Abstract

This article investigates the history of a reliquary containing objects associated with Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca) and his legendary lover Laura. Originally part of the collection of Princess Izabela Czartoryska (1745–1831) in her Puławy residence in Poland, the reliquary now belongs to the National Museum in Cracow. In the first section, I reconstruct the circumstances surrounding the journey of a splinter of Petrarch’s cupboard and Laura’s finger bone to Puławy, from Arquà in 1818 and Avignon in 1820 respectively. The bulk of the article is dedicated to analysing Izabela Czartoryska’s endeavours to elevate the status of these physically inconspicuous objects into historical relics. I argue that their semantic potential was revealed and manifested through the sophisticated container in which they were placed, the exhibition in which they were incorporated and the narrative that Czartoryska crafted around the fabled lovers. The example of the Puławy relic illustrates the mechanisms used during the era of sentimentalism to provide an object with the status of a historical relic, which was the only chance for such artefacts to survive—or at least to survive as meaningful entities.