Talk:Chasse (casket)

A fact from Chasse (casket) appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know column on 14 July 2010 (check views). The text of the entry was as follows:

Did you know... that a chasse (pictured) is a medieval box shaped like a house or church, and usually a reliquary?

A record of the entry may be seen at Wikipedia:Recent additions/2010/July.

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copied from my talk. Johnbod (talk) 20:47, 7 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Well done on the new article - excellent stuff. I have a few observations and suggestions but no criticisms (apologies for the formatting of what follows - haven't really mastered the mark-up yet):

1) You mention hinged lids and bases but a higher proportion of Limoges chests have a hinged 'door' occupying one or other of the gabled end (it's always amused me that a number of these have an iconic standing figure of St Peter holding his keys and in several cases the keys are adjacent to the lock - a nice visual pun).

Done

2) Although you're right about the normal chests having plaques nailed to a wooden core, from the mid-13th Century some were also produced just using thick metal plates held together with mitres and pegs. I may be wrong but I think there is mention of the latter in; W. F. Stohlman, 'Quantity Production of Limoges Champlevé Enamels', in Art Bulletin, 17(3), 1935, pp. 390-94.

Indeed there is - added. Do you think the "St Exupere" one now illustrated might be one of these? Johnbod (talk) 22:12, 7 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]

3) I think perhaps you overplay the cheapness of Champleve enamelled chests - they would still have been luxury products beyond the reach of most. The massively greater survival of champleve enamels over cloisonne is mainly down to two factors - firstly champleve uses relatively thick rigid sheets of copper that are more resistant to the torsional stresses which cause enamel to flake off, secondly (more importantly) a high proportion of Cloisonne enamelled objects were subsequently melted down for their gold content - less of a problem with the copper/bronze plaques used for champleve. In terms of difficulty there isn't a great deal of difference between the two techniques.

Done - more or less.

4) The pitched-roof/gabled ended design has never been fully explained but my own view is that it relates to a tradition of tomb design dating back to those Etruscan sarcophagi that resembled simple houses. The earliest example I am aware of regarding the use of this shape for a reliquary chest is the Merovingian 'Châsse de Mumma' in St-Benoit-sur-Loire (7th century).

added

5) Regarding the extraordinary profusion of chasses featuring the Magi, I feel it is unlikely that Archbishop Rainald of Cologne would have started giving away core bodily relics of the Magi so soon. An alternative explanation put forward by Marie Madeleine Gauthier is that they were made to distribute fragments of the old shrine of the Magi from St Eustorgio in Milan, sanctified by long contact with the Magi (see M.-M. Gauthier and G. François, Émaux méridionaux: Catalogue international de l'oeuvre de Limoges - Tome I: Epoque romane, Paris 1987, p.101).

added, with the ref. Johnbod (talk) 22:12, 7 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]

6) Although enamel production in the Limousin was in decline by the end of the 13th century, what really killed off the industry there (and much else besides) was the sacking of Limoges by Edward the Black Prince in 1370.

added

7) As well as the book by Gauthier and François mentioned above (the first vol of what was to have been a comprehensive corpus of medieval enamels), some useful further references are Ernest Rupin‟s massive 1890 study l’Oeuvre de Limoges and, more practically, J. P. O'Neill and T. Egan, eds., Enamels of Limoges, 1100-1350 (Metropolitan Museum of Art), Yale 1996 (one of my top five most useful exhibition catalogues on any topic!)

Feel free to use any of that or ignore it as you wish. As luck would have it, I included a chapter on Limoges enamel reliquary chests in my PhD thesis and since my viva is this Friday, so I have the references close at hand!

Cheers, Stuart

StuartLondon (talk) 12:51, 7 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks very much; I'll copy this to the talk on the article if that's ok. I couldn't pin down to a really specific ref what seems to be the case, that in English the term is used based on shape, and partly size (small), and in French mainly on size (large) - does that seem right? Needless to say the OED was no use - see their "Cloisonné". I'll work these useful points in. I've been working through such enamel articles as we have, now collected in Category:Vitreous enamel & any help is most welcome. The NGA catalogue (online) has an alternative explanation on the popularity of the Magi, based on Plantaganet play-acting. Good luck with the viva! Johnbod (talk) 13:04, 7 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I'm afraid even specialist art-historical dictionaries and encyclopedias tend to be pretty useless for medieval art. For Chasse, Oxford Art Online (what used to be the Grove Encyclopedia of Art) simply gives "Term for a container used to hold the relics of a saint" while the Oxford Companion to Western Art just has "a box or casket, often with a gabled roof, usually containing relics of a saint or holy person. see reliquary." Often this kind of vagueness is because historians are picking up on equally vague usage of such words in medieval accounts or late-medieval inventories. In France I've occasionally seen the term used for ornamented secular boxes, probably because some pompous 19th century curator thought it sounded better than 'boite'. I think it makes better sense here to restrict its meaning to the reliquary context. StuartLondon (talk) 14:10, 7 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]

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