Gothic Ivories Project | Openwork panels, 4 registers, 3 arches across (plaques ajourées; frise d'arcatures) (Front)

Register 1 (panels 1-2): Marriage-feast at Cana; hanging curtains; bread; wers. Christ before Pilate.
Register 2 (panel 3): Flagellation with onlookers. Carrying of the Cross with the Virgin helping Christ; one of the Holy Women; man holding a hammer; man holding nails.
Register 3 (panel 4): Noli me Tangere (Christ appearing to saint Mary Magdalene). Christ appearing to the Holy Women.
Register 4 (panel 5): Resurrection; Three Holy Women at the Tomb, with angel seated on the tomb and three soldiers asleep; ointment pot. Harrowing of Hell with Adam and Eve coming out of the mouth of Hell; saint John the Baptist stands beside Christ; souls thrown into the mouth of Hell by demons.
Pierced quatrefoils in the gables. Musician angels (string instrument; triangle; drums; harp; trumpet) and angels holding scrolls in the spandrels; columns; roped border; tracery; pendant bosses.

Koechlin 1924: France, beginning of the 15th century
Longhurst 1929: France, beginning of the 15th century
Leeuwenberg 1969: France (?), last quarter of the 18th century to 1st half of the 19th century.
Williamson and Davies 2014: Northern France or Northern Italy (Milan?), late 14th-early 15th century or early 19th century.
Related panel in a private collection in London radiocarbon dated (2011): 95.4% probability that the elephant died between 1263 and 1377.

Attribution
Master of the Agrafe Forgeries (Leeuwenberg 1969)

Reverse
Flat and smooth with traces of fabric.

Object Condition
This is an assemblage of 5 pieces of ivory: the first panel was either made of two pieces or sawn into two parts which are now glued together.
Missing: parts of the tracery in the upper border of the Harrowing of Hell scene.
The panel with the Flagellation has split and been repaired, as has that with the Harrowing of Hell.

Comments
These panels belong to the same ensemble as some openwork panels now at the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh, an openwork panel of the Nativity formerly in the Trivulzio collection in Milan (see Koechlin 1924), and an openwork panel in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (32.100.207). See related objects.

Provenance
Possibly part of Préaux sale, Paris, 10 January 1850, lot 151. Collection of Robert Goff, Esq., Eaton Square, London, by 1862; on loan to South Kensington Museum (later Victoria and Albert Museum); Goff sale, Christie, Manson & Woods, London, 7 June 1866, lot 9; bought by John Webb (b. 1799, d. 1880), London: on loan to museum from 1867; purchased from him by the Museum in 1871.

Bibliography
A-C. Robinson, Catalogue of the Loan Exhibition, South Kensington Museum, London, 1862, no. 198.
List of Objects in the Art Division, South Kensington, Acquired During the Year 1871, Arranged According to the Dates of Acquisition (London, 1871), p. 30.
W. Maskell, Ivories Ancient and Mediaeval in the South Kensington Museum (London, 1872), p. 128, with illustration.
Catalogue of Bronzes and Ivories, exhibition catalogue, London, Burlington Fine Arts Club, 1879, no. 84.
E. Molinier, Histoire générale des Arts appliqués à l'Industrie (Paris, 1896), I: Les Ivoires, p. 200.
A. Maskell, Ivories (Connoisseurs Library), (London, 1905), p. 152, pl. XXVII.
R. Koechlin, Histoire de l'art depuis les premiers temps chrétiens jusqu'à nos jours, ed. by A. Michel, II (Paris, 1906), vol. I, p. 487, 488.
R. Koechlin, 'Quelques ateliers d'ivoiriers français aux XIII et XIVe siècles. III. L'atelier des diptyques de la Passion', in Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 35 (1906), pp. 49-62 (p. 61).
O. M. Dalton, Catalogue of the Ivory Carvings of the Christian Era in the British Museum (London, 1909), no. 313.
O. M. Dalton, Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of London, XXVI (London, 1913-1914), p. 15.
O. Pelka, Elfenbein (Berlin, 1920), pp. 203, 206.
O. Pelka, Elfenbein, 2nd edition (Berlin, 1923), p. 206.
R. Koechlin, Les Ivoires gothiques français (Paris, 1924), I, pp. 321, 326, 338; II, no. 858; III, pl. CLIV.
M. Longhurst, Catalogue of Carvings in Ivory, Victoria and Albert Museum, 2 vols (London, 1927 and 1929), II (1929), p. 36, pl. XXXVI.
J. Beckwith, ‘A Rhenish ivory Noli Me Tangere’, Victoria and Albert Museum Bulletin, vol. 2, 1966, p. 114, fig. 4.
J. Leeuwenberg, 'Early Nineteenth-Century Gothic Ivories', in Aachener Kunstblätter, 39 (1969), pp. 111-148 (pp. 124-6, fig. 25).
C. T. Little , ‘The Art of Gothic Ivories: Studies at the Crossroads,’ in The Sculpture Journal 23.1 (2014), p. 23.
P. Williamson and G. Davies, Medieval Ivory Carvings 1200-1550 (London, 2014), no. 171.

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