Head Reliquary of a Female Saint, probably a Companion of Saint Ursula
Unknown · 1275-1300
A young woman smiles out from the gilded copper, her long hair parted in the middle and falling over her shoulders. The head rests on a short foot narrowed by a ring and a plain circular base. The top of the skull, pierced with a cross and small radiating motifs and held by three fastenings, lifts off as a lid to reach the relic inside. Around its rim a band once glittered with gems; a single baroque pearl fixed at the front is all that remains. The serene, slightly dreamy expression is typical of Limoges work of the late thirteenth century, when the workshops turned from enamel to embossed copper figures.
The saint is unnamed, but reliquaries of this kind usually held the skulls of the companions of Saint Ursula, the eleven thousand virgins martyred at Cologne, whose relics were distributed across Europe in enormous numbers. The head passed through the collections of Jacques-Philippe Bouvier, sold in Paris in eighteen seventy three, Eugène Desmottes in Lille, and Octave Homberg, whose widow gave it to the Louvre in his memory in nineteen hundred and seven.
Did You Know? Of all the jewels that once ringed the saint's head, only one lopsided pearl at the front has survived.
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