The pax, meaning "peace," was a tablet that the priest and faithful kissed before taking Communion. This example depicts the Crucifixion with the Virgin, St. John, Longinus, and Stephaton. A sword, placed like a stream of blood flowing from Christ's wound, pierces Mary's breast. This iconographic motif developed out of meditations of Rhenish Dominican mystics on the sorrow of the Virgin at the death of her son. The copper-gilt frame was probably added in the late 15th century.
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Title:Pax with the Crucifixion
Date:ca. 1360–70 (ivory); 15th century (frame)
Culture:South German
Medium:Elephant ivory and copper gilt
Dimensions:Overall: 3 3/4 x 3 1/8 x 15/16 in. (9.5 x 7.9 x 2.4 cm)
Classification:Ivories-Elephant
Credit Line:The Cloisters Collection, 1970
Object Number:1970.324.9
This Pax is composed of an ivory panel encased in a frame made of gilt copper alloy. The rectangular ivory panel presents the Crucifixion beneath a canopy of three crocketed gothic arches. The carver has used gestures and symbols to call attention simultaneously to the transformative nature of the Crucifixion and the human suffering it entailed. On the lower left, the Roman soldier Longinus crouches on one knee, his left hand pointing to his eye. Medieval works such as the Golden Legend tell that the blood of Jesus got into Longinus’s eyes after he stabbed Jesus’s torso with his spear. A sword emerging from the side wound pierces Mary’s heart, calling attention to her grief and shared suffering during the Crucifixion. On the right, Saint John the Evangelist carries his book and places his head on his hand in a posture of grief as he turns away from the scene. Below him, Stephaton, another Roman soldier holds up a sponge soaked in vinegar on a stick for Jesus to drink, a moment in the Gospel narrative that medieval commentators interpreted as a final act of torture at the hands of his executioners.
The ivory is in excellent condition. The vertical grain of the ivory is visible in the smooth background of the carving, and it has suffered no cracking from dehydration. Extensive traces of gold leaf are visible in the recesses of the carving, especially on the loincloth of Jesus. The frame surrounds the edges and back of the panel. The back is smooth save for the beaded handle and preserves a pair of inventory stickers. The frame’s front takes the form of a miniature pair of buttresses flanked by a spiral band of gilt copper shaped into a leaf. The frame is bent in several places and has lost its left pinnacle and a significant percentage of its original gilding.
A pax is a liturgical tool that a celebrating priest and congregation kiss during the Mass, serving in place of the person-to-person Kiss of Peace that was more widespread in the early Middle Ages. Using the handle at the back, the holy-water clerk would kiss the face of the pax before eating the Eucharistic bread and then handed to a minister, who held it before each member of the congregation to kiss. Fourteenth-century ivory paxes are known and distinguishable from diptych fragments by means of a groove carved into the lower back, allowing the panel to be propped up on an altar as in a pair of examples now in London (The British Museum inv. no. 1856,0623.60; Victoria and Albert Museum inv. no. A.569-1910). The fourteenth-century ivory carving in this pax by contrast retains traces of a hinge and began life as the right side of a devotional diptych and was remounted for its current use in the fifteenth century.
Iconographic and compositional devices on this ivory strongly resemble examples made in the Rhineland of northeastern Germany. Especially close is a complete diptych attributed to the French-inspired ivory carving workshops of Cologne and now in the collection of the Met (acc. no. 17.190.287). The strong resemblance between the two, including the shared small scale, inclusion of Longinus on one knee, and representation of Stephaton with the sponge, suggests that they both derive from the same workshop model, and that the now-missing left panel of the current diptych fragment depicted the Adoration of the Magi. That said, ivory carvers paired other scenes with the Crucifixion on a regular basis, so that it is also possible that it may have depicted the Glorification of the Virgin or the Nativity of Jesus.
Ivory paxes survive in large numbers from fifteenth-century Netherlands and Germany, but works from this period show distinctive characteristics, such as the use of curved sections of ivory, the cutting of panels with arched tops, and the application of heavy crosshatching on the backgrounds of the carving (see for instance British Museum inv. no. 1878,1101.35; 1878,1101.34, Victoria & Albert Museum acc. no. 150-1879). The reuse of old devotional diptychs, such as we see here, was also a common practice, and numerous fragments of devotional diptychs survive as elements in paxes from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries (See for instance Bruges, Bruggemuseum-Gruuthuse inv. no. 0.5.VIII; Darmstadt, Hessisches Landesmuseum inv. no. Pl 36:95; Treasury of Saint-Nicolas Cathedral, Fribourg, inv. no. D 5). The custom of donating ivory diptychs to church treasuries likely spurred the practice of reuse, allowing this highly public element of church ceremony to memorialize members of the community and their munificence.
The public quality of the usage of the pax made it a source of conflict in late medieval parish communities, where the access to the Eucharist was heavily guarded and distributed on a hierarchical basis. To the chagrin of contemporary commentators like Christine de Pisan, elite parishioners of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries made a point of claiming the right to be the first to kiss the pax. Disagreements could become heated and occasionally lead to violence, with English court rolls documenting that offended parishioners occasionally destroyed paxes or used them as weapons to attack officiating clergymen if they felt slighted by being denied the honor of the first kiss.
Further Reading:
Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996): pp. 125-130.
Harvey Stahl, "Narrative Structure and Content in Some Gothic Ivories of the Life of Christ," in ed. Peter Barnet, Images in Ivory: Precious Objects of the Gothic Age (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997): pp. 95-114.
Sarah M. Guérin, "Meaningful Spectacles: Gothic Ivories Staging the Divine," The Art Bulletin 95, (March 2013): pp. 53-77.
Catalogue Entry by Scott Miller, Andrew W. Mellon Curatorial and Research Collections Specialist, Department of Medieval Art and The Cloisters, 2020–2022
Emile Baboin, Lyons ; Ernst and Marthe Kofler-Truniger, Lucerne (sold 1970)
Kunsthaus Zürich. "Sammlung E. und M. Kofler-Truniger, Luzern, Zürich," June 7–August 2, 1964.
Koechlin, Raymond. Ivoires Gothiques: Collection Émile Baboin. Lyons: A. Rey, 1912. no. 3, pp. 6–7, pl. III.
Koechlin, Raymond. Les Ivoires Gothiques Français: Volume I, Text. Paris: Editions Auguste Picard, 1924. no. 613, pp. 221 n. 1, 223 n. 9, 332.
Koechlin, Raymond. Les Ivoires Gothiques Français: Volume II, Catalogue. Paris: Editions Auguste Picard, 1924. no. 613, p. 230.
Koechlin, Raymond. Les Ivoires Gothiques Français: Volume III, Plates. Paris: Editions Auguste Picard, 1924. no. 613, pl. CII.
Morey, Charles Rufus. "A Group of Gothic Ivories in the Walters Art Gallery." The Art Bulletin 18, no. 2 (June 1936). p. 204, (on list as no. XXV).
Bloch, Peter. "Sammlung E. und M. Kofler-Truniger, Luzern: Ausstellung im Kunsthaus Zürich vom 7. Juni bis 1. September." Kunstchronik 17 (October 1964). p. 265.
Sammlung E. und M. Kofler-Truniger, Luzern: Ausstellung. Zurich: Kunsthaus Zürich, 1964. no. 747, pp. 81–82.
Lasko, Peter. "A Notable Private Collection." Apollo 79, no. 28 (June 1964). fig. 22, ill. p. 472.
Schnitzler, Hermann, Peter Bloch, and W. F. Volbach. Sammlung E. und M. Kofler-Truniger, Luzern: Skulpturen – Elfenbein, Perlmutter, Stein, Holz; europäisches Mittelalter. Vol. 1. Lucerne: Verlag Räber & Cie, 1964. no. 84, p. 27.
Bloch, Peter, Hermann Schnitzler, Charles Ratton, and W. F. Volbach. "Mittelalterliche Kunst der Sammlung Kofler-Truniger, Luzern." Aachener Kunstblätter 31 (1965). p. 26.
"Departmental Accessions
." Annual Report of the Trustees of the Metropolitan Museum of Art 101 (July 1, 1970–June 30, 1971). p. 21.
Raggio, Olga, ed. Patterns of Collecting: Selected Acquisitions, 1965-1975; Explanatory Texts. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1975. p. 17.
Frazer, Margaret English. "Medieval Church Treasuries." The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, n.s., 43, no. 3 (Winter 1985-1986). pp. 27–28, fig. 26.
McLachlan, Elizabeth Parker. "Liturgical Vessels and Implements." In The Liturgy of the Medieval Church, edited by Thomas J. Heffernan, and E. Ann Matter. Consortium for the Teaching of the Middle Ages. Kalamazoo, Michigan: Western Michigan University, 2005. pp. 420, 422, fig. 18.
Lowden, John. Medieval and Later Ivories in the Courtauld Gallery: Complete Catalogue. London: Courtauld Gallery, 2013. p. 64.
Couzin, Robert. Right and Left in Early Christian and Medieval Art. Boston: Brill, 2021. pp. 94–95, Fig. 30.
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