Gawain on the perilous bed; bed on wheels; two lions; swords and spears falling from the sky; the three maidens at the Château Merveil; horse; trees.
Koechlin 1924: France, 1st half of the 14th century.
Metropolitan Museum's opinion 2012 (back panel): Paris, c. 1350.
Attribution
Unknown
Comments
The location of all panels from this dismantled casket is unknown, apart from the back panel which is now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (2003.131.2). This casket is known from an eighteenth- century engraving (see Lévesque de Ravalière).
Provenance
Collection of Charles Gros de Boze, Paris (the casket was already dismantled in 1745 but the panels were still together).
Bibliography
Lévesque de Ravalière, 'Explications de quelques bas-reliefs en ivoire', in Histoire de l'Académie royale des inscriptions et belles-lettres, ed. C. Gros de Boze, C. Le Beau, B.-J. Dacier (Paris, 1710-1843), vol. XVIII, (1753), pp. 322-323, 5 plates facing p. 322.
J. B. Passeri, Monumenta sacra eburnea, in F. Gori, Thesaurus Veterum Diptychorum Consularium et Ecclesiasticorum, 3 vols, (Florence, 1759), III, pl. XXII.
Seroux d'Agincourt, Histoire de l'Art par les Monuments (Paris, 1823), IV, pl. XXIX.
R. Koechlin, Les Ivoires gothiques français (Paris, 1924), I, p. 37, 507, II, no. 1290, III, Pl. CCXX (only the back panel of the casket).
P. M. Shoppe, Reading Romances. The Production and Reception of French Gothic Secular Ivory Caskets in the Context of Late Medieval Literary Practices (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Urbana-Champaign, Illinois, 2000), esp. pp. 47-74.
D. Gaborit-Chopin, Ivoires médiévaux, Ve-XVe siècle (Paris: Musée du Louvre, 2003), pp. 418-419 (esp. figs. 174a-c).
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