About this Website

This website has been funded by the Cleveland Museum of Art and was produced at Columbia University's Media Center for Art History under the direction of Holger A. Klein, Associate Professor of Early Christian, Byzantine, and Western Medieval Art and Archaeology.


This digital monograph allows museum visitors, scholars, students, and a broad range of internet users to explore the history of the Christian cult of saints and their relics through a variety of different digital tools and programs, including video, Quicktime panoramic photography (QTVR), and high-resolution, zoomifiable images. The site expands on what is presented in the Treasures of Heaven exhibition and in its catalog, and places the exhibition objects within the cultural, geographical, and architectural environment for which they were originally created.

Inside the special exhibition galleries, a resource center allows visitors to explore a comprehensive kiosk version of the website. In order to make this information available to a wider audience, the partnering institutions—namely the Cleveland Museum of Art (CMA), the Walters Art Museum, and the British Museum in cooperation with Yale University Press—as well as a number of other museums have kindly agreed to make their textual and image resources available for use in a public web version of the site that was originally developed for exclusive use inside the exhibition galleries of the CMA.

Given the nature of contractual obligations and restrictions imposed by many lending institutions, the Treasures of Heaven website currently features only a selection of objects in the exhibition with their accompanying catalogue texts and images. However, it is our goal for the future to supplement the initial website with additional texts, videos, and QTVR-images to enhance its usefulness for undergraduate and graduate students at Columbia University and other universities in the United States and worldwide.


The Media Center for Art History is a part of the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University in the City of New York. The mission of the Media Center is to explore the relationship between art history, media, and pedagogy to connect faculty research and curriculum through the application of technology.

The center was founded on a National Endowment for the Humanities Challenge Grant in 1995 under the direction of Professor Stephen Murray.

Caleb M. Smith, Director
James A. Hall, Educational Technologist
Cassy Juhl, Digital Resources Curator
Gabriel Rodriguez, Assistant Curator