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Articles

An Imperial Byzantine Casket and its Fate at a Humanist's Hands

Pages 77-87 | Published online: 14 Aug 2014
 

Abstract

The ivory casket in the Palazzo Venezia, Rome, depicting an emperor and empress blessed by Christ and a selection of scenes from the life of David, is one of the few surviving major works from the period immediately after a centuries-long hiatus in Constantinopolitan ivory-carving. It has been given a wide variety of dates and places of origin, but it is identified here as a work made for the emperor Leo VI and assigned to 898 or 900, a little more than a decade after the “scepter tip” in Berlin, also supposedly made for the emperor. The circumstances under which the casket's inscriptions and figures were partially recarved have contributed not a little to misunderstanding of the original state of the object. This reworking, it is suggested, was undertaken in Rome, in the circle of the Jesuit savant, Athanasius Kircher.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Anthony Cutler

Educated in Athens and Paris, Nicolas Oikonomides has taught Byzantine history at the University of Montreal since 1969 and has published more than a hundred books, articles, and reviews on a variety of Byzantine subjects. Currently he is preparing a catalogue of the Byzantine seals in the Harvard University Collections, in addition to studies of taxation and tax-exemption in the Middle Byzantine Empire, and Byzantine diplomatics (a handbook). [Département d'Histoire, Université de Montréal, C.P. 6128, Succursale A, Montréal, Canada H3C 3J7]

Nicolas Oikonomides

Educated in Athens and Paris, Nicolas Oikonomides has taught Byzantine history at the University of Montreal since 1969 and has published more than a hundred books, articles, and reviews on a variety of Byzantine subjects. Currently he is preparing a catalogue of the Byzantine seals in the Harvard University Collections, in addition to studies of taxation and tax-exemption in the Middle Byzantine Empire, and Byzantine diplomatics (a handbook). [Département d'Histoire, Université de Montréal, C.P. 6128, Succursale A, Montréal, Canada H3C 3J7]

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