Royal Gold Cup
[1] According to Thomas Hoving, former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, "of all the princely jewels and gold that have come down to us, this is the most spectacular—and that includes the great royal treasures.
The stem of the cup has twice been extended by the addition of cylindrical bands, so that it was originally much shorter,[5] giving the overall shape "a typically robust and stocky elegance.
[12]John, Duke of Berry (1340–1416) was Charles VI's uncle and a powerful figure in the kingdom, as well as the most famous and extravagant collector and commissioner of art of his day.
[13] The young king Charles had been forced to remove his uncle from governorships after the latter's rapacious conduct had led to unrest, and the meeting in 1391 marked their reconciliation after a period of bad relations.
[20] Another possibility is that it had been pawned, as it was in 1449 and again in 1451, on both occasions to finance England's increasingly unsuccessful efforts to hold on to French territory;[21] The cup first appears in the records of the new Tudor dynasty under Henry VIII in 1521.
By now the cover had lost the finial "garnished with four sapphires, three balas rubies and fifteen pearls" described in Charles VI's inventory and had a new one of gold in the form of a closed, or "imperial" crown.
[28] According to Pauline Croft, "With his usual over-generosity the king gave the departing envoys around half the large gold vessels from the royal possessions he had inherited from Elizabeth.
The Constable himself received a stupendous gift of plate, including possibly the most venerable item in the collection, known as "the Royal Gold Cup of the Kings of France and England.
A marginal note on the deed, in the Constable's own handwriting, records that he had obtained the permission of the Archbishop of Toledo, Bernardo de Sandoval y Rojas, for the cup to be used as a ciborium, or container for consecrated hosts.
There had been a spate of forgeries of medieval objects, and the Parisians were suspicious, until one, Baron Jérôme Pichon, researched the second added cylinder and was sufficiently convinced that this was the cup documented in 1604 to make a rather low offer, which was accepted.
However, on looking further into the matter the duke realized that the sale was contrary to the 1610 deed of gift he had discovered in the family archives, and sued in the French courts to recover the cup.
He was forced to put up £5,000 of his own money temporarily while he continued to try to get smaller amounts from others, and succeeded in 1892 when the Treasury agreed to contribute the final £830; "to Franks this was his greatest acquisition, and the one of which he was most proud.
[40] However, in 1978 Ronald Lightbown, Keeper of Metalwork at the V&A Museum, rejected this theory on stylistic grounds, considering that the cup must have been created only shortly before it appeared in Charles VI's inventory in 1391.
"[42] This view was rejected in 1981 by Neil Stratford, former Keeper of Medieval and Later Antiquities at the British Museum, who pointed to a number of manuscript illuminations in a similar style that date from earlier than 1390.
[6] However John Cherry, noting the exclusively religious subjects depicted (including that on the lost tripod stand) considers that the cup may have been intended as a ciborium from the start.
Although it is Berry who is especially remembered as a patron, partly because he specialized in illuminated manuscripts which have little value in their materials, it was his brother Louis of Anjou who was the "most passionately interested in the goldsmith's art";[51] he had over 3,000 pieces of plate at one point.
[56] This was the first of a number of periods that saw the large-scale destruction of goldsmiths' work that the cup escaped, but thousands of other pieces did not, a survival that Brigitte Buettner finds "almost miraculous".
"[59] The cost of even very skilled labour was low compared to that of the materials, and in the absence of any reliable way of either depositing or investing money, it was turned into lavish objects, in the knowledge that it might well need to be sold or melted down to finance some future project.
[60] There are only four other known survivals, secular or religious, of basse taille enamel on gold, one the small Salting Reliquary, also in the British Museum, and none as fine as the cup.
Other texts are quotations from the Latin Vulgate Bible, mostly derived from the liturgy for St Agnes' feast day,[66] and it has been suggested that the two rings of pearls also reflect the language of the chants for these services.
[68] The story begins on the inside of the bowl, which has a round medallion showing St Agnes kneeling before a bearded figure, representing her teacher, wearing a chaperon.
She holds a book inscribed Miserere mei Deus sancte ("Have pity on me, Holy God"), while a banderole says In corde meo abscondi eloquia tua ut non peccem tibi ("Thy words have I hid in my heart that I might not sin against thee".
They are accosted by Procopius, the young son of the Prefect of Rome, who has fallen in love with Agnes and shows her an open casket of jewels to persuade her to marry him.
However the result of the miracle was that (in William Caxton's translation) "the bishops of the idols made a great discord among the people, so that all they cried: Take away this sorceress and witch that turned men's minds and alieneth their wits".
The Prefect is now sympathetic to Agnes but fears he will lose his position if he does nothing, so leaves the matter in the hands of another official; the two are seen talking together, with words from Luke 23:4 Nihil invenio cause in eam ("I find no cause against her") above.
As Constantina sleeps, Agnes, holding her lamb, appears to her, saying Si in xpm (Christum) credideris sanaberis ("If you believe in Christ you will be healed", an adaptation of the text in the source).
[77] In the final scene, the cured, and baptized, Constantina tells her crowned father the story, with the inscription Hec est virgo sapiens una de numero prudencium ("This is a wise virgin, one of the number of the prudent").
Below the two added cylinders on the stem, the four traditional symbols of the Evangelists run round the sloping foot of the cup, in pairs facing each other, above a green ground area.
[78] High quality courtly work like the cup is conventionally assigned to Paris in the absence of other stylistic evidence; this is where other documentary sources locate the main concentration of goldsmiths.
After the enamel was added and fired the surfaces were cleaned up, made good and polished, including removing by scraping any bumps showing through on the reverse of the metal.
