CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

The Most Interesting Museum in Pittsburgh

Image by Vidar Nordli-Mathisen.

Pittsburgh, the city where I live, has some very good art museums. The Carnegie Museum of Art has a large collection, focused on contemporary art. Thanks to the Carnegie International, this institution regularly has good presentations of present day artworks. There is, also, a branch of that museum, the Warhol, which has a display of his art and, also, an archive devoted to his studio. And the Frick museum, the smaller branch of the museum in New York, has a distinguished, small old master collection. I value these local institutions, and so I have often reviewed their displays. But right now for me the most interesting museum here is St. Anthony’s Chapel. This church display of sacred works was founded in the late nineteenth-century by Suitbert Goedfried Mollinger, a priest. Pastor of the Most Holy Name Parish, he used his family inheritance to build this church and collect relics. At that time, in Europe often the collections of relics were being dispersed. And so it was a buyer’s market.

Interested in this church because I have written a great deal about art museums, I was, still, unprepared for my experience of its fascination. In an earlier essay published in this journal, “Relics/Icons/Paintings: A Very Short History of Venetian Painting” (March 10, 2026) I compared and contrasted the sacred uses of relics and paintings. Here, extending that discussion, I focus on one important contemporary presentation of relics. St. Anthony’s contains more than 4200 relics, more than any other single place, it’s claimed, except for the Vatican. It has relics of the apostles, martyrs, virgins and saints, Popes who have been canonized, as well as bits of the true cross. Documentation in the church gives exhaustive information on their........

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