Shield from the Antler of an Elk

Entry

This unique, exquisitely carved elk antler is very likely an ex-voto or memorabilium originating from the funerary chapel of Holy Roman Emperor Louis the Pious (778-840), son and heir to the throne of Charlemagne, in the German city of Metz. The antler’s earliest known mention occurs in 1867, the year in which it was sold among numerous items formerly belonging to the art collector Philippe-Antoine Paguet (1768-1854), a local pâtissier (pastry chef) in that same city.¹⁰ Having no children of his own, Paguet bequeathed all his possessions upon his death in 1854 to his nephew by marriage, the Metz wine dealer Victor Colchen. It was not until Colchen’s death in 1867, that Paguet’s entire collection of art came under the hammer at the Paris auction house Drouot. Among the many items offered, the elk antler sold for 8,550 French francs – with the exception of one other piece, the highest amount bid – to one Henri Delange (1804-?), an art dealer in Paris.¹¹ In his turn, Delange sold the antler at some point between 1867 and 1870 to Prince Alexander Petrovich Basilevsky (1829-1885), a Russian nobleman and prominent art collector in Paris.¹²

One year after the sale, Charles Abel, a renowned historian and archaeologist of Metz, published an article on medieval ivory carvings from the city’s cathedral in the Mémoires de la Société d’Archéologie et d’Histoire de la Moselle.¹³ In the same article, Abel also discussed a number of ivories from Paguet’s collection, including two ivory reliefs,¹⁴ and the twelfth-century ‘cor de Charlemagne’ (also called the ‘oliphant of St Arnulphus’), today preserved at the Musée Cluny.¹⁵ According to Abel, Paguet also possessed two fragments from Louis the Pious’s burial tomb.¹⁶ His article also mentioned the account of an old and venerable citizen of Metz, who stated that, prior to the French Revolution, the horn and antler had always hung as ex-votos in King Louis’s funerary chapel: ‘Mr Paguet heard from an old man from Metz that before the Revolution his oliphant had hung as an ex-voto in the vault of the chapel of Louis the Pious in the Abbey Church of Saint-Arnould and was believed by the people to be Charlemagne’s hunting horn. There was also a shield that was procured by Mr Paguet [...] The shield was made from the horn of an elk; it was decorated with crude carvings in the German style representing animals, foliage and fruit in a frieze around a handle in the form of a lion’s head. [...] An old canon of our cathedral found this tablet among other religious effects, from which Mr Paguet obtained his diptychs, his oliphant and his shield.¹⁷ The shared provenance of the hunting horn and the elk antler (the latter described by Abel as a shield) – both having come from the funerary chapel of Louis the Pious – bestowed on these works the high esteem afforded Carolingian relics. By all appearances, the two objects were either lost or sold in the aftermath of the French Revolution.¹⁸ In the years 1792-93, attempts had been made to smuggle out part of the church’s treasury.¹⁹ Presumably, however, most of the collection was ultimately confiscated and sold at that time. It was then that the fragments from the burial tomb and the most important of the ivories – among them very likely the elk antler – were dispersed, in the end finding their way into Pauget’s possession. In 1874, the antler again appears in the catalogue of the Basilewsky collection, depicted in a heliogravure.²⁰ It can also be seen in a watercolour of the interior of Basilewsky’s home on the Rue Blanche, which shows the collector sitting surrounded by his art treasure.²¹

The ‘shield’ is made from antler – an ‘eight-pointer’ – of a European elk (Alces Alces). It is a so-called palmate antler, recognizable by the flattened, wide palm and the sharp points or ‘tines’. Three of the eight tines have broken off, perhaps already during the animals lifetime. Of the remaining five, one tine was partly replaced early on, with another broken tine restored more recently. Abel’s remark that the antler once hung from the vaulted ceiling of the funerary chapel – together with the ‘cor de Charlemagne’ – is supported by the seven drill holes made in the antler’s natural underside, allowing it to be hung with a cord, inverted with the short side facing upwards.

The Amsterdam antler is one of two known surviving decorated medieval elk antlers where the natural form has been preserved;²² it has not been reworked into a utilitarian object or sawn into plaques.²³ The antler’s convex exterior side has been decorated with a double-bordered frieze that closely follows the contours of the middle section. The frieze itself is decorated with rinceaux of undulating vines abundant with grape bunches and foliage, and interspersed with predatory birds and several lions engaged in the act of biting at the vine. Most of the birds have a curious form, with the head arching backwards under one of the feet. Five of the eight antler tines have been transformed into fantastical monsters. The topmost is a recumbent lion; lying behind its are a winged dragon with lion’s head and a pointed curly tail. The antler tine middle-left assumes the form of a grapevine winding its way up to the point, intersected by two winged, intertwined snakes. A hybrid dragon with lion’s head and a winged body again dominates the third tine, finally terminating in a curving pointed tail. The fourth comprises intertwining snakes among the grapevines. The fifth and last antler tine features a recumbent lion ¬– undoubtedly a replacement, albeit at a relatively early point in time, but no later than 1874. Because the heads of all the above-cited beasts turn to face the middle section, with the grapevines ostensibly sprouting from their gaping mouths, one can only conclude that they form an integral part of the decoration system. Two short, broken antler tips have been transformed into lion’s heads, with their wide-opened mouths directed away from the central part. The antler’s stem terminates in a large lion’s head. Both the frieze and the monsters belong to the repertoire of fantastical creatures ordinarily encountered in art starting in the early Romanesque period. Just as with the antler, they typically populate the borders and margins of their supports.²⁴

The antler was hung by means of two cords passing through original suspension holes drilled in the tips of the first three tines: one cord passed through the gaping jaws of the lion’s heads on the two short tines; a second cord, tied to the hole in the curled tail at the end of the long tine, was used to stabilize the whole. Suspended from these three points, the antler would have been positioned essentially the same as it was once seen sitting on the elk’s head.²⁵

The decoration was executed with great care, adapted to the natural form. This applies both to the carved tines as well as the frieze with grapevines and animals, which follow the antler palm’s contour with great precision. Laying out the frieze was certainly no simple task: it necessitated that the artist made subtle corrections in the pattern of the winding vine in response to the antler’s irregular form and the inconstant distances separating each of tines. By introducing variations in the birds and the lions, but also by cleverly adapting the form of the vine, the artist managed to achieve a fluid and seemingly regular decorative pattern. This leaves no doubt that respecting and maintaining the recognizability of the antler’s natural form was of great importance. Furthermore, he chose for a striking contrast between the empty middle section – where no single trace of decoration has been applied (apart from smoothening the surface) – and the ornate ornamentation of the frieze and tines. Alternating between decorative and empty spaces is a characteristic shared with a number of surviving oliphants from the eleventh and twelfth centuries.

Past inquiries into the origin and dating of the Rijksmuseum antler shield gave rise to a variety of theories. The sale catalogue accompanying the Paguet collection describes it as a work dating from the ‘eleventh to twelfth century’, with no stated provenance. The Basilewsky catalogue, by contrast, lists the antler as Art Byzantin with a dating in the ninth century. In 1936, when still held in Fritz Mannheimers collection in Amsterdam, Von Falke catalogued the antler as ‘Romanisch um 1200’ (Romanesque circa 1200). In the Rijksmuseum’s annual report of 1953, Leeuwenberg described the piece as Romaans (Romanesque) and waarschijnlijk afkomstig uit Scandinavië (probably originating from Scandinavia).²⁶ Radiocarbon dating of a sample taken from the core of the broken tine confirmed the antler’s significant age, with the moment at which the elk shed its antlers or was killed as hunting quarry occurring between 975-1020 AD.²⁷ This dating rules out the possibility that the piece was produced in Emperor Louis the Pious’s lifetime – already a highly improbable conclusion on stylistic grounds. Circa 1000, the range of elk still extended across much of the European Continent, as far west as the British Isles and as far east as Germany, as far north as the Low Countries and as far south as the Alps and the Pyrenees Mountains.²⁸ Quite tenably, the antler could originally have been retrieved in the immediate surroundings of Metz. This belies Leeuwenberg’s belief that it could only have originated from Scandinavia.²⁹ Indeed, the style of the carving betrays nothing of the compact and complex decoration patterns associated with the late Viking style.³⁰ Nevertheless, by this time human encounters with shy elk were fairly uncommon in many parts of the Continent; antlers would have come to been seen as objects of curiosity, possibly even bestowed with magical, apotropaic powers.³¹

Charles Abel described the antler disparagingly as a work executed in a grossières, du style allemande (coarse, German style). Ironically, not Germany but regions in fact nearer to Abel’s home – northern France, Alsace-Lorraine and the northernmost reaches of the Moselle, Rur and Meuse rivers – are where one finds the greatest stylistic parallels. Similar decorative grapevines – albeit slightly compacter, with or without animals – adorn eleventh- and early-twelfth-century portable altars from Metz, Namur and Trier,³² a reliquary cross from Solières (c. 1150),³³ and Romanesque capitals at Maastricht (in the Onze-Lieve-Vrouwekerk, c. 1160), nearby Rolduc, and Liège.³⁴ Important for a determination of the antler’s dating is a striking agreement between the grapevine frieze and comparable motifs in several illuminated manuscripts. Kahsnitz observed commonalities with the characteristic, sharply defined and open vine tendrils in illuminated works produced at the abbey of St. Bertinus at Saint-Omer during the abbacy of Odbert (987-1007), including the Evangeliarium Saint-Omer (the Liber generationis, ms 56), or the Quoniam leaf (fol. 51r) in manuscript M.333 in the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York.³⁵ The lion’s head on the stem of the Amsterdam antler has a block-like form echoing four walrus ivory lion’s heads on the Nonnberger faldistorium in Salzburg, a fifteenth-century folding chair partly reconstructed with elements from a much older piece. These re-used elements – including the lion’s heads – are said to be of northern French or English origin, circa 1125-50.³⁶ Adorning the crowning element of an ivory crozier, possibly once belonging to Bishop Ivo of Chartres (after 1090), are dragons intertwined with grapevines similar in form and style to those of the Amsterdam elk antler.³⁷ Both French and German parallels exist for the characteristic pose of the birds in the frieze, with their heads bent backwards below one leg. The same motif appears, for example, on the tenth-or eleventh-century mallet of the ‘Joyeuse’ and the foot of a German altar candlestick from Fritzlar.³⁸ Striking stylistic and iconographic parallels can also be observed when comparing the lions entwined in the vines of the antler frieze to those found on two stone lintels: one from a wall on Rue des Trinitaires in Metz and the other from the church in nearby Méy. The latter not only share the pose and lively expression of the antler lions, but also the limberness and muscular build conveyed by the arched backs, full-round buttocks and slender legs, standing tall on their feet.³⁹ All of the above-cited points of agreement together warrant a localization of the elk antler in northern or north-eastern France, and a dating in the early eleventh century based on the correspondence with manuscript illumination from Saint-Omer.⁴⁰ This dating is likewise reasonably corroborated by the radiocarbon dating of the antler itself. Importantly, none of the findings above preclude a Metz provenance.

Little is known about the antler’s function, other than that it hung in Louis the Pious’s burial chapel and that, in the nineteenth century, it was thought to be either a shield, ex-voto or curiosity – with one designation by no means excluding the other. Von Falke viewed the antler as an object ohne Gebrauchszweck (without utilitarian function).⁴¹ One can assume it was originally treasured as a hunting trophy, taken around the year 1000 from a then rare and exotic animal sort and shortly thereafter bestowed a new function and meaning.⁴² As Abel already believed in 1868, that function was perhaps a symbolic shield or ex-voto, procured in the eleventh century to augment the burial chapel of Louis the Pious in the Benedictine abbey church of St Arnould with a Carolingian ‘relic’. By the late eighth and early ninth century, this church – dating back to the sixth century – had become an important mausoleum of the Carolingian dynasty. Besides Arnould – patron saint and founding father of the imperial family – other family members laid to rest here included Hildegarde, Charlemagnes wife, in 783, as well as various daughters and cousins of the emperor. In 843, Louis the Pious was subsequently buried here in a late-antique sarcophagus, followed in 855 by his half-brother, Drogo, the highly influential Archbishop of Metz. Yet information regarding the earliest disposition of the Carolingian tombs in the church of Saint-Arnould remains virtually non-existent.⁴³ In the mid-eleventh century, the abbey church underwent a major renovation, at which time the individual graves were relocated, with Louis’s sarcophagus moved close to the grave of his mother, Hildegarde. Almost two centuries later, in the thirteenth century, Louis’s tomb was further embellished with the addition of a stone-carved effigy. In the context of the abbey with all its Carolingian relics, one can readily imagine that ‘new relics’ were added to the chapel, particularly after Pope Leo IX’s consecration of the newly renovated abbey church in 1049, which coincided with the reinstallation of the imperial burial chapel. Moreover, a renaissance in the esteem afforded the Carolingian dynasty began to manifest itself in various forms in the twelfth century, giving rise to Charlemagne’s canonization and the growing popularity of the chansons de geste.⁴⁴

When in 1552 the old abbey was demolished during the Siege of Metz by Emperor Charles V’s troops, the Benedictine monks were bestowed new living quarters within the city walls, in the former monastery of the Dominicans. With great pomp and circumstance, the remains of Louis the Pious and the other Carolingian family members were transferred in a procession to the new abbey church of St. Arnould. On the orders of the French king, Henry II, a new tomb monument was built, thereby incorporating elements from the old burial chapel, including the antique sarcophagus – by this time holding not only Louis’s remains, but also those of his mother, half-brother, and the other Carolingian family members – and its thirteenth-century effigy. It was from the vaulted ceiling of this later burial chapel that the Rijksmuseum antler and the oliphant in the Musée Cluny once hung.⁴⁵ With the exception of a few minor alterations and several new inscriptions, this monument remained virtually unchanged up until the French Revolution, at which time it was destroyed and the abbey church of St Arnould was dismantled. Fortunately, this later monument has been preserved in the form of various prints and drawings. It was also at this time that the burial chapel’s contents were removed and subsequently dispersed.⁴⁶

Darcel and Basilevsky both presumed that ‘without significant use, [the elk antler] must have been cherished as a curiosity, just like a great number of natural but rare objects kept in the churches and their treasuries’.⁴⁷ As such, they placed the present antler in the same group as other naturalia and mirabilia, together with narwhal, elephant and shark teeth, bulls horns, bones, fossils, red corals and ostrich eggs. From very early on, churches valued these natural curiosities for their exotic allure, symbolic/theological meaning or their curative, antidotal and apotropaic qualities, and acquired them as objects to enrich their treasuries.⁴⁸ Cardinal Paleotti (1522-1597) of Bologna explicitly mentions the corna de cervi (elk antlers) in his extensive enumeration of religious curiosities, alongside crocodiles, ostrich eggs and exotic animals.⁴⁹ From the fifteenth century on, the integration of naturalium and artefact – of which the Amsterdam elk antler is an exceptionally rare and early example – was to become one of the guiding principles of the Kunst- und Wunderkammer. That a decorative elk antler similar to the present one also hung from the beams of Francesco Calzolari’s Wunderkammer in Verona in 1622 therefore comes as no surprise.⁵⁰

Frits Scholten, 2024