Matter and Meaning of Mother-of-Pearl: The Origins of Allegory in the Spheres of Things

Abstract

The first, theoretical part of this study pursues the question of how meaning was generated and how an ambivalent—or polyvalent—object, for example, an allegory, was or can be understood. The interweaving of acts of interpretations involving things, ideas, nature, and—in the specific case of a work of art—the artist, that is to say, the material history of matter and artistic traditions, can be described as allegoresis. As this study demonstrates, the scholar who most vigorously shed light on the medieval exegesis of nature through allegoresis was Friedrich Ohly.The second part of the essay is a case study of an object executed in émail en ronde bosse, combined with an extremely fine relief carved in mother-of-pearl, that unfolds the various layers of the object's meaning through an analysis of the ambivalence of its iconographic motifs, its cultural origin (the courtly practices of gift-giving in French families), and its artistic origin in Paris about 1400, in the workshop of a goldsmith with an extraordinary expertise in only recently developed artistic techniques (rouge cler, émail blanc, painted enamel, and pointillé). The aim of this article is not to provide one interpretation of this object but, rather, to elucidate its ability to oscillate between multiple possible meanings and to reveal how insisting on just one of them would deprive the object of its ability to function in different contexts—secular and sacred.