Casket with Scenes of Romances (Walters 71264)

The object called by the museum Casket with Scenes of Romances (catalogued as Walters 71264) is a French Gothic ivory casket made in Paris between 1330 and 1350, and now in the Walters 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).

The casket is one of the relatively few surviving Gothic 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 the British Museum with an almost identical set of scenes, and one in the Cluny Museum in Paris, which shares many scenes, but diverges in others.

By this period, Paris was the main European centre of ivory carving, producing large numbers of religious and secular objects, including small diptychs with religious scenes that used the same relief technique; these and smaller secular objects such as mirror-cases are more common than these caskets, or larger religious statues like the Virgin 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.

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".Susan L. Smith has proposed that composite caskets express the power of love. The Walters casket is first recorded in England in 1757, and was bought by Henry Walters in 1923. The iron mounts are modern, probably 19th century.

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