The object called by the museumCasket with Scenes of Romances (catalogued as Walters 71264) is a French Gothicivory casket made inParis between 1330 and 1350, and now in theWalters Art Museum,Baltimore,Maryland. The casket is 4 5/8 inches high, 9 15/16 inches wide and 5 1/16 inches deep (11.8 × 25.2 × 12.9 cm).[1]
The casket is one of the relatively few survivingGothic ivory caskets decorated with a variety of themes from courtly literature, called composite caskets for that reason. There are at least eight known surviving examples (and numerous fragments), of which two more are also discussed in this article: firstly a casket in theBritish Museum with an almost identical set of scenes,[2] and one in theCluny Museum in Paris, which shares many scenes, but diverges in others.[3]
By this period, Paris was the main European centre of ivory carving, producing large numbers of religious and secular objects, including smalldiptychs with religious scenes that used the samerelief technique; these and smaller secular objects such as mirror-cases are more common than these caskets,[4] or larger religious statues like theVirgin and Child from the Sainte-Chapelle of the 1260s. The composite caskets differ slightly from each other, but are sufficiently similar to suggest they all originated from one Paris workshop, or group of workshops, around 1330 to 1350.[3]
This casket may well have been a gift of courtship or upon marriage, and was probably intended for an aristocratic female owner, to keep her jewels and other valuables in. The carved scenes were possibly originally painted; as the paint on Gothic ivories tended to peel in places, it was very often removed by later dealers and collectors. The unusually large size of the piece allows a wide range of the repertoire of popular scenes from different literary sources in French Gothic art to be shown, which display a variety of medieval attitudes to love and the role of women: "Themes such as lust and chastity, folly and wisdom are juxtaposed in a series of non-connected scenes".[5]Susan L. Smith has proposed that composite caskets express the power of love.[3][6] The Walters casket is first recorded in England in 1757, and was bought byHenry Walters in 1923. The iron mounts are modern, probably 19th century.[1]
The lid shows scenes of theCastle of love and knights jousting and the sides show other scenes fromFrench medieval romances. The themes of the lid are related to the 13th-centuryRomance of the Rose byGuillaume de Lorris andJean de Meung. TheSiege of the Castle of Love (or "Assault on" etc.), at the left on the lid, is a fanciful scene of courtly romance, where knights attack a castle defended by ladies and a cupid, with both sides throwing roses as missiles. This subject does not, as is sometimes claimed, appear in theRoman de la Rose,[7] and first appears in art not long before the date of the casket, as one of few secular scenes in theilluminated manuscript known as thePeterborough Psalter of 1299–1328.[8] But such a scene was staged and acted out by "many gentlemen and twelve of the fairest and gayest ladies ofPadua" as part ofa festival at Treviso in 1214, a century earlier.[9] In the center knights joust in front of ladies.
The scene at right has differing interpretations: either the victor, whose shield carried three roses, receives a bouquet of roses from a lady as prize,[10] or, more likely, the tournament continues, now between the ladies, fighting with flowers, and the knights using "oak branches".[11] This is the only scene on the lid that differs in the British Museum and Paris caskets, where the siege of the castle continues in the section at furthest right. A variation of this set of scenes has examples in theCleveland Museum of Art,Detroit Institute of Arts,Château de Boulogne-sur-Mer,Walker Art Gallery and theMetropolitan Museum of Art: in the latter (17.190.173) there is an elopement scene at left, then the two central sections are the tournament, with the attack on the Castle of Love behind the elopement at left, and in the last section on the right.[12]
The front of the casket has, from the left:Aristotle teachingAlexander the Great,Phyllis riding Aristotle, watched by Alexander from a window, and at the right, old people arriving at theFountain of Youth, and young naked people in it.[13]Phyllis riding Aristotle is the "quintessential image from thePower of Women topos", which was beginning its long career in art at this time.[14] The Fountain of Youth is a regularly occurring scene, of Eastern origin, that shows old people being carried to a miraculous spring which immediately turns them into beautiful young people,[5] one of the relatively few scenes in medieval art where figures are not just "naked" but "nude".[15] All three scenes are the same in the British Museum casket, and the Walters also has a side from a French casket of similar date but less high-quality carving, showing the first two of these scenes, but changing the last (Walters 71196, shown below). The Walters also has mirror-cases with other examples of theSiege of the Castle of Love and theFountain of Youth.
The rear side of the casket contains scenes fromArthurian romance described in theCourtauld Institute database of Gothic ivories as: "Gawain in armour fighting the lion;Lancelot crossing the sword bridge, with spears falling from the sky;Gawain on the perilous bed; bed on wheels and with bells; lion; shield with a lion's paw; spears falling from the sky; the three maidens at the Château Merveil".[16] The sword bridge features inLancelot, the Knight of the Cart byChrétien de Troyes, and the perilous bed in hisPerceval, the Story of the Grail. Both the Walters and British Museum caskets have the same scenes and compositions here, which both depart from the literary sources by having the rain of swords falling not only on Gawain on the bed, but also on Lancelot on the bridge, suggesting that the ivory-carver's or designer's contact with the literature was indirect.[5]
The two ends show other Arthurian scenes: the adulterous loversTristan and Iseult are spied upon by Iseult's husband KingMark of Cornwall, hiding in a tree; his face can be seen reflected in the pool below, which they see, enabling them to switch to innocent conversation. This end also has a scene with a woundedunicorn, a maiden and a man with holding a spear which has been run through the unicorn, in a version of the subject ofThe Hunt of the Unicorn where the maiden has been used to lure the unicorn to his death.[5] The other end has a scene withGalahad.
![Walters, end, Galahad receiving the keys to the Castle of the Maidens[17]](/mt/?noimg=&dark=on&url=https%3a%2f%2fen.wikipedia.org%2fwiki%2fFile%3aFrench_-_Casket_with_Scenes_of_Romances_-_Walters_71264_-_Right.jpg)
![Paris: the same two Aristotle scenes (left), and two different ones to right.[18]](/mt/?noimg=&dark=on&url=https%3a%2f%2fen.wikipedia.org%2fwiki%2fFile%3aMnma%2c_casket_with_assoulkt_to_the_castle_of_Love_and_other_romance_scenes%2c_paris_1300-1310%2c_ivory_03.JPG)
TheCourtauld Institute maintains a database of over 5,000 Gothic ivories.[19] The database catalogues the surviving composite caskets and the known fragments as follows:
In addition there are fragments from a dismantled casket, known from an 18th-century engraving, whose locations are unknown, save the back panel which is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (2003.131.2):
