Girdle of Thomas

The supposed original girdle is a relic belonging to Prato Cathedral in Tuscany, Italy and its veneration has been regarded as especially helpful for pregnant women.

[2] The story was frequently depicted in the art of Florence and the whole of Tuscany, and the keeping and display of the relic at Prato generated commissions for several important artists of the early Italian Renaissance.

In other versions he was miraculously transported from India to the Mount of Olives, to be present at the actual Assumption, and the Virgin dropped her girdle down to him as she was taken up to heaven.

An altarpiece by Palma Vecchio, now in the Brera Gallery in Milan, shows an intermediate version, with Thomas in the distance hurrying towards the other apostles, and the Virgin taking off her girdle.

It has been suggested that this nervous time, and the date of the lifting of the siege, stimulated the significant number of Florentine commissions of art involving the story of the girdle in the years immediately following.

In 1402 Gian Galeazzo Visconti, Duke of Milan again invaded Florentine territory and the relic was processed round the city to protect it, and indeed he did not attack.

The museum also has the reliquary by Maso di Bartolomeo of 1446–47, decorated with putti' matching the outside pulpit; he also made the very fine Renaissance metalwork screens closing off two sides of the Cintola chapel from the aisle, which were partly paid for by the Medici.

The main pulpit inside the cathedral, for normal preaching, is decorated with reliefs by Donatello's pupil Antonio Rossellino and Mino da Fiesole and was completed in 1473.

There were a number of supposed original girdle relics across the ancient Christian world, partly conflated with tertiary relics (belts that had touched the supposed genuine belt) – Elizabeth of York, queen of Henry VII of England, bought one of these from a friar to help her pregnancy, and there was an "original" at Westminster Abbey in London.

Florence's great rival, Siena, acquired a competing girdle relic in 1359 for the hospital Santa Maria della Scala, and the Basilica of Our Lady, Maastricht had another.