Medieval Art and the Cult of Saints

It can be said that medieval art, in great part, is predicated on the engagement with the cult of the saints. Between the fifth and sixteenth centuries, saints and their images grounded Christian belief and shaped its practices. Patron saints formed a crucial part of the devotee’s spiritual life, believed to provide intercession, work miracles, and model pious behavior. Countless churches and shrines were dedicated to well-known as well as local saints, their visual programs coalescing around reliquaries that held the bodily remains or contact relics of holy men and women. The faithful undertook pilgrimages to holy shrines in order to secure saints’ help and to petition them with prayer. Saints’ likenesses were fashioned in wood and metal, paint and stone, ivory and textile; their lives were narrated and visualized in scores of manuscripts. In other words, to explore a history of medieval art and the cult of saints one would have to write a history of medieval art as a whole. This article provides but a sample of key studies that address specific topics with a focus on Western medieval and Byzantine art: images of saints in churches and monasteries; art along pilgrimage roads; relics and reliquaries; and saints and piety. It does not include sources that treat sacred spaces dedicated to saints—churches, shrines, chapels—as a whole.