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

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.

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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]