Discussing a season of rarely travelled Vatican artifacts on tour throughout the nation, arts reporter Eve M. Kahn writes in the New York Times about an upcoming stop at Cleveland Museum of Art.

Here is an excerpt: "On Sunday [October 17] 'Treasures of Heaven: Saints, Relics and Devotion in Medieval Europe' opens at the Cleveland Museum of Art, with a half-dozen Vatican loans. Displayed are marble sarcophagi and tomb fragments from the fourth century, a boxed collection of Holy Land souvenir rocks assembled around 500, and a ninth-century lidded silver vessel made to hold St. Sebastian's skull."

The exhibition, on view in the Kelvin and Eleanor Smith Foundation Exhibition Hall until January 17, 2011, will provide American audiences with an unparalleled opportunity to see 135 extraordinary works of late antique, Byzantine, and Western medieval art, including precious metalwork objects, paintings, sculptures, and illuminated manuscripts, drawn from public and private collections as well as church treasuries across the United States and Europe. Several of these spectacular works have never been seen outside their home countries.

The Times quotes Holger A. Klein, a curator of the Cleveland show, as saying that the Vatican officials "were surprisingly open to the idea" of lending. "They are not sending the actual relics" of saints' bodies, he added. "They are not sending bones."

Unearth the whole story here.