Panel from a Casket with Scenes from Courtly Romances (c. 1330–50 or later): Art, History and Details

Panel from a Casket with Scenes from Courtly Romances (c. 1330–50 or later) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

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

Among the most lavish and deluxe products of French ivory workshops of the 1300s were large caskets carved with elaborate scenes drawn from courtly romances. The panel shown here comes from such a casket. The largest panel (here) once formed the lid and depicts a tournament, the most splendid and romantic of knightly activities. Just to the right is a favorite allegory of chivalric love: knights assaulting the castle of love. These images suggesting chivalry, fertility, virginity, youth, and an idealized courtly love likely derive from manuscripts including the Roman de la Rose and the poems of Chrétien de Troyes. Such texts were often found within the libraries of the aristocracy, so the casket’s symbolic images would have been readily understood. Such caskets may have originally been gifts between a man and a woman. The expense of the material, ivory, suggests they were produced for an elite, aristocratic clientele.

Object facts

• Title: Panel from a Casket with Scenes from Courtly Romances
• Date: c. 1330–50 or later
• Culture: France, Lorraine?, Gothic period, 14th century
• Type: Ivory
• Technique: ivory
• Dimensions: Overall: 13 x 26.2 x 1 cm (5 1/8 x 10 5/16 x 3/8 in.)
• Collection: MED - Gothic
• Department: Medieval Art
• Accession number: 1978.39.a

A detail from the museum

Two knights in mail surcoats and helms joust here with blunted lances "for courtesy," a version of the joust known as the Joust of Peace.

Collection credit

John L. Severance Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Wixom, William D. "Eleven Additions to the Medieval Collection." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 66, no. 3 (1979).
• Cleveland Museum of Art, and Barbara A. Kathman. A Cleveland Bestiary. 1981.
• Martin Nagy, Rebecca. Textiles in Daily Life in the Middle Ages. Cleveland, Ohio: Cleveland Museum of Art in cooperation with Indiana University Press, 1985.

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.