Ostensorium

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Ostensorium with a tooth, St. Attributed to Apollonia , in the Cathedral Treasury of Porto Cathedral in Portugal

An ostensorium (from Latin ostendere , 'to hold against', 'to show') is a display vessel in which an object for religious worship can be shown or carried in a procession .

Reliquary ostensorium

Relics of saints have enjoyed special esteem and veneration from the dawn of Christianity. They were kept and venerated in reliquaries , mostly round or box-like, increasingly artistically decorated capsules, later also in the form of busts and statuettes. The best known are the reliquary shrines .

Occasionally from the 9th century and widely from the 13th century, people started to keep the relics in a visible place and present them for veneration, for example during processions or church services. In some cases, valuable glazed display vessels, called reliquary ostensorium or reliquary monstrance , were created. Depending on the shape, a distinction is made between tubular reliquaries with a lying or standing crystal cylinder to hold the relic or disc reliquaries with a round or oval viewing vessel.

Agnus Dei Ostensorium

Since the 9th century the custom arose in Rome that during the cartage, 3 to 5 cm large round wax tablets with the embossed, seal-like relief of the Lamb of God , called " Agnus Dei ", were blessed and distributed to the faithful on the Saturday after Easter . They took these home as sacramentals for private devotion. In the 15th century the Pope exclusively blessed these tablets, in the first and then every seventh year of his reign. Metal capsules or monstrance-like containers, the Agnus-Dei-Ostensorien , which were often artistically designed, were used for safekeeping .

monstrance

A special form and the most well-known form of an ostensorium today is the monstrance , a display vessel made mainly of precious metal for the exposure and worship of the holy of holies , the consecrated host . It was based on the model of the reliquary eastern sensoria since the late Middle Ages in the course of the spread of the Eucharistic adoration and the sacrament processions .

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Thomas Richter: Reliquary . In: Walter Kasper (Ed.): Lexicon for Theology and Church . 3. Edition. tape 8 . Herder, Freiburg im Breisgau 1999, Sp. 1090 .
  2. ^ Rudolf Huber (Ed.): Church implements, crosses and reliquaries of the Christian churches. (= Glossarium Artis. Volume 2). KG Saur Verlag, 3rd edition, Munich-London-New York-Paris 1991, ISBN 3-598-11079-0 , pp. 179.183f.
  3. Jump up ↑ Joseph Braun: Agnus Dei , in: Reallexikon zur Deutschen Kunstgeschichte , Vol. 1, 1933, Col. 212-216. Rudolf Huber (ed.): Church implements, crosses and reliquaries of the Christian churches. (= Glossarium Artis. Volume 2). KG Saur Verlag, 3rd edition, Munich-London-New York-Paris 1991, ISBN 3-598-11079-0 , p. 218.