Other Uses
Ciboria, often much smaller, were sometimes also erected to cover particular objects, especially icons and reliquaries, and smaller ciboria that stood on, rather than over, the altar are also found. The word may also be used of some large sculptural structures that stand behind an altar, often offering no canopy or covering as such, for example at Siena Cathedral. These may be free-standing, or built against a wall, and usage here overlaps with the terms tabernacle and retable. The typical Gothic form of canopied niche to enclose a statue may be regarded as a "reduced form of ciborium".
A very famous ciborium that apparently did not stand over an altar was one that apparently functioned as a quasi-reliquary shrine or symbolic tomb for the missing remains of St Demetrius of Thessaloniki in Hagios Demetrios, the large and important church erected in Thessaloniki over the mass grave in which he was traditionally buried. This appears, from various accounts of miracles associated with it, and depictions in mosaic, to have been a free-standing roofed structure inside the church, at one side of the nave, with doors or walls in precious metal all around it. It was hexagonal and made of or covered with silver; inside there was a couch or bed. The roof had flat triangular panels rising shallowly to a central point. It was rebuilt at least once. A medium-sized 13th-century ciborium in a corner of San Marco, Venice, known as the capitello ("little chapel"), was used for the display of important icons and relics in the Middle Ages.
Read more about this topic: Ciborium (architecture)