gem martyr

Spent the morning in the western altstadt – part of the old city; most pleasingly populated by a mixture of shops and churches. So the hours went very quickly. There is a certain delight (well, I find, anyway) in visiting all the shiny produce in the department and chain stores one doesn’t normally have time to peruse. K- needed to buy some clothes basics and I was more than happy to ‘try on’ accessories and look at the fashions.

Not all women have this drive I know, and I never did when I was young(er) – I was far too serious in those days. But I delight in it now; perhaps a necessary rectifying balancing of the humours after all the hours of academic grind. Or perhaps some ladies have particular pleasure receptors in the brain that only respond to the shiny retail experience. Well that’s two excuses ready prepared.

I’ve confessed before I have an irrational love of jewels and gems. So I stopped off at a Swarovski shop and was pleasurably mesmerised by their offerings as usual. Crystals and diamonds can be very useful things of course when employed in industry; but the highly priced and prized ones transcend utility. Like poems they are beautiful in their own right, for no particular purpose and intrinsically untranslatable to another medium or arguably to another language.

I guess there is a kind of aesthetic continuum of created or part-created ‘things’: from the useless tat, through industrial or domestic utility and more expertly crafted objects that have both use and aesthetic value (the meaning of ‘craft’ really), then onward to the pure objets d’art, which have transcended utility while retaining the marks of creative inspiration and skill. Perhaps it’s most difficult sometimes to distinguish between the two extremes on this object scale. The tat and the art proper. What is throwaway kitsch and what is culturally (especially in our postmodern times) to be esteemed. Time passing, social contexts and the personal parameters of experience and desire all shift the classifications along too.

How strange then to be vividly reminded immediately after the window shopping of a very different use of gem adornment; for into the church of St Peter we stepped, to discover reliquary of the most vivid sort, in what appeared to be the complete skeleton of Roman Martyr St Munditia complete with a kind of artificially beautified skull, clearly exposed within a glass casket. This displaying of the mortal is rather gruesome to our modern eyes but has a long tradition in Catholic Christianity. Often a saint’s body is declared to be miraculously preserved after death, but even if not, body parts and bones have great spiritual value as a visual aid to the faithful.

I remember a fellow (that should be sister) PHD student – this is nearly 20 years ago now – who was at the time also a nun in a small modern Catholic community saying she was once nearly arrested for carrying the elbow and forearm of their particular founding said (I forget who) through some European Customs. That kind of thing would certainly be featured on one of those reality airport documentaries if it had happened recently. In fact if I was a producer on such a show I would make sure it did, forthwith.

What was striking about St Munditia however was not solely her skeletal presence, but the fact that she was adorned, considerably adorned, from head to foot – no, from skull to metatarsal, in large precious gems – what looked like rubies, sapphires, emeralds. The big three in the precious gem world. Presumably as a mark of the valuable regard in which her life of heroic virtue is held; the ongoing spiritual value and respect due to her. But what a contrast to the Munich Swarovski shops and their ilk. Put her in another context and her appearance now could almost be a parable on the worthlessness of hankering after earthly bling, seeing as you yourself are not going to look youthfully or conventionally beautiful in it for ever, no matter how high a price you’ve paid. A memento mori with rocks on.

But balanced between these two interpretations I feel Munditia has acquired an odd resonance that is neither adoration nor offputting example. A striking sort of postmodern pulchritude, in her bare bones set with stones older even than she. Weirdly beautiful at least in the eyes of this beholder.