The stag hunt, one of the principal secular themes of the Middle Ages, is here eloquently portrayed in ivory. The action begins at the left with hounds and hunters on horseback departing the castle. In a wooded setting women lure falcons, while the hunter has shot an arrow at the stag as hounds torment it; finally, as the stag seeks relief from the waters of a fountain, the hunter delivers the coup de grace with his sword. In medieval poetry such courtly themes were also regarded allegorically as the hunt for love.
The panel originally formed the back of an exceptionally large casket (now lost). The casket is known from an eighteenth- century engraving that shows the conclusion of the hunt, with the stag's head being presented to courtly figures. As key examples of secular ivory carving in Paris during the time of Charles V (1338-1380), the images are rendered with crisp, graphic carving that creates rich surface and spatial effects commensurate with the finest luxury works of the city.
Joining the celebrated secular ivories from the Morgan collection, this panel and three others illustrated here enable the Museum to offer an unparalled glimpse of the secular spirit of the high Middle Ages.
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Left to right: The hunters leave the castle; the hunters flush rabbits from holes, train falcons, and attack a deer; a man captures a stag
This artwork is meant to be viewed from right to left. Scroll left to view more.
Left to right: The hunters leave the castle; the hunters flush rabbits from holes, train falcons, and attack a deer; a man captures a stag
Later engraving, after the engraving of 1753
Artwork Details
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Title:Panel with Hunting Scenes
Date:ca. 1350
Geography:Made in Paris, France
Culture:French
Medium:Ivory
Dimensions:Overall: 4 5/16 x 12 1/8 x 3/16 in. (11 x 30.8 x 0.5 cm) W: 29.0-30.8 cm; Depth: .2-.5 cm
Classification:Ivories-Elephant
Credit Line:The Cloisters Collection, 2003
Accession Number:2003.131.2
The low relief carving on this ivory panel represents the progress of the hunt in three scenes. On the left, the chase begins as a hunter on a galloping horse blows his horn while his dog runs beside him and court ladies watch from the parapets of the castle. The middle scene takes place within a forested hunting park. Two mounted couples pursue different quarries simultaneously. They are aided by an unmounted forester, who coordinates with his fellows by blowing his horn. The women occupy themselves with falcons: the woman on the left feeds her bird from her hand and the one on the right swings a lure to encourage hers to dive. The man on the left draws his companion’s attention to a small mound covered in vegetation, where his dogs flush rabbits out of their holes. To the right, a man in a hood pursues the most prestigious form of hunting, the stag hunt with dogs (chasse par force de chiens). He stabs a stag, previously wounded by one of the arrows of a fellow hunter, while his dogs attack his flanks. In the final scene, a man, now unmounted, delivers the coup de grace to a stag, exhausted by the pursuit of the hounds, as he dips his head to drink at a fountain.
The top and side edges of the ivory panel are flat and slightly raised, and two further smooth bands of ivory separate the scenes. The small, circular holes drilled into these areas remain from previous hardware, as do three horizontal cavities in the upper band. The back of the panel retains a sticker from a previous owner. The beveled short edges are one half of a rabbet joint, which allowed it to snuggly fit two now-missing panels of ivory to form the sides of a box.
This panel is the sole surviving element of a large rectangular box known to art historians as The Academy Casket. It is so named after a 1753 article in L’histoire de L’academie Royale des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres in which it was described in detail and reproduced in engravings, making it an early object of antiquarian interest in medieval ivories and in medieval art more broadly. By 1753 the box had lost its bottom and metal armatures, and its then owner, Madame Boze, purchased them as five unattached panels. Before the box’s disassembly, the current panel served as the back, as evinced by the three holes on its top, the remains of hinges that secured the lid. In the original box, the narrative was completed on one of the sides, which represented three riders returning from the hunt and presenting a stag head as a trophy to ladies waiting in a castle.
Two other panels, the front and the second short side of the lost box, represented scenes from romance. The side depicted Gawain on the Perilous Bed from Chrétien de Troyes’ Perceval. (The author of the 1753 article, who argued at length that medieval literature was too boring to read in an attempt to identify the scene, incorrectly identified that panel as a dream sequence!) On the front, narratives representing a knight’s rescue of ladies from wild men and a lady’s imprisonment of her attackers in a castle flanked an empty central square for the box’s lock plate. The lid represented a joust in a composition broadly similar to an ivory box lid in the collection (acc. no. 17.190.256).
Our fragment from the Academy Casket, read in tandem with the now-missing elements, demonstrates that the narratives and characters on ivory boxes could reinforce paradigms of elite codes of conduct. The hunt and joust were two events in which medieval European elites enacted classed and gendered performances surrounding the courtly code of chivalry. For men especially, these events offered the opportunity to hone martial skill and achieve renown as bold, powerful warriors versed in both combat and courtly etiquette. As ritualized forms of violence steeped in complex codes of conduct, the jousting and hunting scenes in the Academy Casket served as real-world equivalents to the literary narratives in which legendary characters enact both sides of this chivalric code. On the other hand, the wild men attacking an unaccompanied lady, which once adorned the box’s front, formed a counter-type to Gawain, the skilled huntsman, and the chivalric code of honorable conduct. Indeed, the conquest of the uninhibited and uncivilized wild man demonstrated the comeuppance meted out to men who break the codes of chivalry. Like the battle between the knight and the wild man, the killing of the wild stag from The Met’s panel served as a metaphor for the human conquest of wild nature.
Further Reading:
Paul Williamson and Glyn Davies, Medieval Ivory Carvings, 1200-1550, Part II (London: V&A Publishing, 2014), pp. 653-706.
Paula Mae Carns, "Compilatio in Ivory: The Composite Casket in the Metropolitan Museum," Gesta 45, no. 2 (2005), pp. 69-88.
Helmut Nickel, "Hunting" in The Secular Spirit: Life and Art at the End of the Middle Ages (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art Press, 1975), p. 217.
John Cummings, The Hound and the Hawk: The Art of Medieval Hunting (New Haven: Phoenix Press, 2001).
Catalogue Entry by Scott Miller, Andrew W. Mellon Curatorial and Research Collections Specialist, Department of Medieval Art and The Cloisters, 2020–2022
Claude de Boze Collection (until 1753) ; Graf Franz Wilhelm von Oettingen-Balderen, Cologne (until 1798) ; Graf Ludwig zu Oettingen-Wallerstein (until 1870) ; Princes of Oettingen-Wallerstein (by descent, until 2003)
Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum. "Earth, Sea, and Sky: Nature in Western Art—Masterpieces from The Metropolitan Museum of Art," October 6, 2012–January 4, 2013.
Beijing. National Museum of China. "Earth, Sea, and Sky: Nature in Western Art—Masterpieces from The Metropolitan Museum of Art," February 8–May 9, 2013.
New York. The Cloisters Museum & Gardens, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. "Treasures and Talismans: Rings from the Griffin Collection," May 1–October 18, 2015.
La Ravalière, Pierre Alexandre Levesque de. "Explications de quelques bas reliefs en ivoire." Histoire de l'Académie royale des inscriptions et belles-lettres 18 (1753). pp. 322–29, ill.
Gori, Antonio Francesco. Thesaurus veterum diptychorum consularium et ecclesiasticorum 3 (1759). Monumenta sacra eburnea, pl. XXII.
"Noch einiges über die Sammlung altdeutscher Gemälde in dem fürstl. Oettingen-Wallersteinischen Schlosse Wallerstein und über die dortigen sonstigen Kunstschätze." Morgenblatt für gebildete Stände / Kunstblatt 5, no. 90 (November 8, 1824). p. 359.
Ferrario, Giulio. Storia ed analisi degli antichi romanzi di cavalleria e dei poemi romanzeschi d'Italia. Vol. 2. Milan: s.n., 1828. pp. 100–103, pl. 18–19.
Lenoir, Alexandre. Monumens des arts libéraux, mécaniques et industriels de la France. Paris: J. Techener, 1840. p. 30, pl. XXIII.
Hagen, Frederik. "Bilder aus dem Ritterleben und aus der Ritterdichtung: nach Elfenbeingebilden und Gedichten des Mittelalters." Abhandlungen der Königlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin Jahre 1855 (1856). pp. 492–93, pl. IV.V.
Hagen, Frederik. Bildersaal altdeutscher Dichter: Bildnisse, Wappen u. Darstellungen aus dem Leben u. den Liedern der deutschen Dichter des 12. bis 14. Jahrhunderts: Text. Minnesinger: deutsche Liederdichter, Vol. 5. Berlin: J. A. Stargardt, Berlin, 1856. p. 46 n. 2.
Löffelholz, Wilhelm von. "Ein Elfenbeinschnitzwerk in den fürstl. Oettingen-Wallersteinischen Kunst-Sammlungen." Anzeiger für Kunde der deutschen Vorzeit: Organ des Germanischen Museums, n.s., 3, no. 9 (September 1856). cols. 274–76.
Eye, August von, and Jacob Falke. Kunst und Leben der Vorzeit von Beginn des Mittelalters bis zu Anfang des 19. Jahrhunderts in Skizzen nach Original-Denkmälern. Vol. 1. Nuremberg: Verlag von Bauer & Raspe, 1858. pl. XLVIII.
Kuhn, Joseph Alois. Katalog der Kunst- und Kunstindustrie-Ausstellung alter und neuer deutscher Meister sowie der deutschen Kunstschulen im Glaspalaste zu München 1876: Volume 2, Katalog für die Ausstellung der Werke älterer Meister. Munich: C. Wolf & Sohn, 1876. no. 1111, p. 161.
Grupp, Georg. Kulturgeschichte des Mittelalters. Vol. 2. Stuttgart: Jos. Roth'sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1895. pp. 92–93, fig. 11.
Koechlin, Raymond. "Quelques ivoires gothiques français connus antérieurement au XIXe siècle (deuxième article)." Revue de l'Art Chrétien 61, no. 5 (September-October 1911). p. 397, fig. 21.
Koechlin, Raymond. Les Ivoires Gothiques Français: Volume I, Text. Paris: Editions Auguste Picard, 1924. no. 1290, pp. 37, 507.
Koechlin, Raymond. Les Ivoires Gothiques Français: Volume II, Catalogue. Paris: Editions Auguste Picard, 1924. no. 1290, pp. 456–57.
Koechlin, Raymond. Les Ivoires Gothiques Français: Volume III, Plates. Paris: Editions Auguste Picard, 1924. no. 1290, pl. CCXX.
Marle, Raimond van. Iconographie de l'art profane au Moyen-Age et à la Renaissance, et la décoration des demeures: Volume 1, La vie quotidienne. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1931. pp. 243, 245, fig. 237.
Falke, Otto von, and Erich Meyer. Romanische Leuchter und Gefässe, Giessgefässe der Gotik. Denkmäler deutscher Kunst. Berlin: Deutscher Verlag für Kunstwissenschaft, 1935. p. 45.
Grodecki, Louis. Ivoires français. Arts, styles et techniques. Paris: Librairie Larousse, 1947. pp. 118–19, pl. XLII.
Ross, David J. A. "Allegory and Romance on a Mediaeval French Marriage Casket." Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 11 (1948). pp. 131, 137, 138, (as K. 1290).
Peters, Heinz. "Falke, Falkenjagd, Falkner und Falkenbuch." Reallexikon zur Deutschen Kunstgeschichte 6 (1973). col. 1282, fig. 22.
Musée du Louvre: Nouvelles acquisitions du département des objets d'art, 1980–1984 (1985). pp. 32–35, fig. 6b, 6d.
Gaborit-Chopin, Danielle. Ivoires Médiévaux, Ve-XVe siècle. Paris: Musée du Louvre, 2003. p. 418.
Metropolitan Museum of Art. "Recent Acquisitions: A Selection, 2002-2003." The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, n.s., 61, no. 2 (Fall 2003). pp. 12–13.
Vogel, Carol. "Inside Art: Cloisters to Get Medieval Ivories." The New York Times (April 18, 2003). p. E30.
Barnet, Peter, and Nancy Y. Wu. The Cloisters: Medieval Art and Architecture. New York and New Haven: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2005. no. 60, pp. 97, 196.
Barnet, Peter. "Recent Acquisitions (1999-2008) of Medieval Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Cloisters, New York: Supplement." The Burlington Magazine 150, no. 1268 (November 2008). p. 797, fig. XIV.
Barnet, Peter, and Atsuyuki Nakahara, ed. Earth, Sea, Sky: Nature in Western Art – Masterpieces from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Tokyo: Yomiuri Shimbun, 2012. no. 28, pp. 79, 218.
Barnet, Peter, and Nancy Y. Wu. The Cloisters: Medieval Art and Architecture. 75th Anniversary ed. New York and New Haven: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2012. p. 97.
Williamson, Paul, and Glyn Davies. Medieval Ivory Carvings, 1200–1550. Vol. 2. London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 2014. p. 655, fig. 2.
Manuwald, Henrike. "Carving the Folie Tristan: Ivory Caskets as Material Evidence of Textual History." In Medieval Romance and Material Culture, edited by Nicholas Perkins. Studies in Medieval Romance. Rochester, N.Y.: D. S. Brewer, 2015. p. 228.
Descheemaeker Bernard. Artes Minores. Miniature Masterpieces in Ivory, Enamel and Wood (1200-1700). Catalogue, Vol. 18. Antwerp: Bernard Descheemaeker Works of Art, 2018. p. 18 n. 14, fig. 3e.
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