiths and gem-cutters, who gained access to the Ecclesiastical Treasury's holdings for restoration and used that access, between 1863 and 1872, to make copies of at least several major pieces and quietly substitute them, keeping and selling the originals. The Holy Thorn Reliquary was one of at least two Ecclesiastical Treasury objects treated this way; the other identified so far is a reliquary-ostensorium set with a Fatimid rock crystal sphere. Related work by the Kunsthistorisches Museum's own curators has since traced several more Weininger-circle substitutions across other Treasury pieces, including a rock-crystal casket now in the Art Institute of Chicago and an Annunciation group now in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, both taken by the same method.

Weininger's copy of the Holy Thorn Reliquary is an accomplished piece of work in its own right, close enough in technique and iconography that it went unquestioned in the Treasury for decades. It also carries tells that give it away on close comparison: the copy's rear doors, unlike the original's plain gold, are enamelled in blue, green and red; its angel wings are coloured where the original's are plain gold; its foliate frame carries ornament the original lacks; and, tellingly, the forger omitted Christ's stigmata from the Judgment figure, apparently not understanding what the wound marks signified within the composition he was copying. Weininger was convicted of separate forgery offences in 1877 and died in prison in Vienna in 1879. His fraud in the Ecclesiastical Treasury went undetected through his own lifetime; nobody with the standing or motive to investigate seems to have wanted to.

The original reliquary, meanwhile, had entered the Vienna art market. Business records place Weininger in transactions with Baron Anselm von Rothschild through the dealer Georg Plach before 1874, and a 2014 study by the Kunsthistorisches Museum notes drily that Anselm 'knew that Weininger professionally dealt in forgeries of antiques' even as he was acquiring pieces through channels connected to him. Whether Weininger sold the Holy Thorn Reliquary to Rothschild directly or through an intermediary cannot now be established.

Identifying the fake, and the genuine article

The Rothschild original and the Vienna copy coexisted, each institution unaware of or unable to prove the other's status, for over half a century. The first scholar to state in print that the London reliquary was the genuine object recorded in the old Viennese inventories, and that the Vienna piece was Weininger's copy, was the Belgian art historian Joseph Destree, in a 1927 essay in The Connoisseur. Even that publication did not immediately settle the matter for the institutions holding the two objects.

Multiple secondary accounts, though not the primary Kunsthistorisches Museum literature consulted for this record, state that the question was 'not finally settled until 1959,' when the Vienna reliquary was brought to London for direct side-by-side comparison, and that a panel of experts drawn from the British Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna examined both pieces together and agreed that the London reliquary was the original. This record has not been able to independently verify that date, that panel's composition, or the specific technical methods used, from a primary or scholarly source, and flags this explicitly rather than presenting it as more solidly documented than it is.

Anselm and Ferdinand de Rothschild, and the Bequest

Baron Anselm von Rothschild of Vienna owned the genuine reliquary by 1872 at the latest; that date is fixed by its listing, under item number 607, in a published addendum to the catalogue of his art collection. When Anselm died in 1874 his collection, including the reliquary, passed to his son Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild, who had by then settled in England and built Waddesdon Manor in Buckinghamshire.

Ferdinand died in December 1898 and left his entire collection of around 300 works, the finest of them Renaissance and late-medieval goldsmiths' work, jewels and glass, to the British Museum. The bequest, universally known since as the Waddesdon Bequest, came with an unusually specific and legally binding condition attached to his will: the collection was to be placed in a room to be called the Waddesdon Bequest Room, kept there separate and apart from the rest of the Museum's holdings, in perpetuity, on pain of the bequest becoming void if the condition was broken. That stipulation has been honoured through every move the collection has made since, from Room 40 in 1900 to the North Wing in 1921, to Room 45 in 1973, to its current home in Room 2A since 2015. It is also why the Holy Thorn Reliquary was left off the itinerary when the Treasures of Heaven exhibition travelled to Cleveland and Baltimore in 2011: under the terms of the Bequest, it cannot leave the Museum at all.

The relic, kept separate from the reliquary

The reliquary's own authenticity as a piece of goldsmith's work made c. 1400 is now settled among the sources consulted for this record. What it was made to contain is a different and separate question, and the two should not be run together. Medieval French royal tradition held that Louis IX bought what was believed to be Christ's actual Crown of Thorns from the Latin Emperor of Constantinople, Baldwin II, in 1239, at enormous cost, and housed it in the Sainte-Chapelle he built for the purpose in Paris. Individual thorns were subsequently given away as diplomatic and devotional gifts by later French kings, and it is one of those distributed thorns that this reliquary was made to hold and display.

Whether the Crown itself is the object it was believed to be in the thirteenth century, and whether any thorn distributed from it is what it was claimed to be, are questions of religious tradition and disputed early source material stretching back to a fifth-century account by Bishop Paulinus of Nola, not questions this record can resolve or needs to. The reliquary is a genuine, extraordinary object of c. 1400 regardless of the answer; that is the finding this record makes, and it is a finding about the goldsmith's work, not about the thorn inside it.

What is still unresolved

No maker is named for the reliquary and the one scholarly proposal, Rennequin de Harlem, has not been taken up by the field. No document places it in Jean de Berry's own hands, only his arms on its base. The three centuries between Berry's death and the reliquary's first appearance in a Habsburg inventory are undocumented. The precise mechanics of the 1959 authentication, repeated across secondary sources but not confirmed here against a primary account, need verification against Tait's 1986 catalogue or the British Museum's own object record. And the identity of the armed figure on the reverse, Michael or George, remains an open disagreement between named scholars rather than a settled point. None of this diminishes the object. It is the ordinary condition of a six-hundred-year-old piece of goldsmith's work that survived by luck, forgery and inheritance rather than by an unbroken paper trail, and this record states the gaps as gaps rather than closing them with invention.