V. The Talbot Casket and Related Late Medieval Leather Caskets

Late medieval wooden caskets decorated with leather have attracted much greater attention in Germany and Belgium than in England. The Spitzer collection is one of the first that included examples of them, and the first major survey that mentioned them was that of Dr. H. Kohlhausen in 1926. His discussion of Minnekästchen , the romantic name given in the nineteenth century to caskets with secular subjects, included both caskets of wood alone and wood covered with leather. He discussed leather caskets now in the Deutsches Ledermuseum at Offenbach and in the Cluny Museum, Paris but, since he was solely concerned with secular iconography, he did not discuss other leather caskets whose style and technique indicated that they had a related origin. The whole group of leather caskets, including the two already mentioned and also caskets at Lucca and in the collection of Mr. Robert Martin on loan to the Cloisters, New York, was first discussed as a whole by Dr. G. Gall in his magisterial survey of European leatherwork. He assigned the Offenbach and Cloisters caskets to northern France or Flanders in the second half of the fourteenth century and the Lucca casket to Northern France or Flanders around 1400. Earlier in 1952 Mme A. M. Marien Dugardin reviewed the evidence for a number of leather caskets mainly in Belgium museums but including the example in the Cluny Museum and concluded from their use of Flemish for the inscriptions around their lids that they were Flemish in origin. In 1975 Mr. H. Bober discussed the Martin casket on loan to the Cloisters and concluded that it was of Flemish origin and dated to about 1400 or slightly earlier. In contradiction to the previously expressed views R. Didier in 1978, in the catalogue of the exhibition Die Parler und der Schöne Stil, discussing the lid of a casket preserved at Nivelles rejected a Flemish origin for the group and suggested that the caskets found an origin in the French sphere of influence, probably in Paris. This article will see how far the casket recently acquired by the British Museum (pis. xxviii-xxxin a ) relates to these caskets and will review the evidence for its place of production

Ancient history · Archaeology · Art · Art history · Flemish · Iconography · Middle Ages · National museum · Historical and Archaeological Studies · History · Medieval European History and Architecture

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