The St Andrews Sarcophagus is one of the most important pieces of Pictish sculpture in existence and the finest thing in the Cathedral Museum. Dating from the second half of the 8th century, it is a large carved shrine — not a sarcophagus in the standard sense, but a box-like structure that would have held the bones of a saint or king — decorated on all four sides with intricate relief carving.
The carving is extraordinary in its quality and its condition. The front panel shows a hunting scene that combines royal imagery (a man wrestling a lion, mounted hunters, a stag) with the vine scrolls of Insular Christian art — the fusion of Pictish and Mediterranean decorative traditions that characterises the best work of the period. The back panel and ends carry geometric interlace and animal ornament. The craftsmanship is comparable to the best Insular metalwork of the same period.
The museum holding the sarcophagus is inside the cathedral precinct, for which an admission fee is charged. The sarcophagus is worth the entrance fee by itself. A reconstruction model showing what the original coloured and gilded version would have looked like is displayed alongside it. Most visitors to the cathedral ruins walk past the museum entrance — worth going in.