Gothic Ivory

The object​ at the centre of Medieval Multiplied: A Gothic Ivory and Its Reproductions, at the Courtauld Gallery until 16 February, is a 14th-century ivory mirror case, carved in relief, showing knights laying siege to a castle defended by maidens. On the left of the scene, a knight in chainmail climbs a rope ladder fastened to a battlement. He has lost his helmet but is on the cusp of breaching the castle. A wimpled maiden reaches down to stroke his chin. Next to him, another knight has half removed his own helmet and holds his sword upright by its point – a symbol of ineptitude, perhaps. On the right, a knight is boosted over the wall by a confederate. Caparisoned horses crowd the foreground. At the top of the scene, above a parapet embellished with trefoils, a demented seraph – the God of Love – gleefully stabs two members of his retinue with arrows. The margins are patrolled by lions who guard the threshold between our world and that of the siege.

Ivory mirror case carved with the Assault on the Castle of Love (c.1325-50).

This medieval allegory is known to modern scholars by many names, including the Siege of the Castle of Love, the Storming of the Castle of Love and, as in the Courtauld display, the Assault on the Castle of Love. The curators might easily have dedicated an entire show to the motif, which was rendered on scores of mirror cases and composite caskets (boxes decorated with narrative scenes) as well as in well-known manuscripts such as the Peterborough Psalter and the Luttrell Psalter, but their focus is not on the trope itself but on a single object and its reproductions. The mirror case appears about ten times: in its original form and as replicated in a variety of media. The earliest reproduction on display, a copperplate engraving from 1812, shows minute details – creases of fabric, the musculature of the crouching lions – but gives no sense of the materiality of the original. A photo-chromolithograph from 1857 better approximates the physical presence of the mirror case but gives it a sandstone colour and – in an audacious alteration of its prototype – replaces the lion missing from the upper left corner. A recent reproduction, made for the exhibition using a 3D printer, captures the ivory hue of the original but degrades its compositional elements to such an extent that they meld together like molten wax.

The point of the show isn’t to prove that reproductions fail to do justice to the original. The curators, Tom Nickson and Alexandra Gerstein, argue instead that reproductions have much to tell us about the production of art-historical knowledge. The Courtauld is home to some five hundred plaster casts of carved ivory objects that were amassed in the 1850s by the scholar and curator Augustus Wollaston Franks. These ‘fictile ivories’ played an important role in the study and teaching of Gothic ivories in the 20th century, allowing for a more complete classification and placing them within broader discussions of medieval art and visual culture.

Twenty-four of the plaster casts make up one display at the exhibition. Their arrangement on the wall matches the layout of photographs of individual ivories in a book produced for London’s Arundel Society in 1869. At the top of the installation are sacred subjects (such as the Crucifixion) and at the bottom profane ones (the Siege of the Castle of Love): the creator of this arrangement seems to have recognised that the medieval imagination placed the earthly close to the celestial, whether in the form of bawdy carvings in the architectural fabric of churches or grotesques cavorting on the margins of the Luttrell Psalter. Here, biblical scenes are brought into conversation with scenes of gallantry and folly (incompetent knights in quest of maidens).

The exhibition also includes a significant number of reproductions of other medieval objects: an electrotype of a 12th-century gilded reliquary lid, a rubbing of a c.1380 memorial brass from 1970. In an accompanying panel, the curators propose that our collective disregard for reproductions – which led to the destruction of many cast collections in the 20th century – was driven by the belief that, to use Walter Benjamin’s word, reproductions lack the ‘aura’ of the original artwork. Their phrasing implies Benjamin was uneasy about the advent of reproduction technologies, but this is not quite right. Rather, Benjamin considered mechanical reproduction necessary to unlocking art’s political potential. The political implications of reproducing works of art could have been given more space here.

The mirror case that inspired this exhibition was made in Paris in the first half of the 14th century; the disc is only 13.5 cm in diameter, about the size of a saucer. It enclosed a polished metal disc and would have been kept, along with ivory combs and gravoirs (hair parters), in a lady’s dressing case (although, as the curators note, ivory mirror cases were sometimes owned by men as well). This example, one of the finest of its kind, was acquired by the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1855 for £50 12s. Such mirrors were practical items, intended to be held and used, and were almost always embellished with secular subject matter. One of the fictile ivories on view is a reproduction of a mirror case from the Louvre showing a couple playing chess in a tent. The man clutches the tent pole – once described by the art historian Michael Camille as a ‘phallic lance’ – while the maiden considers her next move.

The Siege of the Castle of Love wasn’t just a visual motif. The subject was performed at festivals across Europe during the late medieval period. In the early 13th century, a Paduan notary called Roland recorded the details of the spectacle, which began with ‘dames and damsels and their waiting women’ building a ‘fantastic castle’ and fortifying it on all sides with sable, ermine, brocades and other lavish materials. Next, the youths cast as the besiegers bombarded it with ‘apples and dates and muscat-nuts, tarts and pears and quinces, roses and lilies and violets, and vases of balsam or ambergris or rosewater, amber, camphor, cardamums, cinnamon, cloves, pomegranates, and all manner of flowers or spices that are fragrant to smell or fair to see’. The castle’s guardians withstood the fusillade but later capitulated to the men when they showered the castle with golden ducats.

Art historians have long suspected that the Siege of the Castle of Love derived from a literary source and a number of texts have been proposed (and subsequently ruled out). My theory is that the trope is linked to a 12th-century treatise on love by Andreas Capellanus, a cleric in the circle of Marie de Champagne. Andreas relates the story of a four-sided palace, ruled by the God of Love and occupied by ladies. The God of Love commands the eastern gate; the northern gate is shut, guarded by recalcitrant ladies who spurn the men attempting to woo them; the western gate is open, allowing concupiscent ladies to romp with lovers beyond the palace walls; and the southern gate is also open but the flow of prospective suitors into the castle is regulated by ladies who assess their valour. It seems probable that the Siege of the Castle of Love is a depiction of the southern gate of Andreas’s palace and that the motif should be read not as an allegory of violent seduction, as it is commonly understood, but as a fable of female agency. As Andreas writes, the inhabitants of the palace ‘admit those entitled with every honour [and] repulse the unworthy far from the court of Love’. At the centre of the mirror case at the Courtauld is a two-towered barbican with a partially raised portcullis. Could it be that the knights scaling its walls have been rebuffed by the gate’s guardians, who judged them unworthy and ‘repulsed’ them from Love’s keep? Or perhaps this bumbling cohort of knights is so accustomed to besieging castles – boosting one another over walls, breaching fortifications in any way they can – that they do not even realise the gate is open.