On Italian Copper Champleve Enamels of the Thirteenth Century

Abstract

THE claims for a French origin of the copper champleve enamels of what may be termed broadly 'Southern' (as distinguishable from Germanic or Mosan, which we may call 'Northern') types, long widely accepted as substantially correct have of recent years been challenged by criticism based in part on material not taken into account when those claims were formulated. The case for the manufacture in Spain, of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, of many (including some of the finest) of the enamels long commonly attributed to 'Limoges,' and for an inception in Spain of the mediaeval Limousin enamelling industry, has already been set out in some detail.1 Now, in the second2 of the volumes of the fine catalogue of the Museo Sacro of the Vatican Library, Stohlman adumbrates a case for an Italian origin for a number of 'Limousin' objects, and supplies us, through the excellent photographic reproductions accompanying the descriptive text, with a considerable body of material for the investigation of the important matter of enamelling in Italy of the thirteenth century. The Introduction to the detailed list of the Museo Sacro's enamels includes a section wherein Stohlman discusses the question of copper champleve enamelling in mediaeval Italy; a question of peculiar consequence, as concerned with the Museo's enamels, because of the probability that many of them came to the Vatican from Italian dioceses. Italian copper champleve enamels of the fourteenth century are distinctive, and their nationality has long been acknowledged. For the twelfth century, Stohlman claims the plaque of St. Nicholas of Bari crowning King Roger II of Sicily, in pure champleve, and the Palazzo Venezia's image of Christ, in a mixture of cloisonne and a sort of champleve, which he (following von Falke) believes to have been made in Italy. And he remarks that if copper champleve enamels were made in Italy in the twelfth century and in the fourteenth, it is very probable that they were made there also in the thirteenth. My own view is that, quite apart from any question as to whether copper champleve enamels were or were not made in twelfth-century Italy and in that connexion we should not fail to recall that their vitreous, as dissociable from their structural, technique had long before the twelfth 'century been applied in Italy by makers of cloisonne enamels in precious metal there appears no good reason why Italian metalworkers of the thirteenth century should not have made such enamels. By that time the Limousin workshops certainly, and those of Spain very probably, were exporting enamels of the sort in quantities; and one may well presume that Italian craftsmen of the period would have had few scruples against turning a more or less honest penny by copying, for local use, the products of those workshops. While I do not always agree with Stohlman in his attributions