Pax with the Death and Assumption of the Virgin

Entry

In the late Middle Ages a new liturgical instrument, the osculatorium or pax, was developed in response to the custom of exchanging the kiss of peace during Mass.² A pax – the terms paes, paesbert or paessteen were all used in Middle Dutch – was a small plaque or disc with a handle; it was kissed by the clergy and then passed around among the churchgoers for them to kiss too.³ In the fifteenth century it was customary for the celebrant to kiss the pax and pass it to his clerical brothers around the altar before Communion.⁴ It was then the turn of the congregation, although this was not a hard and fast rule.⁵ Frequent references to paxes in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century sources confirm that the object had become generally accepted in this period and could be made in materials of all kinds – silver gilt, wood, ivory, mother of pearl, glass, pipeclay. It also emerges that owning a pax was not the sole preserve of the clergy; lay people could also have their own paxes.⁶ The pax fell into disuse in the Low Countries in the course of the sixteenth century, in part as a result of the Reformation.⁷

This ivory pax is unusual in its size and elaborate ornamentation, since the majority of the ivory paxes made in the later Middle Ages were simply executed objects, often decorated in a stereotypical fashion.⁸ Nowadays this group is often attributed to mass-production workshops in the Low Countries or Northern France. Around 1500, paxes with greater variation in shape, decoration and iconography began to appear. The Rijksmuseum pax reflects this development.

The pax is made from a piece of curved ivory, estimated to be about a quarter of the circumference of a large elephant tusk. It is more than two centimetres thick at the lower edge. Attached to the back with a dovetail joint is a handle with two large round openings and a number of small drilled holes creating the shape of a gothic letter B. On the front the twelve apostles sit and stand around the lifeless body of the Virgin, laid out on her deathbed. Above, she is borne up to heaven by four angels. This part of the image – like the handle, for that matter – shows signs of wear and must have been the most frequently kissed. The scene is set in a three-part late gothic portal, framed with a cable border and decorated with intricate flowerheads. The top is crowned with gothic finials, and two columns flank the whole. The composition was taken directly from a woodcut by Jean d’Ypres (d. 1508) that appears in several late-fifteenth-century Parisian books of hours, including an Heures à l’usage de Rome published by Phillipe Pigouchet (Paris 1488) and an Heures à l’usage de Paris brought out by Antoine Verard (Paris 1500) (fig. a).⁹

The scenes of the Death and Assumption of the Virgin are a well-considered choice for a pax. The group of apostles, so prominently positioned, can be seen as an image of the earliest religious community, the ones who remained on earth after the Virgin’s death. They stand for the origin of the church and, in their union and spiritual affinity, provide an example for the medieval churchgoers who used the pax to express their own unanimity and love of peace. Mary, moreover, as Virgo facta Ecclesia (Virgin made Church) and her election as the virginal ‘instrument’ of the Incarnation, was regarded as the Bride of Christ.¹⁰ She thus reflected the loving bond of the church, the congregation of the faithful, with God. From the twelfth century onwards, the bond of love between bridegroom and bride described in the Song of Songs was seen as the union both of God with his Church, and of God and Mary. In the liturgy of the late Middle Ages, too, Mary and the Church were increasingly equated.¹¹ Against this background, the Death and Assumption of the Virgin on the pax are extremely apt. Her assumption, after all, implies her union with Christ, and by analogy with the Mary-Ecclesia metaphor, also the union of Christ and his bride, the Church. Added to the text of Song of Songs 1:1, in which the bride says of her bridegroom: ‘Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth’, the unification idea of the liturgical kiss of peace and the symbolic union of the faithful and God coincide perfectly in the scene on this pax.¹² They thus have a direct theological connection with the mystical union of Christ and the faithful, and with the peace among the faithful themselves. In a Dutch book of hours dating from around 1490 there is a similar association between an image of the Death and Assumption of the Virgin and the kiss.¹³

Stylistically, this pax is closely related to a group of ivories made in the Low Countries or Paris around 1500 and in the first decades of the sixteenth century. In many cases, the scenes on these ivories were derived from metal cuts in Parisian books of hours, as Reesing and Yvard have argued.¹⁴ When the effects of the Hundred Years’ War and other aspects had put an end to the heyday of French ivory carving, new centres for this craft grew up in the north.¹⁵ In the fifteenth century, Flanders was home to workshops where carvers made stereotypical ivory caskets and small Marian altars, primarily for export. The Flemish range also included small diptychs of saints and paxes.¹⁶ Koch and Randall were the first to identify ten technically and stylistically related ivories in this fifteenth-century northern output, attributing them to one or more workshops in the Northern Netherlands in the third quarter of the fifteenth century that could probably be placed in Utrecht.¹⁷ They are small diptychs (or parts of them), paxes and a freestanding statuette of the Virgin and Child. In the meantime, it has been possible to add various pieces to this group and a more precise classification is now needed.¹⁸ The ivories in this group have in common a particular emphasis on the framing of the composition – often exaggeratedly depressed gothic, three-part arches with rayonnant tracery – hatched backgrounds and a scene carved in fairly low relief.¹⁹

Some of these characteristics of fifteenth-century northern ivory carving are also found in a group of ivories of a markedly higher artistic standard, with more variation in form, subject and decoration. This more exclusive output was probably produced a generation later and aimed at a growing market for private devotional works among the prosperous urban class and the clergy. The relatively large numbers of these more expensive ivories that survive, including the Amsterdam ivory, attest to the considerable volume of this output, possibly to be situated in Paris or the Franco-Flemish cultural milieu.²⁰ Paxes account for a strikingly large proportion of this output. The use of letters and inscriptions is also a conspicuous feature of this group of ivories.

The style constants of northern ivories come together in a more accomplished manner and on a ‘monumental’ scale in the large Amsterdam pax. The background is hatched, but much more carefully than on the other paxes. The spatial distribution of the figures betrays the hand of a practised ivorycarver, who succeeded in convincingly transferring his print model to the format of a curved relief while at the same time adapting the crowning element to fit the form of a pax and incorporating a small scene of the Assumption of the Virgin. A slightly smaller and simpler pax, doubtless from the same workshop, was in the Spitzer Collection in the late nineteenth century (fig. b),²¹ and a third example in ivory with a very similar scene of the Death of the Virgin is held in Museo Correr in Venice. It has a provenance dating back to before 1830.²²

Frits Scholten, 2024