Germany, Augsburg or Nuremberg
Circa 1520–30
High relief, enameled gold and silver
Height: 6.4, width: 4.5 cm
Provenance
Lord Francis Pelham Clinton Hope, 8th Duke of Newcastle (1866–1941), London;
L. Harris, London;
Joseph Brummer, Auction Parke-Bernet, Part I, 20–23 April 1949, no. 705;
Melvin Goodman, Auction Parke-Bernet, 24 April 1969;
Collection Paul W. Doll jr., New York, until 2020.
The relief depicts Christ in a purple robe kneeling under the weight of the Cross that has since been lost. He is just leaving the city of Jerusalem on the way to Mount Golgotha where the crucifixion is to take place. Two figures in the group on the far left are the Virgin Mary and St. John, standing below the arch of a building. They and three more companions are dressed in violet, blue, turquoise and green robes, all contributing to the dynamic colouration of the relief. In the background is a hill with a castle on top, above which is a translucent blue sky. The vegetation in the foreground is modelled in the round.
The relief was made using the ronde-bosse enameling technique. In such works, a goldsmith creates the figures out of gold or silver (hammered or cast) and then coats them with a glass paste that is then melted to form enamel. The figures would then be placed on a silver or gold plate, on which the coloured, mostly translucent glass forming the background is melted between gold bars. The colour palette of our relief ranges from transparent blue and green for the background, to opaque white for the faces and turquoise, cobalt, purple and green for the robes. These precious shimmering colours give the small relief an incomparably elevated character; even the curly hair is made of gold shavings.
The Carrying of the Cross is a traditional scene from the Passion of Christ. Our enamel plaque was originally part of a series comprising several scenes. Four other gold enamel works from this series belong to the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The plaques are all the same size with a round finish at the top and are comparable in their artistic execution. The character of the faces and robes, the treatment of the background with white, gold-ornamented architecture, right down to details such as the plants made of emerald-green as well as the small-scale leaves on gold wire in the foreground, suggest they all belong to the same group. These scenes from the Passion could have adorned a reliquary box or a casket.
Another enamel plaque, also with an oval finish and depicting Christ in front of Pontius Pilate, also fits into this group. This enamel was attached to a pax board at a later date and was donated to the Louvre in Paris in 1901 by Adolph de Rothschild.