Set of Three Panels from a Casket with Scenes from Courtly Romances (c. 1330–50): Art, History and Details

Set of Three Panels from a Casket with Scenes from Courtly Romances (c. 1330–50) 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 panels shown here come from such a casket. The largest panel (center) 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. The two side panels depict other scenes such as the fountain of youth, Sir Gawain and the Lion, and Lancelot crossing the sword bridge. 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: Set of Three Panels from a Casket with Scenes from Courtly Romances
• Date: c. 1330–50
• 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 detail from the museum

In the center panel 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

• Liverpool Museum (Liverpool, England), and Charles T. Gatty. Catalogue of Mediæval & Later Antiquities Contained in the Mayer Museum, Including the Mather Collection of Miniatures and Medals Relating to the Bonaparte Family. Liverpool: G.G. Walmsley, 1883.
• W. Hugelshofer, "Aus Einer Basler Privatsammlung," DU vol 12 (1951).
• Kleinbauer, Eugene, "Recent Major Acquisitions of Medieval Art by American Museums" Gesta 19/1 (1977).

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.