Abstract

What is the value of relics? Which logic and symbolic economy sustain the collective belief and the institutional worship of material remnants and images of that which belongs, by right, to the sphere of the divine, object of theology and, by fact, to the dimension of documents, object of history? The Author engages with these questions and their unpredicted persistence in artists like Kandinsky and Duchamp, via an original reading of Calvin's "Traité des reliquies", a key text in the religious and political debate of mid XVI century.