Ciborium (architecture)

The ciborium arose in the context of a wide range of canopies, both honorific and practical, used in the ancient world to cover both important persons and religious images or objects.

The free-standing domed ciborium-like structure that stood over what was thought to be the site of Jesus's tomb within the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem was called the aedicula (or edicule), and was a key sight for pilgrims, often shown in art, for example in the Monza Ampullae.

[11] Possibly the earliest important example over an altar was in the Basilica of Saint John Lateran in Rome, also donated by Constantine, looted by the Visigoths in the 5th century and now replaced by a large Gothic structure (see below).

Ἔστι δὲ καὶ κατὰ τὴν κιβωτὸν τῆς διαθήκης Κυρίου, ἐν ᾗ λέγεται Ἅγια Ἁγίων καὶ ἁγίασμα αὐτοῦ· ἐν ᾗ προσέταξεν ὁ Θεὸς γενέσθαι δύο χερουβὶμ ἑκατέρωθεν τορευτά· τὸ γὰρ ΚΙΒ ἐστὶ κιβωτός, τὸ δὲ ΟΥΡΙΝ φωτισμὸς Θεοῦ, ἢ φῶς Θεοῦ.

[18] The example by the Cosmati in the gallery is similar to another 12th-century Italian ciborium now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York,[19] and that in the Basilica di San Nicola in Bari.

By the Romanesque, gabled forms, as at Sant'Ambrogio, or ones with a flat top, as at the Euphrasian Basilica (illustrated) or St Mark's, Venice, are more typical.

Probably the most elaborate is the one in the Basilica of Saint John Lateran in Rome, designed by Arnolfo di Cambio and later painted by Barna da Siena.

[21] Altar-curtains survived the decline of the ciborium in both East and West, and in English are often called riddels (from French rideau, a word once also used for ordinary domestic curtains).

[23] Late medieval examples in Northern Europe were often topped by angels, and the posts, but not the curtains, were revived in some new or refitted Anglo-Catholic churches by Ninian Comper and others around 1900.

In earlier periods the curtains were closed at the most solemn part of the Mass, a practice that continues to the present day in the Coptic and Armenian churches.

This appears, from various accounts of miracles associated with it, and depictions in mosaic, to have been a free-standing roofed structure inside the church, at one side of the nave, with doors or walls in precious metal all around it.

[29] A medium-sized 13th-century ciborium in a corner of San Marco, Venice, known as the capitello ('little chapel'), was used for the display of important icons and relics in the Middle Ages.

[32] Many other elaborate aedicular Baroque altar surrounds that project from, but remain attached to, the wall behind, and have pairs of columns on each side, may be thought of as hinting at the ciborium without exactly using its form.

[33] The Gothic style of ciborium was also borrowed for some public monuments like the Albert Memorial in London,[34] as it had been in the Middle Ages for the outdoor Scaliger Tombs in Verona.

The word ciborium, in both senses, is said to derive from the cup-shaped seed vessel of the Egyptian water-lily nelumbium speciosum, which is supposed to have been used as a cup itself, and to resemble both the metal cup shape and, when inverted, the dome of the architectural feature, though the Grove Dictionary of Art, the Catholic Encyclopedia and other sources are somewhat dubious about this etymology, which goes back to at least the Late Antique period.

Matthew Paris records that Henry III of England wore a robe "de preciosissimo baldekino" at a ceremony at Westminster Abbey in 1247.

A number of other Baroque ciboria, and secular architectural canopies, copied this conceit, for example Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome.