Incense Burner and Stand for an Altar Cross (1150–75): Art, History and Details

Incense Burner and Stand for an Altar Cross (1150–75) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

Supported by dragon-shaped feet on its corners, this unusual object is fashioned like a small, centralized church with gabled roofs, a lantern crowned by a turret, and four semi-circular apses. Traces of soot on the interior walls of a nearly identical object in the Kunstgewerbemuseum in Berlin indicate that these objects once served as incense burners. The objects’ design with an open turret in the center of the roof further suggests that they may have doubled as stands for altar crosses. The fact that both objects formerly belonged to the Bouvier Collection in Amiens may be taken as an indication that they were made as a pair in the same 12th-century workshop.

Object facts

• Title: Incense Burner and Stand for an Altar Cross
• Date: 1150–75
• Culture: Germany, Lower Saxony, Hildesheim?, Romanesque period, 12th century
• Type: Metalwork
• Technique: bronze: cast, gilded, engraved, and chased
• Dimensions: Overall: 18.1 x 12.7 cm (7 1/8 x 5 in.)
• Collection: MED - Romanesque
• Department: Medieval Art
• Accession number: 1926.555

A detail from the museum

This object may been have created for a traveling court with its entourage to use for Catholic Mass, where incense could be used in an easily transportable vessel.

Collection credit

Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• W. M. M. “Two Medieval Objects from the Rhineland in the J. H. Wade Collection.” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 14, no. 4 (April 1927): 56–63.
• Winter, Patrick M. de. “The Sacral Treasure of the Guelphs.” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 72, no. 1 (March 1985): 2–160.
• Wilhelmy, Winfried, and Marcel Schawe. Meisterwerke des Bischöflichen Dom- und Diözesanmuseums Mainz. Regensburg : Schnell + Steiner, 2020.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.