Two fancy skeletons are my features today: one an homage, the other the actual man (as far as believers thought). Here I bring you the decorated corpse of Saint Maximus, brought to the village of Bürglen, Germany, in 1682. Turns out that in the Catholic Counter-Reformation, bedazzling the bones of the saints was all the rage. Monks and especially nuns (especially in what became Germany and Austria) excelled at lovingly supplying holy skeletons with fantastic costumes of bright colors, precious jewels, and embroidered fabrics.
Soon after his arrival, Saint Maximus’ corpse began to drip with a “rare yellowish fluid that smelled like sweat” — a miracle! Or, rather a cat that liked to hang out on the altar next to the dead holy man. But the villagers also observed that the cat travelled to the dwellings of poor people– so many folks began to think that the cat was miraculous, because maybe the poor could get some miracle cat-money!
The second slide is a photograph of Saint Maximus in modern surrealist attire — a creation of the beautifully macabre art duo “Mothmeister.” Both versions of Maximus can be seen in publications featuring other garbed saints and costumed masked creatures that I shall cite in the comments.
Source(s): @Vice, citing _Heavenly Bodies: Cult Treasures and Spectacular Saints from the Catacombs_, by Paul Koudounaris, “Your corpse will never look so good,” Tanja M. Laden, 24/10/2013. _Dark and Dystopian Post-Mortem Fairy Tales_, by mothmeister. @mothmeister.
