A PAINTED CASKET IN THE VICTORIA AND ALBERT MUSEUM, LONDON

This paper seeks to reassess the iconography and the physical condition of a fourteenth-century carved and painted casket in order to review its geographic origins and to consider its function. The intriguing, but under-researched casket (now in the Victoria and Albert Museum) has been discussed mainly in terms of the Tristan iconography of its lid, apparently derived from a German version of the Tristan story. Yet the casket has been generally described as English or French. In order to review these conflicting assumptions, and to exclude the possibility of a nineteenth-century forgery, the casket was reassessed technically, and the well-preserved polychromy was found to be consistent with a fourteenth-century date. Using stylistic and iconographic analyses, a Netherlandish origin of the casket (around 1350–70) is tentatively proposed. Within the context of the controversial discussion of Minneka¨stchen, the casket is finally interpreted both as a practical object and as the bearer of a coded language of love.