Romantic love is the principal subject of this casket. The front is bracketed by scenes of young men kneeling before their maidens, a classic image of courtship. Some are rewarded, and others rebuffed. On the far left, amorous advances are rewarded with a wreath. On the right, a young man kneels and extends a ring to his beloved. Personal items like jewelry would have been kept in these kinds containers.
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Artwork Details
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Title:Box with Courting Couples
Date:14th century
Culture:French
Medium:Elephant ivory with modern iron and cardboard mounts
Dimensions:Overall: 2 3/4 x 6 1/8 x 3 9/16 in. (7 x 15.6 x 9 cm) gr. thickness (of panels): 3/16 in. (0.6 cm)
Classification:Ivories-Elephant
Credit Line:Gift of J. Pierpont Morgan, 1917
Object Number:17.190.163
This luxurious ivory box is an outstanding example of approaches to art-making typical of French royal courts of the fourteenth century. Composed of six panels of ivory glued to cardboard, it is the type of precious and exclusive object that royals and high aristocrats desired, commissioned, and gifted during festive occasions like New Year’s Day. The cardboard interior is a modern addition, as are the lock, the handle, the hinges, and the iron bars that attach the top and sides. When originally made, the ivory elements of the sides and base fit together via rabbet joints. Round iron and ivory pinheads emerge from holes, forming lines across the exterior surface. These lines correspond to earlier bars of bronze or silver that ran along the exterior. This earlier construction method heightened the box’s luxurious aspect, provided the box with both a firm armature, and lent it a finished aspect similar to that currently seen on another example in The Met’s collection (acc. no. 17.190.180). Also missing is the original handle. Its attachment to the top panel is still visible as a pair of flat circles that interrupt the carved colonnade.
The carvings on the side also demonstrate fourteenth-century French mindsets about artmaking, especially its kinship to literary authorship. Fourteenth-century artists working for court audiences appear to have approached their craft as a type of visual storytelling. Whether they depicted many epics, romances, and tales from Greek antiquity in a series of vignettes (acc. no. 17.190.173a, b; 1988.16), or elaborated upon a single narrative across the whole surface of an object (acc. no. 17.190.180), the carvers who made Gothic boxes in the fourteenth century treated surfaces as vehicles for stories, eschewing or subordinating decorative motifs. On the current box, the only non-narrative motif is the arcade with crockets and gables on the lid. The artist has deployed this architectural imagery to organize the lid into a series of compartments in which courting couples exchange flowers, crowns, vows of fidelity, and hold hands. This amatory imagery continues onto the sides. On the front, a woman crowns a man who kneels in a gesture of subordination to her will, a couple embraces, and another couple overlooks a kneeling man who offers a woman a ring. On the short, left side of the box, a man with a hawk watches a man and a woman embrace in an outdoor setting. On the box’s opposite, right-hand side, a man picks flowers and hands them to a woman making a flower crown or chapelet. The back depicts a man offering a woman a flower, a couple riding with hawks and accompanied by a pair of foresters, and a man and a woman exchanging a crown. Unlike the other Gothic boxes in the collection, the current scenes do not appear to tell any story in particular. Instead, these characters belong to the dreamy, idyllic world in which aristocratic subjects engage in generalized scenes of lovemaking. Similar imagery is encountered in other art media associated with royal courts and castles, such as a tapestry in the collection (acc. no. 2011.93). These suggestive snippets demonstrate the intensity of the fourteenth-century French impulse to create narrative imagery. This drive to create narrative was powerful enough to produce figural imagery where there is no larger story arc and where artists working within other milieux would treat a blank surface as a space for decoration. As such it stands in contrast to ivory boxes from Sicily (acc. no. 17.190.241) or the Byzantine Empire (acc. no. 17.190.239), which deploy vegetation, motif, and human and animal figures with few suggestions of narrative action.
Further Reading:
Paul Williamson and Glyn Davies, Medieval Ivory Carvings, 1200-1550, Part II (London: V&A Publishing, 2014), pp. 653-706.
John Lowden, Medieval and Later Ivories in the Courtauld Gallery: Complete Catalogue (London: Courtauld Gallery, 2013), p. 94.
Paula Maie Carns, "Remembering 'Floire et Blancheflor': Gothic Secular Ivories and the Arts of Memory," Studies in Iconography 32 (2011), pp. 121-154.
Catalogue Entry by Scott Miller, Andrew W. Mellon Curatorial and Research Collections Specialist, Department of Medieval Art and The Cloisters, 2020–2022.
Charles Mannheim, Paris (by at least 1898); J. Pierpont Morgan (American), London and New York (until 1917)
New York. The Cloisters Museum & Gardens, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. "Treasures and Talismans: Rings from the Griffin Collection," May 1–October 18, 2015.
Reusens, Edmond Henri Joseph, ed. Exposition Rétrospective d'Art Industriel, Bruxelles 1888: Catalogue Officiel. Brussels: P. Weissenbruch, 1888. no. 1179, p. 222.
Darcel, Alfred, and Emile Molinier, ed. Exposition rétrospective de l'art française au Trocadéro. Exposition universelle de 1889. Lille: L. Danel, 1889. no. 126, p. 19.
Molinier, Emile. Collection Charles Mannheim: Objets d'Art. Paris: s.n., 1898. no. 16, p. 11, ill. unnumbered plate.
Migeon, Gaston. "Collection de M. Piet-Lataudrie." Les Arts 92 (August 1909). p. 7.
Loomis, Roger Sherman. "A Medieval Ivory Casket." Art in America 5, no. 1 (December 1916). p. 19.
Koechlin, Raymond. Les Ivoires Gothiques Français: Volume I, Text. Paris: Editions Auguste Picard, 1924. no. 1262, pp. 479, 481.
Koechlin, Raymond. Les Ivoires Gothiques Français: Volume II, Catalogue. Paris: Editions Auguste Picard, 1924. no. 1262, p. 441.
Breck, Joseph, and Meyric R. Rogers. The Pierpont Morgan Wing: A Handbook. 2nd ed. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1929. p. 110.
Forsyth, William H. "A French Mediaeval Writing Tablet." The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 33, no. 12 (December 1938). p. 260 n. 5.
Roy, Bruno. "Archéologie de l'Amour Coutois: Notes sur les Miroirs d'Ivoire." In Miroirs Et Jeux De Miroirs Dans La Litterature Medievale, edited by Fabienne Pomel. Interférences. Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2003. p. 240, fig. 16.
Carns, Paula Mae. "Cutting a Fine Figure: Costume on French Gothic Ivories." Medieval Clothing and Textiles 5 (2009). pp. 61 n. 16, 76 n. 67, 79 n. 81, 90.
Carns, Paula Mae. "Remembering 'Floire et Blancheflor': Gothic Secular Ivories and the Arts of Memory." Studies in Iconography 32 (2011). p. 149 n. 6.
Lowden, John. Medieval and Later Ivories in the Courtauld Gallery: Complete Catalogue. London: Courtauld Gallery, 2013. p. 94.
Tomasi, Michele. "La diffusion des ivoires gothiques profanes dans la première moitié du XIVe siècle Géographie, société, genre, entre œuvres et documents." In Gothic Ivories between Luxury and Crisis, edited by Manuela Studer-Karlen. Basel: Schwabe & Co., 2024. fig. 3.3 pp. 63, 64.
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