Sacerdotium and Imperium in Material Form: The Reliquary of St. Patriarch Niphon II of Constantinople at the Dionysiou Monastery (1515)

Abstract

Crafted in the form of a cross-in-square church, the reliquary casket of St. Niphon II, former Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople (in office 1486–1488, 1497–1498, †1508, Dionysiou Monastery, Mount Athos), displays an unusual architectural form that blends various Byzantine, Gothic, and Islamic decorative features, making it an object of complex eclecticism. The piece, commissioned by the Voivode of Wallachia, Neagoe Basarab, in 1515, evokes liturgical church-form containers such as censers and artophoria, but makes an unusual and unwieldy choice for a reliquary, which, in the Byzantine cults of relics, needs to be displayed open for touching and kissing. The study argues that the Dionysiou reliquary was manufactured in the Principality of Wallachia to make a statement about the distinctive hierarchical status of Saint Niphon II as the ecumenical leader of the Post-Byzantine Church of Constantinople. This quality is symbolized by its mixed style and the katholikon-like form, alluding to the Post-Byzantine multicultural context in which Niphon functioned as the sole patriarch of the former Byzantine commonwealth. It testifies to the sacerdotium as the Church’s power structure and its sacred clerical functions, paired with the sovereignty of the secular power (the imperium). Both dimensions are represented in the double portrait of Voivode Neagoe and Saint Patriarch Niphon on the lid’s reverse, designed in the form of a katholikon (cathedral) church. The literary sources, iconography, and models, as well as the ritual and symbolic function and materiality of the object, are analyzed in this study, exploring how the reliquary was conceived for display and use, and how its material form evokes the artophorion, linking it to Eucharistic symbolism as a container of sacred matter.

The authors' abstract, as published at the source. Religions, 2026 · DOI ↗