Rare religious relics not been seen in England since the Enlightenment will go on display at the British Museum’s summer exhibition.
The breast milk of the Virgin Mary, the foot of St Blaise and one of the earliest known likenesses of Jesus will be among exhibits in the Treasures of Heaven: Saints, Relics and Devotion in Medieval Europe exhibition, which opens on June 23.
Introducing the exhibition today, its curator, James Robinson, said he hoped that it would allow visitors to “enter the medieval mind”.
Museum staff also expect thousands of Christians to make a modern-day pilgrimage to offer their prayers and lay their hands on the Perspex surrounding the relics.
In 2009 some 250,000 people, including the former Prime Minister, Tony Blair, travelled to Westminster Cathedral to view a casket containing part of the thigh and foot bones of the nineteenth-century St Thérèse of Lisieux.
Other highlights of the new British Museum exhibition include an arm reliquary of St George that has not left the Treasury of St Mark’s in Venice since the Sack of Constantinople in 1204 and a twelfth-century bust of St Baudime that once contained a vial of the saint’s blood.
The Mandylion of Edessa, which has been loaned by the Pope’s private chapel, was described by Mr Robinson as “one of the earliest likenesses of Christ”.
Three thorns thought to be from Jesus’s crown will also go on display, including one that has been lent by Stonyhurst College, the 400-year-old Jesuit boarding school.
The thorn is said to have been seized from Constantinople during the Fourth Crusade and was later sold to Louis IX of France before spending the last 200 years at the British public school.
In total, the exhibition will feature almost 200 objects from more than 40 institutions. It has drawn enthusiastic reviews in Cleveland and Baltimore since opening last year.
The New York Times called it “the most beautifully mysterious exhibition” of the year, while the Cleveland Plain Dealer described it as “an intellectual spectacle that rewrites a chapter of art history”.
Karen Armstrong, a trustee of the museum and a leading commentator on religious affairs, said that the veneration of saints and martyrs has a contemporary relevance.
“Princess Diana was seen almost as a martyr figure”, she said, adding that when the princess died “secular London suddenly developed shrines all over the place”.
“I think we should think about our [modern] cult of celebrity,” she added. “So many people these days want to be a celebrity just for the sake of being famous.
“The martyr was someone who had done something heroic or brave.”
There are plans to use the final room of the exhibition to link the veneration of saints with the modern cult of celebrity, though details are still being completed.
·The exhibition will run from June 23 to October 9 with an admission charge of £12.
An hour-long accompanying television show presented by Andrew Graham-Dixon will be broadcast on BBC Four in June