Surprised by Time: Halkida treasure

Showing posts with label Halkida treasure. Show all posts

08 October 2011

The Negroponte Hoard, Part Two

Some of the "Negroponte hoard," now in the British Museum.

Go here for more on this treasure.

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I recently presented a couple of items from the "Negroponte hoard" -- it is neither a hoard nor all from Negroponte -- and thought it might be a pleasure to look at more of the individual items. The British Museum lists 389 items, mostly multiples of buttons, in this collection which was a bequest to the museum in 1897 by Sir Augustus Wollaston Franks, Director of the museum. His total bequest consisted of more than 6000 items, and such a private collection in the possession of a museum director would now be considered highly questionable. I do not know about the financing of the BM in 1897 -- perhaps a reader does -- and this may have been its primary means of acquisition. But it leaves a bad taste. The Dalton catalog of the holdings says that the items were acquired "in the first half of the nineteenth century" but provides no more information about the acquisition.

(These pictures should all enlarge when clicked on.)

First, BELT ORNAMENTS. You can see similar belts in 15th C Byzantine and Italian portraits. These are all Italian, and I would prefer Venice for the first two.

Note that the item to the lower left has a Malatesta shield,
with initials L and B: the third Malatesta shield in this collection.

BUTTONS. Byzantines had massive assemblages of buttons on their formal garments -- forty or so at times -- and every single button gets its own catalog listing. These are the ones I like best. Most of them are not as charming.

EARRINGS.

RINGS.

The number 1821 is the ring's original catalog number.
The number now is AF-1860. It is an extremely large ring,
a thumb ring, or for a man.

The "hoard" included an elegant silver bowl:

And an ancient Greek cup.

Go here to look up items from this collection at the British Museum under the term "Halkida" or "Halkida gold".

27 August 2011

The Negroponte Hoard, Part One

Malatesta coat-of-arm, Negroponte Hoard, BM

There is a remarkable and nearly unknown collection of jewelry in the British Museum, known as the Negroponte hoard. It consists of 395 items (28 items are one model of silver filigree buttons, 65 another model of exquisite gold buttons), some of them important. The collection was acquired in the late 19th-century from an Athens dealer who claimed these were all found in one hoard in Negroponte, and who made requests for secrecy. I will write later about my opinions of that.

What has fascinated me this week is this 2.5 cm shield with alternating bands, certainly the Malatesta shield, and the same one that Pandolfo Malatesta put up in two locations in Patras.

The Patras shields disappeared during the Italian occupation in WW2 and there has been no report of them since. This image was taken from a photocopy of an etching of a squeeze of the shield found in the Lambros history of medieval Greece, and you may have to trust me on this.

A second shield turns up which somewhat explains the first, which is the same size as the shield in the center with reverse bands and may have been similarly used as the center of an ornament. I do not find a photograph of it on the BM site and this one, a detail from a large mass of ornaments, is extremely difficult to make clear. The three heads are interesting: the Malatesti added three profile heads to their shields around 1385, and possibly these heads refer to those.

[Note: I have identified a third shield in a subsequent post on the collection.]

The main question I have about these two Malatesta shields is: what were they doing in Negroponte? Cleofe Malatesta was in Mistra from the fall of 1420 to the spring of 1433. Her brother Pandolfo was archbishop of Patras from 1424 until mid-1429. I can think of a number of ways in which the shields might have traveled east: the explanation that convinces me will have to wait for another blog.

Below, I am supplying a series of Malatesta shields. They vary according to the owner, but the basis for each is a pattern of bends, sometimes checked, sometimes with suggestions of weaving. The first three are from manuscripts reproduced in large expensive books on the Malatesti, but unidentified; the last two are from Wikipedia.