Knight in armour and wild man fighting over a maiden; wild man brandishing a club; wild men seizing a lady on the castle battlements. Knight in armour fighting a wild man; sword; knight and lady on horseback; knight striking the wild man with his sword; ladies with hands joined in prayer, knight and wild man fighting on the castle battlements. Ladies leading chained wild men into prison; ladies and youths watching from the castle battlements. Lady and knight standing at the prison door; lady holding the key; couple watching from the castle battlements; queen and youth with a hawk on his wrist.
Koechlin 1924: France, 1st half of the 14th century.
Metropolitan Museum's opinion 2012 (back panel): Paris, c. 1350.
Attribution
Unknown
Comments
The location of all panels from this dismantled casket is unknown, apart from the back panel which is now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (2003.131.2). This casket is known from an eighteenth- century engraving (see Lévesque de Ravalière).
Provenance
Collection of Charles Gros de Boze, Paris (the casket was already dismantled in 1745 but the panels were still together).
Bibliography
Lévesque de Ravalière, 'Explications de quelques bas-reliefs en ivoire', in Histoire de l'Académie royale des inscriptions et belles-lettres, ed. C. Gros de Boze, C. Le Beau, B.-J. Dacier (Paris, 1710-1843), vol. XVIII, (1753), pp. 322-323, 5 plates facing p. 322.
J. B. Passeri, Monumenta sacra eburnea, in F. Gori, Thesaurus Veterum Diptychorum Consularium et Ecclesiasticorum, 3 vols, (Florence, 1759), III, pl. XXII.
Seroux d'Agincourt, Histoire de l'Art par les Monuments (Paris, 1823), IV, pl. XXIX.
R. Koechlin, Les Ivoires gothiques français (Paris, 1924), I, p. 37, 507, II, no. 1290, III, Pl. CCXX.
P. M. Shoppe, Reading Romances. The Production and Reception of French Gothic Secular Ivory Caskets in the Context of Late Medieval Literary Practices (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Urbana-Champaign, Illinois, 2000), esp. pp. 47-74.
D. Gaborit-Chopin, Ivoires médiévaux, Ve-XVe siècle (Paris: Musée du Louvre, 2003), pp. 418-419 (esp. figs. 174a-c).
All images on this website are made available exclusively for scholarly and educational purposes and may not be used commercially.
