From Roman Canopy Of Honor To Bernini's Baldacchino

The ciborium's form derives from Roman civic and imperial canopies of honor, freestanding columned structures used in Roman architecture to mark a seat, statue or object of particular importance, a device Christian builders adapted from the early church onward to give the altar the same architectural mark of singular honor within the building. Surviving early and medieval examples appear across a wide range of scales and regions, and the form remained in active use across many centuries and traditions rather than belonging to any single period, with both Western and Eastern churches building canopied altars in materials ranging from simple wood to elaborately carved stone and precious metal.

The type's most famous single example is the bronze baldacchino designed by Gian Lorenzo Bernini for the high altar of Saint Peter's Basilica in Rome, completed in the seventeenth century, whose four spiraling bronze columns and soaring scale transformed what had been a modest architectural convention into one of the most celebrated works of Baroque sculpture and architecture in its own right, so influential that the terms baldachin and baldacchino are now often used interchangeably with ciborium for this altar canopy form even outside specifically Italian or Baroque contexts.