Reliquary in the form of a bust, probably St Elizabeth of Brittany, silver and gilded silver, Spain (Aragon: town mark of Zaragoza) attributed to Martín Durán, 1509.

Silver and gilded silver bust of a woman, the face silver, the hair and costume gilded. Town mark of Zaragoza for the period 1500 - ca. 1540 struck on the lower front of the bust.

Dr W.L. Hildburgh Bequest

The V&A bust has recently been connected by Spanish scholars to a silver reliquary bust mentioned in a contract in the Zaragoza archives.The contract, dated 1509, is between the confraternity of the Eleven Thousand Virgins (at the monastery of Santo Domingo), and the goldsmith Martín Durán, in which Durán agrees to make a 'silver head [...] with neck and shoulders' for the confraternity. The document does not identify the saint, but references in sixteenth-century inventories refer to 'a head of St Elizabeth' in the monastery treasury and a seventeenth-century account states that among the monastery's possessions were relics of St Elizabeth of Brittany, one of the eleven thousand virgins martyred with St Ursula. Durán's work was paid for by a combination of confraternity funds and donations from the faithful. The Zaragoza town mark punched on the front of the V&A bust matches the type used in the early sixteenth century, while the long hair of the figure is consistent with an identification of the bust as a maiden girl. In the twentieth century the bust was in the collection of Dr Walter Leo Hildburgh, who lent it to the Museum and then bequeathed it to the V&A on his death in 1955. It is not known when or where it was acquired by Hildburgh, but a press release issued by the Museum in January 1958 to accompany a memorial exhibition of his legacy explained that 'most of his [Spanish] purchases were made outside that country and he bought practically nothing after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War' (see V&A Nominal File MA/1/H1954 - Hildburgh, Dr WL, 1955/4478 X ABC Part 15).

In the medieval period, the bones and body parts of saints, as well as fragments of their possessions, were all known as relics. They were kept in a shrine, or in special containers called reliquaries whose design sometimes evoked the relic itself. Both shrines and reliquaries were lavishly decorated with gold, silver, enamels and precious stones.

This empty reliquary portrays a young girl in a brocaded dress with a fashionable square-cut bodice. Her identity is unknown, but she probably represents a virgin martyr, perhaps St Ursula who, according to legend, was martyred with 11,000 virgins. The reliquary may originally have held a relic of her head.

M.468-1956