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Art: Enduring to Dazzle

3 minute read
TIME

The artist who 600 years ago made the altarpiece shown on the opposite page used durable materials, gilded silver, and enamel, as though he hoped that it would last to bedazzle thousands in, perhaps, the 20th century. It did; at its new permanent home in The Cloisters, the branch of Manhattan’s Metropolitan Museum of Art that houses medieval treasures, it conveys a sense of perfect and untarnished work from a hand long since turned to dust. But it came through only by luck: a large proportion of contemporaneous objects of art made of precious metal was later melted down to provide some prince or tyrant with funds for a now-forgotten war.

The Queen’s Fingers. Queen Elizabeth of Hungary, who probably owned the altarpiece, headed a gay and lively court in Visegrad. When, one day in 1329, a berserk courtier tried to assassinate her husband and children, the Queen helped fight off the assassin. In the defense she lost four fingers of her right hand—”that hand,” as a monk-chronicler put it, “which she extended so many times to the poor and miserable.” Beautiful, bountiful and (thanks largely to gold mines that she owned) enormously rich, the Queen became more devout than she had ever been before.

She founded in what is now Budapest the first Hungarian convent of the Poor Clares of the Order of St. Francis, and for the rest of her life, she showered it with gifts. Among these was a “small altarpiece for domestic use of silver gilt.” Was this the same work now at The Cloisters? Hungarian scholars have always thought so. Cloisters Curator Margaret Freeman, who presumably knows (but will not tell) where the museum got it, feels ready to agree.

The altarpiece, she says in an article in the Metropolitan’s Bulletin, was most likely made in Paris, where 273 goldsmiths are known, by name, to have lived at the time. If the 36 tablets look like illustrations from an illuminated manuscript, it is because the goldsmiths tended to emulate the art of Jean Pucelle, the greatest of Paris’ painters of miniatures. The enamel work, as Cellini described it a century later, was a painstaking process. First, he said, “you can grave on your plate anything that your heart delights in.” The colored glass that is to form the enamel must be “well ground in a little round mortar with very clean water.” The powdered glass is applied “as if you were painting in miniature.” It should then be fused to the metal by firing it until the glass “begins to move” but not to “run.” Other coats are applied and fired in the same way.

Homage to the Virgin. It was typical of the century that all this love and skill should be lavished on a tiny private altar devoted to the Virgin Mary, for she was revered throughout the Middle Ages as both “the Queen of Heaven and the Mother of All.” The act of suckling her infant had symbolic importance, for she could plead with the son she had suckled as no one else on behalf of sinners she thought worthy of heaven.

In The Cloisters’ little altarpiece, the Virgin is about to offer her breast—one of the tenderest of human acts transformed into a theme of eternal forgiveness. She seems to be saying the words that are inscribed on a nearby painting of the same scene at The Cloisters: “Dearest Son, because of the milk I gave you, have mercy on them.”

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