GREEK (NORTH-WEST), CIRCA 1700

Details

A UNIQUE CASKET, PROBABLY A CONTAINER FOR THE HOLY MYRRH
GREEK (NORTH-WEST), CIRCA 1700
The obverse showing the Mother of God and John the Baptist in supplication to the Old Testament Trinity, each side portraying two saints blessed by the half-figure of Christ that emerges from the clouds, St. Demetrios and an elderly saint at the left, the medicinal saints, Panteleimon and his teacher, Ermolaos, at the right, the semi-tubular lid decorated with five-rayed stars, the inside of the lid depicting the scene of the lamentation against a naturalistic, hilly landscape, the figures painted delicately with a combination of light pastel and deeper saturated colours, against a half-orange and half-gold background, the back being undecorated and each corner bears a hole at the bottom
8 7/8 x 5½ x 6 5/8 in. (22.5 x 14 x 17 cm)

Literature

A short article on this box is published in the Bulletin of British Byzantine Studies, volume 32 (2006), 116-120

Special notice

No VAT will be charged on the hammer price, but VAT at 15% will be added to the buyer's premium which is invoiced on a VAT inclusive basis.

Lot Essay

Painted, wooden boxes were not particularly common in the Byzantine and Post-Byzantine era. The few known examples prove that the function of the boxes was linked to their decoration. Therefore, the fourteenth-century casket from the Cleveland Museum of Art was decorated with scenes from the life of St. John the Baptist and it probably contained relics of that saint. Similarly, a box from the church of Sts. Varnavas and Hilarion in Cyprus that shows the Mother of God and is inscribed with the beatitude 'Blessed are the merciful...' used to be a collecting box. The representation of St. Demetrios the myrrh-gusher and the two medical saints, suggests that this lot was destined to enclose a therapeutic substance. The inside of the lid with the uncovered body of Christ, captures the moment before his anointing with myrrh. The absence of the myrrh-vessel that is usually present in this scene, combined with the fact that the box was fixed in one place, as it has holes in its base, indicates that the substance within could have been as valuable as the Holy Myrrh that is produced by the Patriarch, on a Good Thursday, approximately every ten years and it is distributed to all the Orthodox churches.

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