The Burlington magazine

by Unknown

VICTORIA AND ALBERT MUSEUM

A MEDIAEVAL SILVER CHALICE FROM ICELAND

THE national collection of silversmiths’ work at South Kensington has lately been enriched by the acquisition of a silver chalice of exceptional beauty and interest, which has reached this country, by way of Denmark, with the history of having belonged formerly to the church of Grundt, a village in the north of Iceland. ¶ As will be seen from the illustration, the chalice is of the early type in which the round contour prevails, in hemispherical bowl, bulb-shaped knop, and circular foot. The bowl is of fine workmanship, fashioned with the hammer with admirable uniformity, and finished with a high polish on the outside. Round its margin runs the leonine hexameter (with some allowances) + SVMMITVR HINC NVNDA DIVINI SANGVINIS VNDA (no doubt for ‘sumitur hinc munda divini sanguinis unda ’).[34] The lettering of the inscription, of which a rubbing is shown, is interesting, apart from the beauty and freedom of its forms, in helping to fix an approximate date for the object it adorns. ¶ The knop, separated from the bowl by a narrow indented necking with beaded edges, is cast hollow, pierced and chiselled with four compartments of foliage. The leafage in each compartment is of a different design, and in each springs from the turned-up ends of a circumscribing band stamped with a row of annulets (see [illustration]). The upper spandrels so formed are filled each with a small leaf; the lower are blank. ¶ The trumpet-shaped foot is finished round the margin with a bevel, engraved with a rudimentary fret and turned out at the edge in a narrow rim. At its junction with the knop it is enriched with a border of vertical leaves rising from a kind of nebuly band. The workmanship of the foot is notably inferior to that of the bowl; the hammermarks are plainly visible inside, and outside no careful polishing has smoothed away the concentric markings of the turning tool which was used, after the hammer, on both bowl and foot. It may perhaps be suggested that the inferior finish of the foot is evidence of its not having originally belonged to the bowl; but the suggestion is discredited by the excellent proportion existing between the two, and by the similarity of both to the corresponding parts of other examples about to be noticed. It is more probable that a higher finish was imparted to the bowl in deference to its function as the receptacle of the consecrated wine. ¶ To conclude the description, the enriched portions, that is to say, the band of inscription round the bowl, the knop with the parts adjacent, and the bevel of the foot, and these only, are gilt, by the old mercury process, with a pale gold. The measurements are: height 413⁄16 in. (12˙2 cm.), diameter of bowl 3¾ in. (9˙5 cm.), diameter of foot 39⁄16 in. (9 cm.). With the chalice is a paten of plain silver, a slightly concave disc 51⁄16 in. (12˙9 cm.) in diameter, with a roughly-formed circular depression. As this is of very rough make, and has no appearance of being that which originally accompanied the chalice, it need not be referred to further.

A SCANDINAVIAN CHALICE OF THE EARLY THIRTEENTH CENTURY, WITH DETAILS (ACTUAL SIZE) OF INSCRIPTION AND DECORATION; IN THE VICTORIA AND ALBERT MUSEUM, SOUTH KENSINGTON.

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LARGER IMAGE

The shape of the chalice is sufficient, by comparison with other examples, to determine its date approximately. It may be compared, in respect of its hemispherical bowl, its flattened globular knop, and its trumpet-shaped foot with bevelled margin, with a much larger and more ornate example in the church of the Holy Apostles at Cologne, shown by the character of its ornament to be of the early part of the thirteenth century.[35] While in the latter example, however, the bowl and knop are separated by a stem equal in length to at least half of the height of the knop, in our chalice they are separated only by the narrow indented band with beaded edges already noticed.[36] ¶ A closer parallel, though again on a larger scale, is furnished by an example dated 1222, formerly in the Heckscher collection, and now in the possession of Sir Samuel Montagu, where all the main features referred to are reproduced, and a much closer similarity in the spacing of bowl and knop is observable.[37] ¶ Still more to the point, however, is a silver chalice found at Sorö, in Denmark, in the year 1827, with an episcopal ring, in the grave of Absalon, bishop of Lund (died 1201).[38] We have here an example from the latter part of the twelfth or the first year of the thirteenth century, reproducing almost exactly the outlines of our chalice already described, and in almost the same dimensions. In the bishop’s chalice the knop is plain, and set off by a band of shallow fluting above and below; but these differences of detail, and even a somewhat wider separation of bowl and knop, cannot veil the striking resemblance of type between the two. ¶ The inscription with its combination of uncial and capital letters furnishes further evidence of date. In general style, as well as in its peculiarities of the use of both varieties of D, the freely curved G, and the A with bent cross-stroke, it shows considerable affinity to the inscription on the ivory cross of Gunhilda (died 1076), grand-niece of Canute, in the Copenhagen Museum.[39] The same peculiarities, as well as the V with a circle on its sinister stroke, are to be observed in the inscriptions on the altar frontal of Lisbjerg, in Denmark, assigned to the twelfth century. The tendency towards curved forms, however, shown in the rounding of the interior of the capital D’s and in the curving-in of the tails of these letters and of the R may be more closely matched, in default of a Scandinavian example, in the inscriptions on the bronze font at Hildesheim, assigned to the second quarter of the thirteenth century.[40] At this date, however, the fully-developed Lombardic character has so far prevailed over the roman capital that it is only by picking out letters here and there, existing as survivals among their curved supplanters, that such pure capital or transitional characters as form the staple of our inscription can be matched. ¶ The foliage on the knop is in two of the groups of that conventional type which, apparently in reality a debasement of the classical acanthus, is employed in the decoration of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries as the leafage of the symbolical vine; and the bud-shaped objects springing among the leaves in one compartment are clearly intended for such bunches of grapes as are similarly rendered in ironwork of the thirteenth century. Foliage of similar character, rising in the same way from the curved ends of the circumscribing band, may be observed on certain of the carved church doors of the twelfth century in Norway,[41] where such groups, employed in rows side by side, distinctly recall an enrichment of classical architecture. It is less easy to speak confidently of another of the bunches of leaves, which suggests the growth either of a trumpet-shaped lichen or possibly of an arum lily. The single flat leaf with curled edges seems clearly the leaf of a water-plant. Perhaps it is not too fanciful to see in this and the vine foliage already noticed a reference to the two constituents of the sacramental element. ¶ Turning to the question of nationality, it is to be remarked that the inscription and the lines enclosing it, one above and two below, are entirely engraved in that zigzag line, reminding one of the mark of an assayer’s tool, which is an almost constant characteristic, even till recent times, of Scandinavian silversmiths’ work; and the fret round the foot shows the same peculiarity. It has already been said that the chalice comes to us with a tale of a distant but active centre of Scandinavian art. If it be doubted whether such highly developed work could have been produced in Iceland at the date indicated it may be recalled that this remote island, whose inhabitants anticipated by five centuries the discovery of Columbus, was at this time the home of a culture such as could hardly be boasted by continental Scandinavia—a land, indeed, ‘where, long before the “literary eras” of England or Germany, a brilliant period of intellectual life produced and elaborated in its own distinct form of expression a literature superior to any north of the Alps.’[42] ¶ Gathering the conclusions to which all indications point, there seems every reason to regard this beautiful little chalice as an example of Scandinavian work, of a date not later than the early part of the thirteenth century, produced, it may well be, in that farthest outpost of European culture whence already in the dark ages a hand was stretched out from the old world to the new.

H. P. MITCHELL.