Armadio

ARMADIO. - In the mosaics of the mausoleum of Galla Placidia in Ravenna and in a miniature of the Codex Amiatinus (Florence, Laurentian Library) we have the oldest records of cupboards for the keeping of liturgical books. Wooden furniture of the same type must also have served to store sacred furnishings and hangings, and must have had the arrangement of internal spaces that is still in use. Not different were the cupboards intended to hold relics, such as the one of cypress carved with rosettes from the time of Leo III, found in the Sancta Sanctorum at the Lateran. Still simple in form, but rich in ornament, is the fourteenth-century example in the sacristy of the Arena Chapel in Padua. In the early Renaissance, inlay decorations were widely used, as in the cupboards of S. Maria del Fiore by Giuliano da Maiano. Subsequently the cupboard is articulated into several bodies and the carving becomes vigorous, as in the seventeenth-century ones of the Certosa di Pavia. In many cases, from the seventeenth century onward, cupboards form a total covering of the walls of the sacristy and thus take on an architectural function, even though they are kept to a great sobriety of line. Sacred furniture then diverges from the development of secular furniture, remaining more closely bound to tradition, and has been able to accommodate, without preciousness of material and effects, the modern simplicity founded on a rigorous adherence to use.

The cupboards for the holy oils are mostly of small dimensions and set into the wall: they take on the appearance of little aedicules because of the architecture that frames them. Often on the door are the two letters O.S. ("olea sancta").

Guglielmo Matthiae