Knob from a Crozier with the Entry into Jerusalem

The narrative imagery encircling this knob from a crozier shaft derives from an important episode recounted in the Gospels, in which Jesus enters the gates of the city of Jerusalem while riding a donkey. The biblical narrative unfolds with apostles and onlookers heralding Jesus’ entry into the holy city. Riding sidesaddle with a holy book in his hand, Jesus looks outward, addressing the viewer with wide eyes and a gesture of blessing. Two nimbed saints follow close behind. The first is an unidentified saint dressed in clerical robes who holds a vessel reminiscent of a medieval liturgical chalice. Behind him, St. Peter holds his attribute, the key. Together, Jesus and the two saints process toward the imposing towers and gateway marking the entrance into Jerusalem. A diminutive man holding a palm frond greets them under the arched entry, which is decorated with chevrons. Standing far from the gate behind a stone tower, four additional palm-bearers witness Jesus’ triumphal arrival. A man dressed in the hooded robe of a medieval monk kneels to lower a frond on the path. The man behind him loosens another frond from an obliging tree, while a third man turns back toward a veiled woman.

This intricately-carved, celebratory scene conflates the honorific gestures recorded in the Gospels with visual references to medieval life, namely, the liturgical processions held at the beginning of Holy Week. In Western Europe, medieval Christians commemorated Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, a feast day held annually on the Sunday before Easter. As early as the fourth century A.D., Palm Sunday was celebrated with the blessing and distribution of palm fronds. In the Carolingian period, if not earlier, processions of clerics, lay rulers, and the public brought the biblical events underpinning the Palm Sunday liturgy into the streets and culminated in the celebration of mass (Harris 2019).

This ivory segment would have connected the long shaft of the crozier below to an ornamental element above, which would have been shaped either like a T (known as a "tau" cross) or like the curved head of a shepherd’s crook. Few crozier shafts or knobs are so intricately carved in their entirety, although the late-twelfth and early-thirteenth century examples at The Met (acc. no. 1981.1) and the Museo Nationale del Bargello in Florence (inv. no. 46 Carrand) are other notable exceptions. While the missing elements of this crozier’s shaft might have also featured narrative imagery, the placement of the Entry into Jerusalem high on the staff – near hand and eye level – indicates the special importance of this feast day to the cleric to whom it belonged.

The bulbous element at the top of this piece features a medley of real and imagined creatures in the narrow triangular spaces, which are delineated by ornamental bands of pearls. A twelfth-century head of a tau cross attributed to northern France isolates the signs of the zodiac within similar framing devices, transforming the tau into a celestial body over the two clerics carved below (London, Victoria and Albert Museum, inv. no. 215-1865). While the creatures depicted on The Met’s crozier knob do not correspond so clearly with astrology, they possibly reminded Christian viewers of the marvelous, strange, and even monstrous inhabitants on the margins of Creation.

Reputedly belonging to the Sainte Vierge des Sablons in Brussels, this knob predates the construction of this fifteenth-century Belgian chapel. Adolf Goldschmidt attributed the related Bargello and V&A examples to England or France, ca. 1200. For Beatrix Fox Griffith, The Met’s knob exemplified the so-called "'Channel’ studios" of southern England which, in her view, were inspired by the "Syrian designs" on imported art works. Griffith’s unsubstantiated hypothesis garnered little subsequent attention.

Passing at some point into private hands, this crozier segment was first documented in the collection of M. Lippens of Ghent, who exhibited it in Paris at the World’s Fair in 1878 (Fleury 1889). At some point during its modern history, it was attached to a modern ivory crozier head representing Saint Michael battling a serpent or dragon (acc. no. 13.46b). First published and reproduced in 1889, early commentators overlooked the stark differences between the style, iconography, and quality of the two pieces, instead celebrating them together as "the most remarkable [crozier] that we know" in terms of "craftsmanship, material, and elegant composition" (Fleury 1889). Following a brief period in the collection of publishing mogul Julius Heinrich Wilhelm Campe of Hamburg, The Met acquired both the knob and the crozier head through the dealer Julius Böhler of Munich and removed the modern crozier head in 1928.


Further Reading:

Max Harris, Christ on a Donkey: Palm Sunday, Triumphal Entries, and Blasphemous Pageants (Leeds: Arc Humanities Press, 2019), pp. 9-15.



Catalogue Entry by Nicole D. Pulichene, Andrew W. Mellon Curatorial and Research Collections Specialist, Department of Medieval Art and The Cloisters, 2020–2022

M. Lippens, Ghent (1886); Julius Heinrich Wilhelm Campe, Hamburg (sold after 1910); [ Julius Böhler Kunsthandlung, Munich (sold 1913)]

Rohault de Fleury, Charles, and George Rohault de Fleury. La Messe: études archéologiques sur ses monuments. Vol. 8. Paris: Veuve A. Morel et Cie, 1889. p. 100, pl. DCL.

Griffith, Beatrice Fox. Treasure Under Glass. Harrisburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 1963. p. 40, pl. XXXIV.