The altars and tabernacles were executed with an equal amount of art and costliness; and from the earliest period of the fabrication or the importation of carpets, embroideries, and gold and silver fabrics, we see them employed for the purpose of covering, adorning, and of rendering more striking and imposing the altar and its accessories, to which the name of chancel was given ([Fig. 20]).
The chalice and the altar-vessels, which date from the very cradle of Christian worship, since without these sacred vases the fundamental services of the religion of Jesus Christ could not have been performed, perhaps owe it to this exceptional fact that they are not spoken of before the eleventh century ([Fig. 21]). In truth, nowhere do we find an indication of their ordinary shape, nor of the mode of their manufacture in early times; but it is reasonable to suppose that the chalice originally was identical, as it was in times approaching nearer to our own, with the goblet of the ancients; or perhaps, to define it more particularly, was the well-known hanap (drinking-cup), the earliest type of which tradition endeavours to trace to so early a date. At a later period, and until the time when the artists of the Renaissance period were called upon to remodel sacred ornaments, and they transformed them into marvels of art on which were lavished all the resources of casting, chasing, and glyptic, we observe that chalices continued to be manufactured with the greatest care, adorned with exquisite elegance, and enriched with all the brilliancy that art can give them.
Fig. 20.—An Altar-cloth embroidered in silver on a black ground, representing the procession of a friar of the Abbey of St. Victor. Fifteenth Century (copied from the original belonging to N. Achille Jubinal).
All that can be said regarding the chalice applies equally to the monstrances and the pyxes employed to contain and to exhibit the consecrated wafers, as also to the censers, which originated in the Jewish form of worship, and which, in accordance with the successive epochs of Christianity, affected different mystical and symbolic shapes ([Fig. 22]). Of these M. Didron gives the following description:—“They were first formed of two open-work spheroids, in cast and chased copper, ornamented with figures of animals and inscriptions.” Originally they were suspended by three chains, which, according to tradition, signified “the union of the body, the soul, and the divinity in Christ.” At another period the censers represented, in miniature, churches and chapels with pointed arches. Again, at the Renaissance, they took the form of that now in use.
Fig. 21.—An Altar-Tray and Chalice, in enamelled gold, supposed to be of the Fourth or Fifth Century, found at Gourdon, near Chalon-sur-Saône, in 1846. (Cabinet des Antiques, Bibl. Imp. de Paris.)
From the first, the lighting of churches was, to a certain extent, carried out on much the same principle as that employed in princely abodes and important mansions. Fixed or movable lamps were used; also wax candles in chandeliers, for the ornamentation of which pious donors and pious artisans, the former paying the latter, vied with each other in skill and liberality. We may here observe that even in the early days of Christianity, numerous candlesticks were generally employed both by day and by night. The candlesticks on the altar represented the apostles surrounding Christ; thus their number ought to be twelve. Placed around the dead, they signified that the Christian finds light beyond the grave. To the faithful they typified the day which shines brightly in celestial Jerusalem.
The worship of relics, established in the early days of the Church, subsequently led to the introduction of shrines and reliquaries, a kind of portable tomb which the disciples of the Gospel devoted to the memory, and in honour, of martyrs and confessors of the faith. Thus from the first, in collecting these holy relics, to which the faithful attached every kind of miraculous powers, they dedicated what, according to ecclesiastical writers, had been the temple of the living God, a gorgeous sanctuary, worthy of so many virtues and miracles. Hence the introduction of shrines into churches, and reliquaries into private houses.
