GOTHIC IVORY SCULPTURE CONTENT AND CONTEXT EDITED BY CATHERINE YVARD Gothic Ivory Sculpture: Content and Context Edited by Catherine Yvard With contributions by: Elisabeth Antoine-König Katherine Eve Baker Camille Broucke Jack Hartnell Franz Kirchweger Juliette Levy-Hinstin Christian Nikolaus Opitz Stephen Perkinson Naomi Speakman Michele Tomasi Catherine Yvard Series Editor: Alixe Bovey Managing Editor: Maria Mileeva Courtauld Books Online is published by the Research Forum of The Courtauld Institute of Art Somerset House, Strand, London WC2R 0RN © 2017, The Courtauld Institute of Art, London. ISBN: 978-1-907485-09-1. Courtauld Books Online is a series of scholarly books published by The Courtauld Institute of Art. The series includes research publications that emerge from Courtauld Research Forum events and Courtauld projects involving an array of outstanding scholars from art history and conservation across the world. It is an open-access series, freely available to readers to read online and to download without charge. The series has been developed in the context of research priorities of The Courtauld which emphasise the extension of knowledge in the fields of art history and conservation, and the development of new patterns of explanation. For more information contact [email protected] All chapters of this book are available for download at courtauld.ac.uk/research/courtauld-books-online. Every effort has been made to contact the copyright holders of images reproduced in this publication. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. All rights reserved. Designed by Matthew Cheale Cover Image: Detail of Fig. 10.1, London, The British Museum, Inv. 1888,1217.1. © Trustees of the British Museum. CONTENTS List of Illustrations 5 Notes on Contributors 8 Acknowledgements 10 Preface 11 CATHERINE YVARD I. Production and Uses: Thirteenth to Fourteenth Century 16 A Flagellation Scene Reunited: a Reassessment of Early 17 Fourteenth-Century Ivory Altarpieces and Tabernacula ELISABETH ANTOINE-KÖNIG, JULIETTE LEVY-HINSTIN Made in Cologne: New Perspectives on the Kremsmünster 30 Workshop MICHELE TOMASI Buying, Gifting, Storing: Ivory Virgins in Documentary Sources 46 from Late Medieval Central Europe CHRISTIAN NIKOLAUS OPITZ II. Ivory Carving in Transition: Late Fifteenth to Early 56 Sixteenth Century Translated Images: from Print to Ivory in the Late Fifteenth and 57 Early Sixteenth Century CATHERINE YVARD 'La Chambre aux dentz d'yvoire': an Introduction to the 68 Inventory of Chicart Bailly KATHERINE EVE BAKER Anatomical Impulses in Sixteenth-Century Memento Mori 76 Ivories STEPHEN PERKINSON III. Ivory and the Collector: Nineteenth to Twentieth 93 Century Gothic and Late Medieval Ivories from the Collection of Clemens 94 Wenceslaus Count of Renesse-Breidbach FRANZ KIRCHWEGER 'A Great Harvest': the Acquisition of William Maskell's Ivory 111 Collection by the British Museum NAOMI SPEAKMAN On Paul Thoby, the Musée Dobrée and Medieval Ivories 125 CAMILLE BROUCKE Epilogue: Touching Ivory Online 143 JACK HARTNELL Photograph Credits 159 PART THREE IVORY AND THE COLLECTOR: NINETEENTH TO TWENTIETH CENTURY CHAPTER 8 'A GREAT HARVEST': THE ACQUISITION OF WILLIAM MASKELL'S IVORY COLLECTION BY THE BRITISH MUSEUM NAOMI SPEAKMAN 8.1 William Maskell, from a portrait by Richmond in the possession of Alfred Maskell, from C. E. Byles, The Life and Letters of R. S. Hawker (London, New York: John Lane, 1905), p. 594. Since its acquisition in 1856 the collection of English clergyman and antiquarian Wil- liam Maskell (b. 1814, d. 1890; fig. 8.1) has formed the core of the British Museum’s hold- ings of Gothic ivory carvings. As this contribution has barely been studied,1 the pre- sent article presents recent research into Maskell and explores the provenance of his NAOMI SPEAKMAN | A GREAT HARVEST 112 collection of ivories, which was recognised in the 1850s as one of the largest and finest in the world.2 An influential supporter of the British Museum and the South Kensington Museum, he is one of the important mid-nineteenth-century benefactors who helped form large-scale public holdings of medieval antiquities in Britain. Having taken holy orders in 1839, William Maskell served as an Anglican priest in Devon and Dorset. It was not until after 1850, when he converted to Roman Catholicism and resigned from his post of vicar of Saint Mary’s Church, Torquay, that he emerged as a prolific collector of objects.3 Prior to 1850 Maskell was known for his extensive library and for his publications on ecclesiastical liturgy and history but this new collecting activ- ity fostered his growing expertise in medieval material culture.4 Despite his conversion, Maskell did not take holy orders in the Roman Catholic church and spent most of his subsequent life as a country gentleman in his house at Bude and later Penzance. Over the course of the 1850s and 1860s his knowledge developed rapidly and he was by the time of his death recognised as one of the leading scholars in the field, with The Tablet noting: In his late years he cultivated art, and was the author of, at all events, one work—that on Ivories … He was previously known as the author … of sev- eral controversial pamphlets and treatises on the Anglo-Roman controversy and the history of the Prayer Book and the English Reformation.5 One of Maskell’s most active collecting phases was between 1850 and 1856, and was followed by the sale of 170 ivory carvings to the British Museum on 23 June 1856, for £2,444.6 This was the culmination of a relationship which had prospered over a number of years between Maskell and the museum, which stemmed from his activity as a book collector. His route to antiquities was not unlike that of other English collectors of the early nineteenth century, such as Francis Douce who gathered one of the largest early holdings of ivory carvings in Britain and like Maskell bought a number of them from book dealers.7 Both collectors were initially interested in acquiring books and prints be- fore turning their attention to ivories. A notebook compiled by Maskell in 1844 lists about 375 liturgical volumes within his library,8 a portion of which was purchased by the Brit- ish Museum for £2,240 in 1847. Other acquisitions were made in 1852 and 1864.9 In a letter dated 12 March 1856, the collector invited Augustus Wollaston Franks, of the British Museum, to view ivories at his house in Bude and select objects for the mu- seum, specifying: ‘As before with the books:—I shall not send them to you: you must come and determine about them here’.10 In a letter, written to the museum trustees the previous month, he was more specific: ‘some years ago, the museum bought a collection of books which I had made: and I am glad to believe that Mr. Panizzi has never seen any reason to repent it’.11 By the mid 1850s Maskell had also started to sell, loan and donate objects to Marlborough House, the precursor to the South Kensington Museum: the earliest record of an object with this provenance is a pair of sixteenth-century brass snuffers, which he presented to the museum in April 1855.12 NAOMI SPEAKMAN | A GREAT HARVEST 113 In 1855 when Maskell joined the Society of Antiquaries, his signatories for election 8.2 William Maskell’s were drawn largely from the British Museum, and included Augustus Wollaston Franks, Certificate of Candidate Edward Hawkins (both members of the Department of Antiquities) and principal librar- for Election (3 May 1855). London, Society 13 ian Henry Ellis (fig. 8.2). The record of his election praised his publication record and of Antiquaries. noted that he was ‘well acquainted and much attached to the study of medieval antiqui- 8.3 ties’.14 His membership strengthened ties with authorities at the British Museum and Alexander Nesbitt’s Survey of Major Ivory Marlborough House. The first known record of Maskell’s association with Franks dates Collections (dated 3 April from 1 June 1855, when the former lent the latter a document to show the Antiquaries 1856). London, The at one of their meetings. Evidently aware of his shifting social position as a new Roman British Museum. Catholic, Maskell also wrote to the Society on 16 June 1855, to point out that he was no longer known as ‘Reverend’, as mistakenly stated in his election announcement.15 His in- volvement with the Society, as with the British Museum, lessened significantly from the end of 1856. There is little other reference to Maskell amongst the papers of the Society after this year, although he is mentioned as the owner of ‘a small little book of horae’ in 1861.16 His obituary by the Society in 1890 noted ‘[he] occasionally exhibited seals, pic- tures and other antiquities at our meetings’.17 The first of Maskell’s objects acquired by the British Museum Department of Antiq- uities were seven seal matrices and one seal impression in 1856.18 These items, in addition to two impressions presented two years previously to the Department of Manuscripts probably reflect Maskell’s early interest in book collecting, as they were intimately related to written documents, and may have been among the first antiquities he obtained.19 Six of the matrices came from ‘Gardner’s collection’,20 i.e. Thomas Gardner, a London-based printer who published a history of Dunwich in 1754.21 Between 1856 and 1890 the Brit- ish Museum acquired 198 objects from Maskell, mostly made of ivory or bone (170) and of these, ninety-two pieces date between c.1200 and 1530.22 These medieval ivories are NAOMI SPEAKMAN | A GREAT HARVEST 114 predominantly religious and only thirteen have secular iconography (eleven mirror cases, one casket and one writing tablet).