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The Royal Gold Cup or Saint Agnes Cup is a solid gold covered cup lavishly decorated with enamel and pearls. It was made for the French royal family at the end of the 14th century, and later belonged to several English monarchs before spending nearly 300 years in Spain. It has been in the British Museum since 1892, where it is normally on display in Room 40, and is generally agreed to be the outstanding surviving example of late medieval French plate. It has been described as "the one surviving royal magnificence of the International Gothic age";〔Lightbown, 78〕 and according to Thomas Hoving, former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, "of all the princely jewels and gold that have come down to us, this is the most spectacular—and that includes the great royal treasures."〔Hoving, 61, calling it the "Saint Agnes Cup"; in French it is always the ''Coupe de Saint Agnes'', as in Neil Stratford.〕 The cup is made of solid gold, stands 23.6 cm (9.25 inches) high with a diameter of 17.8 cm (6.94 inches) at its widest point,〔"British Museum collection database"〕 and weighs 1.935 kg (4.26 lb).〔Dalton, 1; Steane, 135〕 It has a cover that lifts off, but the triangular stand on which it once stood is now lost. The stem of the cup has twice been extended by the addition of cylindrical bands, so that it was originally much shorter,〔There are illustrations of the original shape in Dalton's Figure 1 (drawing), and Cherry, p. 24 (edited photo, also in Henderson, 138). However, Neil Stratford, 263, raises the possibility that there was originally a longer stem.〕 giving the overall shape "a typically robust and stocky elegance."〔Lightbown, 81〕 The original decorated knop or finial on the cover has been lost, and a moulding decorated with 36 pearls has been removed from the outer edge of the cover; a strip of gold with jagged edges can be seen where it was attached. Presumably it matched the one still in place round the foot of the cup.〔Dalton, 1, and Lightbown, 81–82. Neil Stratford, 263, adds that the hexagonal top of the cover is modern. See Provenance section for the missing parts.〕 The gold surfaces are decorated with scenes in ''basse-taille'' enamel with translucent colours that reflect light from the gold beneath; many areas of gold both underneath the enamel and in the background have engraved and ''pointillé'' decoration worked in the gold. In particular the decoration features large areas of translucent red, which have survived in excellent condition. This colour, known as ''rouge clair'', was the most difficult to achieve technically, and highly prized for this and the brilliance of the colour when it was done successfully.〔"British Museum Investigation"〕 Scenes from the life of Saint Agnes run round the top of the cover and the sloping underside of the main body. The symbols of the Four Evangelists run round the foot of the cup, and there are enamel medallions at the centre of the inside of both the cup and the cover. The lower of the two added bands contains enamel Tudor roses on a diapered pointillé background; this was apparently added under Henry VIII. The upper band has an engraved inscription filled in with black enamel, with a barrier of laurel branches in green to mark off the end of the inscription from its beginning.〔Dalton, 1–4; "British Museum collection database"〕 The cup came to the British Museum with a custom-made hexagonal case of leather on a wood frame, with iron lock, handles and mounts. This was either made at the same time or soon after the cup, and has incised and stamped foliate decoration and a blackletter inscription: ''YHE.SUS.O.MARYA.O.MARYA YHE SUS''.〔(Wood and leather case ) British Museum collection database, accessed June 16, 2010. Registration number: 1892,0501.2〕 ==Provenance== There is no firm evidence as to the date and circumstances of the creation of the cup. It is first clearly documented in an inventory from 1391 of the valuables belonging to Charles VI of France (reigned 1380–1422), surviving in two copies in the Bibliothèque nationale de France.〔Dalton, 8–9. The inventories are BnF Mss Fr 21445 (f.1b) and 21446 (f.45b)〕 This lists: A hanap of gold, all its cover well and richly enamelled on the outside with the life of Madame St Agnes; and the cresting of the foot is garnished with 26 pearls, and the crown around the cover with 36 pearls; and the finial of the said cover (is) garnished with four sapphires, three balas rubies and fifteen pearls. And it weighs 9 marcs 3 ounces of gold. and the said hanap rests on a stand of gold in the form of a tripod, and in the middle of the tripod is represented Our Lady in a sun on a ground of clear red, and the three feet of the tripod are formed by three winged dragons. The said hanap and cover were given to the king by monseigneur the duc de Berry on his journey into Touraine in the year 91.〔Translation from Dalton, 8–9. Crucially, the number of pearls around the foot agrees with the current number. A "marc" is approximately 249 grams, so allowing for the changes to the cup, the weight given is consistent. The stand weighed 3 marcs and 5 ounces. See also Jenny Stratford, 320〕 John, Duke of Berry (1340–1416) was Charles VI's uncle and a powerful figure in the kingdom, as well as the most famous and extravagant collector and commissioner of art of his day. He is still best known for commissioning the ''Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry'', the famous International Gothic illuminated manuscript, and also commissioned the Holy Thorn Reliquary, now in the British Museum.〔Cherry, 39–43〕 The young king Charles had been forced to remove his uncle from governorships after the latter's rapacious conduct had led to unrest, and the meeting in 1391 marked their reconciliation after a period of bad relations.〔Dalton, 9〕 Lavish gifts among the Valois court circle were routine,〔The subject of Buettner's article; Cherry, 47, gives alarming statistics〕 and on this occasion Berry had special reason to be generous. The cup appears in another inventory of Charles V in 1400,〔Jenny Stratford, 320〕 and then is not recorded until it appears as the property of another royal uncle, and collector, John of Lancaster, 1st Duke of Bedford (1389–1435), son of Henry IV, who was briefly Regent of both France and England for his infant nephew Henry VI. How he acquired the cup is not known, but he would have received many gifts from Charles VI, and had both lent the king money and bought from him things such as the library of the Palais du Louvre,〔Dalton, 10; Jenny Stratford 60–61, on the cup between 1400 and entering Bedford's possession, and generally on Bedford's property.〕 in the uneasy period when Charles had made peace with the English and made Henry V his heir. After the death of his brother Henry V, Bedford struggled to stem the resurgent French resistance, which was energised by Joan of Arc. He died in Normandy in 1435, leaving Henry VI as his heir.〔Jenny Stratford's book is on Bedford's inventories, and includes a brief biography (Chapter 1) and chapter 5 on him as a "Patron and Collector"; Dalton, 10〕 The cup is more briefly described as the first item in a list of valuables received from Bedford's estate prepared for Henry VI's minister Cardinal Henry Beaufort, but the tripod is not mentioned, some of the jewels are missing, and the subject is misidentified as the life of Saint Suzanna not Saint Agnes. For some reason it does not appear in a royal inventory of 1441;〔Jenny Stratford, 319–325; Dalton, 8. It is the only surviving piece of metalwork from the list (J. Stratford, 319)〕 Jenny Stratford suggests that this was because Beaufort still had it at this point.〔Jenny Stratford, 48〕 Another possibility is that it had been pawned, as it was in 1449 and again in 1451, on both occasions to finance England's increasingly unsuccessful efforts to hold on to French territory;〔Dalton, 8〕 The cup first appears in the records of the new Tudor dynasty under Henry VIII in 1521. By now the cover had lost the finial "garnished with four sapphires, three balas rubies and fifteen pearls" described in Charles VI's inventory and had a new one of gold in the form of a closed, or "imperial" crown. This matches a propaganda drive at this time by Henry to assert England as an "empire", a contemporary sense meaning a state recognising no superior, though the Great Seal of England had already used a closed crown since 1471.〔Neil Stratford, 261〕 Other uses had probably been found for the jewels of the old finial; it is assumed that the lower band with the Tudor roses was added in Henry's reign,〔Dalton, 1, 8〕 as part of a programme of adding Tudor badges to possessions inherited from earlier dynasties, which covered tapestries, illuminated manuscripts and buildings such as King's College Chapel in Cambridge.〔Anglo, 198-199〕 The cup is described in inventories in 1532 and after Henry's death in 1547, and then under Elizabeth I it was inventoried in 1574 and 1596.〔Dalton 8, Jenny Stratford, 324, 320; the cup appears in all known Tudor inventories of the royal plate.〕 When James I succeeded to the English throne in 1603, one of his first priorities was to end the Anglo-Spanish War, which had been dragging on since 1585. A Spanish delegation arrived for the Somerset House Conference, which concluded with a treaty signed in 1604. The leader of the Habsburg diplomats was Juan Fernández de Velasco, 5th Duke of Frías and Constable of Castile. The upper extension to the stem of the cup has a Latin inscription that translates as: This cup of solid gold, a relic of the sacred treasure of England and a memorial to the peace made between the kings, the Constable Juan de Velasco, returning thence after successfully accomplishing his mission, presented as an offering to Christ the Peacemaker.〔Translation "British Museum collection database". Dalton has the reading "sacred (royal) treasure", p. 5.〕 The gift of "some 70 items of silver and gold plate" by James to the Constable, of which the cup was the most notable item, is documented on both the English and Spanish sides;〔Ungerer, quoted here, has details and references〕 the Constable wrote an account of his mission on his return, which mentions the gift from James. The Constable had previously presented both James and the queen with elaborate cups, among other valuable gifts.〔Dalton, 6. Ungerer describes several surviving bills of exchange; most of the Spanish gifts were bought in the Spanish Netherlands.〕 According to Pauline Croft, "With his usual over-generosity the king gave the departing envoys around half the large gold vessels from the royal possessions he had inherited from Elizabeth. The Constable himself received a stupendous gift of plate, including possibly the most venerable item in the collection, known as "the Royal Gold Cup of the Kings of France and England."〔Croft〕 In 1610 the Constable gave the cup to a convent in Medina de Pomar, near Burgos, as the inscription describes.〔Jenny Stratford, 325, has an extract from the list of gifts.〕 His deed of gift survives, and records that the gift was on condition that the cup was never alienated by the convent. A marginal note on the deed, in the Constable's own handwriting, records that he had obtained the permission of the Archbishop of Toledo, Bernardo de Sandoval y Rojas, for the cup to be used as a ciborium, or container for consecrated hosts. By this period a rule of the church normally forbade the use of vessels decorated on their inner surface as ciboria.〔Dalton, 6〕 The cup stayed in the convent until 1882 when the nuns were short of funds and wanted to sell it. It was at some point during this period that the pearl border to the cover and the Tudor finial were removed.〔 The nuns decided they would get a better price in Paris than in Spain, and the cup was entrusted to Simon Campo, a priest, who took it to Paris and approached several leading dealers and collectors. There had been a spate of forgeries of medieval objects, and the Parisians were suspicious, until one, Baron Jerome Pichon, researched the second added cylinder and was sufficiently convinced that this was the cup documented in 1604 to make a rather low offer, which was accepted. In the course of his researches the baron had contacted the current Duke of Frías, who had supplied useful information, and then initially congratulated the buyer on his purchase. However, on looking further into the matter the duke realized that the sale was contrary to the 1610 deed of gift he had discovered in the family archives, and sued in the French courts to recover the cup.〔Dalton 6, Jenny Stratford 320〕 The duke eventually lost his case in 1891,〔So Dalton, 6; both Jenny Stratford and Neil Stratford (p. 263) mention a judgment of 1885, but there were perhaps appeals.〕 enabling a further sale that had been set up by Baron Pichon to proceed. This was to the leading firm of Messrs. Wertheimer of Bond Street in London,〔〔See also (The Wertheimer Family ), from the Jewish Museum (New York).〕 where the cup was seen by Augustus Wollaston Franks, who had been Keeper of British and Mediaeval Antiquities and Ethnography at the British Museum since 1866, and was president of the Society of Antiquaries. Samson Wertheimer agreed "with much public spirit" to sell the cup to the British Museum for the £8,000 (£ in ) it had cost the firm.〔 Franks was worried by the new American collectors such as J. P. Morgan, and in 1891 wrote to Sir Henry Tate, of Tate Gallery fame: "A very wonderful gold cup has appeared returned to this country after an absence of 287 years, and I am anxious to see it placed in the National Museum and not removed to America."〔Wilson, 175〕 He tried to get wealthy individuals to subscribe £500 (£ in ) each, but even with a grant of £2,000 from HM Treasury could not raise the price. He was forced to put up £5,000 of his own money temporarily while he continued to try to get smaller amounts from others, and succeeded in 1892 when the Treasury agreed to contribute the final £830; "to Franks this was his greatest acquisition, and the one of which he was most proud."〔Wilson, 175–176 (quotation, 176).〕 Apart from the Treasury, the £500 contributors were Franks and Wertheimer, the Worshipful Company of Goldsmiths, Charles Drury Edward Fortnum, the Duke of Northumberland, Lord Savile, Lord Iveagh and the Earl of Crawford.〔Dalton, 6; he lists some donors of smaller amounts. See also Wilson, 175–176 for more detail on the timing. Samson Wertheimer died in 1892, and the sale was actually concluded by his son Asher and other heirs, and the donation by them was in his memory.〕 In 1901 Morgan succeeded in buying the Lindau Gospels in London, which the museum had also wanted.〔Needham, 24〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Royal Gold Cup」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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