Gothic Ivories Project | Set of writing tablets, 4 inner writing tablets and 2 outer covers, 2 registers, 3 arches across (tablettes à écrire; frise d'arcatures; plaquettes) (Front cover)

Tablet 1
Register 1: Crucifixion; swooning Virgin supported by Holy Women; saint John the Evangelist and onlookers holding scrolls.
Register 2: Entombment (Anointing of Christ's body), with Holy Women.
Tablet 2
Register 1: Adoration of the Magi.
Register 2: Nativity and Annunciation to the Shepherds; musician shepherd; swaddled Christ.
Pointed trefoils in the spandrels.

Koechlin 1924: France, 2nd half of the 14th century.
Longhurst 1929: France, 2nd half of the 14th century.
Williamson and Davies 2014: probably Mosan, c. 1380-1400.

Attribution
Unknown

Reverse
The four inner tablets are recessed front and back. The two outer tablets have a recessed back to receive the wax, with a raised border.

Comments
Only the two outer tablets, forming the 'binding' of the ensemble are sculpted on their external side. The other four tablets had one side covered with a thin layer of wax. These tablets were probably originally bound together in book-form with a hinge of leather or vellum (see the Namur set for comparison).
The booklet is currently held together by paper hinges glued in groups of three to the inner edges of the leaves (not original).
Several leaves retain substantial traces of a green wax (probably 19th century). The wax of the first two leaves has the following inscription under the heading 'Waxen tablets of the 14th Century': 'the Duke of Northumberland has at Alnwick an almost perfect set of tablets, which were found in a tomb in Egypt, and which are of the date of 300 years before Christ. Mr Curzon has one leaf of a set of tablets of the same kind. Besides these, and the present one, one speciment only is known; it belonged to Philippe le Bel, king of France; some of its leaves are in the Royal Library at Paris...3 are at Basle, and others at [...]'.

Provenance
In the collection of the Hon. Robert Curzon, Jr. (b. 1810, d. 1873), latterly Lord Zouche, by 1862: purchased by the Museum from the Zouche Collection in 1891.

Bibliography
Catalogue of the Special Exhibition of Works of Art of the Mediaeval, Renaissance, and more recent periods on loan at the South Kensington Museum, June 1862..., revised edition, exhibition catalogue (London, 1863), no. 241.
R. Koechlin, Les Ivoires gothiques français (Paris, 1924), I, p. 177; II, no. 339.
M. Longhurst, Catalogue of Carvings in Ivory, Victoria and Albert Museum, 2 vols (London, 1927 and 1929), II (1929), pp. 19-20, pl. XIX.
The Decorated page: eight hundred years of illuminated manuscripts and books, exhibition catalogue, London, Victoria and Albert Museum, May-October 1971, no. 254.
J. Lowden, Medieval and Later Ivories in the Courtauld Gallery (London, 2013), p. 84, in relation to no. 12.
P. Williamson and G. Davies, Medieval Ivory Carvings 1200-1550 (London, 2014), no. 134, see also no. 130.

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