Box with Scenes from the Romance, “The Chatelaine de Vergy”

This box is composed of the top, front, and back of an ivory box made in Paris the first half of the fourteenth century. The left and right sides are modern replacements. It was originally composed of six panels of ivory, including a now-missing bottom. When first made, rabbet joints carved into the interiors of the five lower panels allowed them to fit snugly together and an armature of silver or copper alloy bars ran along the raised, flat bands that frame the carved scenes on the box’s face. Rivets passed through the bars and ivory panels, providing shape and support for the box in the place of the current particle-board armature. An external hinge attaches the top to the metal bars holding together the back. A further metal element forming a lock plate once occupied the damaged, square frame on the box’s front. The central bar on the lid continued down the front of the box, where it could slide into the lock to securely fasten the top closed. The two perforated, flat, round spaces on the lid once formed the bases for a handle.


The carved imagery represents scenes from The Chatelaine of Vergy, an anonymous, thirteenth century octosyllable poem. This popular story recounts a love affair between a lady (the Chatelaine of Vergy) and an unnamed knight that ends in tragedy as a result of jealous and vengeful gossip. The narrative begins on the lid, which is divided into eight scenes. On the upper left, the unnamed knight professes his love to the Chatelaine of Vergy, who accepts him as her lover on the condition that he will tell nobody about the affair, which he swears to do in the scene to the right. According to their agreement, the knight will know that the lady is free to meet when she releases her dog, seen in the lower left corner, and it runs to the knight, to the right. On the third scene from the bottom left, the couple is seen embracing with the dog next to them. The romance is interrupted when the Duchess of Burgundy, smitten by the knight, makes a pass at him, as seen in the third seen from the left in the top register. In the upper right-hand corner, the humiliated Duchess tells her husband, the Duke, that the knight made a pass at her. In the right corner, the knight swears to the king that he is not interested in the duchess. He proves that he already has a happy romance by allowing the duke to spy on his tryst with the Chatelaine of Vergy, as seen in the first two scenes on the back. In the third and fourth, the duchess wheedles the duke for the identity of the knight’s lover. The missing side panel likely represented the story’s next scene, in which the duchess confronted the Chatelaine about her illicit affair at a party. On the front of the box, the humiliated Chatelaine collapses in shock and dies in an inner room. Her lover then finds her dead and kills himself, whereupon the duke takes the sword and kills his own wife, whose death likely occupied the missing side panel.


Ivory carvers in northern France developed the form of articulated rectangular lock box to store small personal items. Constructed out of slabs of ivory reinforced with metal, their mechanics contrast with ivory coffers made in Byzantium (acc. no. 17.190.235) and the wider Mediterranean (acc. no. 17.190.241). These latter are typically made of ivory veneers affixed by dowels to wooden cores, and frequently feature tops that slide along grooves rather than open upward by means of articulated hinges. While these luxurious foreign boxes likely inspired the vogue for ivory boxes in France, comparison to a fifteenth-century wooden chest in the Museum’s collection (acc. no. 13.205.2) demonstrate that the mechanics of Gothic boxes more closely resemble the large, iron-reinforced wooden storage chests produced locally. That local ivory carvers and woodworkers should share construction techniques should not surprise modern viewers. Ivory carvers and woodworkers used the same set of tools, and as Paris’s guild statutes, the Livre Des Metiers de Paris, demonstrate, ivory carvers frequently worked in wood as well.


Continuity in use also suggested the borrowing of construction techniques from large wood chests. Like wooden boxes, precious ivory boxes were used to keep precious objects safe. Indeed, they likely spent most of their time inside of the larger, wooden chests that they so resembled. Itinerant households of fourteenth-century European courts placed a priority on security and were accustomed to placing valuables within nested layers of locked barriers. While most rooms of medieval house were open to the public, aristocrats constructed off-limits safehouses within castle keeps and set aside private retreats called garderobes (literally, closets) within their apartments to store expensive materials. These rooms were lined by iron-reinforced wooden boxes stuffed with bolts of cloth, tapestries, painted manuscripts, and precious plate. The wooden boxes often had internal shelves or compartments for smaller boxes. This arrangement may be seen in the miniature of The Birth of John the Baptist Turin-Milan Hours, where a large, open chest is stuffed with smaller boxes made of leather and bark (Turin, Biblioteca Nazionale Reale, MS. 47 fol. 93v). Where a jewelry box today might be expected to sit passively on a bedroom dresser, an ivory box from the Middle Ages, such as the present example, would likely have been moved in and out of these larger chests as its contents were used. Such boxes thus needed to be easy to pick up and manipulate. Handles made this simple, and the metal bars and locks discouraged break-ins when the owner was not around--a significant concern when households were large and mobile aristocrats were frequently far away from home.


Further Reading:

Paul Williamson and Glyn Davies, Medieval Ivory Carvings, 1200-1550, Part II (London: V&A Publishing, 2014), pp. 653-706.

Miss A. Kemp Welch, The La Chatelaine de Vergy, a romance of the 13th century (London: Chatto and Windus, 1907).

Richard H. Randall Jr., "Popular Romances Carved in Ivory." In Images in Ivory: Precious Objects of the Gothic Age, edited by Peter Barnet (Detroit: Detroit Institute of Arts, 1997), pp. 62-79.

Laila Gross, "'La Chastelaine de Vergi' Carved in Ivory," Viator 10 (1979), pp. 311-321.

Paula Mae Carns, "Remembering 'Floire et Blancheflor': Gothic Secular Ivories and the Arts of Memory," Studies in Iconography 32 (2011), pp. 121-154.


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

Sir Francis Douce (British); Sir Samuel Rush Meyrick ; Charles Mannheim, Paris (by at least 1898); J. Pierpont Morgan (American), London and New York (until 1917)

McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College. "Memory and The Middle Ages," February 17–May 21, 1995.

Detroit Institute of Arts. "Images in Ivory: Precious Objects of the Gothic Age," March 9–May 11, 1997.

Walters Art Museum. "Images in Ivory: Precious Objects of the Gothic Age," June 22–August 31, 1997.

Meyrick, Samuel Rush. "On Ancient Caskets of Ivory and Wood." The Gentleman's Magazine, n. s., 3, no. 157 (February 1835). no. II, p. 199.

Meyrick, Samuel Rush. "Descriptive Catalogue of the Doucean Museum, now at Goodrich Court." The Gentleman's Magazine, n.s., 5, no. 159 (April 1836). no. 9, p. 382.

South Kensington Museum. A Description of the Ivories, Ancient & Mediaeval, in the South Kensington Museum, edited by William Maskell. London: Chapman & Hall, 1872. no. 22, p. 180.

Reusens, Edmond Henri Joseph, ed. Exposition Rétrospective d'Art Industriel, Bruxelles 1888: Catalogue Officiel. Brussels: P. Weissenbruch, 1888. no. 1180, p. 222.

Darcel, Alfred, and Emile Molinier, ed. Exposition rétrospective de l'art française au Trocadéro. Exposition universelle de 1889. Lille: L. Danel, 1889. no. 122, p. 18.

Molinier, Emile. Catalogue des Ivoires. Paris: Musée du Louvre, 1896. pp. 152–53.

Molinier, Emile. Collection Charles Mannheim: Objets d'Art. Paris: s.n., 1898. no. 15, pp. 7–11, ill. unnumbered plate.

Borinski, Karl. "La Chastelaine de Vergy in der Kunst des Mittelalters." Monatshefte für Kunstwissenschaft 2, no. 1 (January 1909). p. 59.

Dalton, O. M. Catalogue of the Ivory Carvings of the Christian Era with Examples of Mohammedan Art and Carvings in Bone in the Department of British and Mediaeval Antiquities and Ethnography of the British Museum. London: British Museum, 1909. p. 124.

Loomis, Roger Sherman. "A Medieval Ivory Casket." Art in America 5, no. 1 (December 1916). pp. 19–20, fig. 2.

Koechlin, Raymond. Les Ivoires Gothiques Français: Volume I, Text. Paris: Editions Auguste Picard, 1924. no. 1302, p. 509.

Koechlin, Raymond. Les Ivoires Gothiques Français: Volume II, Catalogue. Paris: Editions Auguste Picard, 1924. no. 1302, p. 461.

Bombe, Walter. "La 'Châtelaine de Vergy' en Italie." Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 5th ser., 15, no. 3 (March 1927). p. 186.

Natanson, Joseph. Gothic Ivories of the 13th and 14th Centuries. London: A. Tiranti, 1951. p. 37, fig. 41.

Erffa, Hans Martin von. "Chastelaine von Vergi." Reallexikon zur Deutschen Kunstgeschichte 3 (1954). cols. 424–26.

Locey, Michael. "La Chastelaine de Vergi." The Register of the Spencer Museum of Art 4, no. 2 (1970). pp. 5, 10–11, 17, fig. G–I.

Gross, Laila. "'La Chastelaine de Vergi' Carved in Ivory." Viator 10 (1979). p. 312 n. 7.

Randall Jr., Richard H. The Golden Age of Ivory: Gothic Carvings in North American Collections. New York: Hudson Hills Press, 1993. p. 122.

Bruckner, Matilda Tomaryn. "Reconstructing Arthurian History: Lancelot and the Vulgate Cycle." In Memory and the Middle Ages, edited by Nancy Netzer, and Virginia Reinburg. Chestnut Hill, Mass.: Boston College Museum of Art, 1995. pp. 65–66, fig. 24, ill. p. 62.

Barnet, Peter, ed. Images In Ivory: Precious Objects of the Gothic Age. Detroit: Detroit Institute of Arts, 1997. no. 61, pp. 242–44.

Randall Jr., Richard H. "Popular Romances Carved in Ivory." In Images In Ivory: Precious Objects of the Gothic Age, edited by Peter Barnet. Detroit: Detroit Institute of Arts, 1997. p. 69.

Sears, Elizabeth. "Ivory and Ivory Workers in Medieval Paris." In Images In Ivory: Precious Objects of the Gothic Age, edited by Peter Barnet. Detroit: Detroit Institute of Arts, 1997. no. 61, pp. 24, 29.

Curschmann, Michael. "Volkssprache und Bildsprache." In Literatur und Wandmalerei: Volume 1, Erscheinungsformen höfischer Kultur und ihre Träger im Mittelalter. Freiburger Colloquium 1998, edited by Eckart Conrad Lutz, Johanna Thali, and René Wetzel. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 2002. pp. 18–23, 37–38, fig. 12–13.

Gaborit-Chopin, Danielle. Ivoires Médiévaux, Ve-XVe siècle. Paris: Musée du Louvre, 2003. pp. 419–21, 559, fig. 175a.

Carns, Paula Mae. "Cutting a Fine Figure: Costume on French Gothic Ivories." Medieval Clothing and Textiles 5 (2009). pp. 58 n. 9, 80 n. 82, 90.

Carns, Paula Mae. "Remembering 'Floire et Blancheflor': Gothic Secular Ivories and the Arts of Memory." Studies in Iconography 32 (2011). p. 153 n. 54.

Ciseri, Ilaria, ed. Gli avori del Museo nazionale del Bargello. Milan: Museo Nazionale del Bargello, 2018. p. 287.