Urte Krass:
Incorporations: Human Remains Entering Novel Constellations in Early Modern European Collections

From their inception, Christian reliquaries have been remarkably receptive to forms, iconographies, and materials from diverse cultural contexts. Long before the era of European expansion, materials such as ivory, animal bone, bison horn, ostrich eggs, walrus teeth, tropical woods, and coconuts found their way into the material culture of the Christian relic cult. This established openness paved the way for the inclusion of yet more novel materials like tortoiseshell and Indian mother-of-pearl during the Iberian expansion.

But it was not only the wrapping materials that travelled. Christian saints’ bodily relics were brought to other continents, and mortal remains also came to Europe from overseas. The lecture traces the intercontinental movements of human remains during the early modern period and contextualizes them with developments in the history of European collections during the same period. The moment when former church or princely treasures transitioned into cabinets of art and curiosities is particularly interesting because Christian relics now entered into new constellations with objects and materials and also with other mortal remains.

Urte Krass is a professor of Early Modern Art History at the University of Bern, Switzerland. Her research focuses on political iconography, the material culture of Christian sainthood, as well as on early modern transcultural negotiation processes via artifacts and images. Krass is the Principal Investigator of the SNSF Consolidator project “Global Bones: Entanglements, Transfers, and Translations in the Early Modern Age.”