The Veroli Casket in London's Victoria strange—at least to modern tastes—reminis and Albert Museum is one of the canonical cent of Cosimo de' Medici sending to his works of what scholars, through the early bride-to-be, Eleonora de Toledo, a portrait of modem period, have been terming Byzantine himself in the guise of Orpheus, scarcely a art (Fig. I).1 Already by 1862 in that great happy omen for their future wedded bliss.5 public collection, it had been described and Whatever the occasion, one is left to wonder published before its acquisition, with special about the original contents of the box. attention paid to its remarkable iconography. Some limited scholarly discussion has One of the outstanding and relatively rare been devoted to the contents of such an ivory earlier medieval examples of sub(and, more often, bone) object. In an article ject matter decorating an object presumably addressing the materials, workmanship, and for secular use, it has six ivory panels, two interpretation of this class of object, Cutler on the front, two on the back, one on each said nothing about what they might have side, and a long, narrow one on the flat top, contained. A few years later, speaking about featuring such subjects as the Sacrifice of the related but different round ivory boxes, Iphigenia, the Rape of Europa, and lots of pyxides, he wrote that pyxides were not putti doing strange things such as kissing and designed with specific functions in mind but suckling a tiger or enacting a puttesque were for the most part versatile receptacles, parody of the Rape of Europa. No one has stamped out (as it were) from the tusk and tried to turn this iconographie array into sold 'off the shelf' for a variety of pur some manner of religious allegory, and no poses.6 He briefly discussed some attempts one has thought that the object was made to deduce function from iconography, men with religious use in mind, although when tioning an article published a few years be first noticed in the Cistercian abbey of fore by John Duffy and Gary Vikan, which Casamari, near Veroli, it was in fact being begins by offering an emendation to the text used as a reliquary.2 Long presented as emof John Moschus's early seventh-century blematic of the classicizing tradition in ConPratum spirituale, specifically to a passage stantinopolitan art, the subject matter was referring to a container for gemstones, which more recently, and persuasively, presented by Duffy and Vikan interpreted as a box Anthony Cutler as being fundamentally pafor keeping precious objects. They observed rodic rather than reverential.3 Its purpose rethat whatever Moschus was referring to was mains unclear, albeit in the most recent something used not in altar service, but in comprehensive study Paul Williamson has the private realm, secular in a broader sense suggested that it might have served as a even if perhaps having religious content.7 wedding casket, given as a present.4 Such They reviewed various scholarly suggestions an interpretation is plausible although a bit for small boxes, observing that the most