Audio Stop 224

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A cup carved from stone is mounted in gold fittings to create a jeweled chalice with handles that curl up each side and a tall, flaring foot below. The stone of the cup is swirled with shell pink and rust brown, and carved to create vertical ridges. The gold rim around the lip flares outward and is set with a band of alternating pairs of small, white pearls and mostly garnet-red stones, though one stone to our right is a muted blue. In this photograph, the handles curve up each side from the base of the stone cup to the gold lip, where the handle divides into two scrolling tendrils on either side of a teardrop shaped center, like curling petals. The base and foot are as tall as the stone cup and gold lip. A knob-like form just below the stone cup is set with deep red and jade green stones around its center, and rows of small pearls around the narrow top and bottom of the knob. The knob is chased to create a pattern of scrolling vines, like tracery. The flaring foot below is also chased with the same pattern, surrounding gold, oval medallions set at regular intervals in the foot. In our view, the medallion to the left shows a bunch of grapes and the center is a portrait of a bearded man with a halo, holding his right hand up with his first two fingers raised. The details on the medallion to our right are difficult to make out but it could be a sheaf of wheat. Small, round jewels are set above and below each medallion, and between each one.

French 12th Century (mounting); Alexandrian 2nd/1st Century B.C.(cup)

Chalice of the Abbot Suger of Saint-Denis, 2nd/1st century B.C. (cup); 1137-1140 (mounting)

West Building, Ground Floor — Gallery G18

Curator Alison Luchs explores the craftsmanship and beliefs surrounding this 2nd-century BCE religious sculpture.

Read full audio transcript

ALISON LUCHS:
I’m Alison Luchs, Curator of Early European Sculpture at the National Gallery of Art.

When you look at this cup, you notice a wonderful sense of movement that pervades both the stone, the swirling, spiraling veining that winds its way over the surface and is broken up by the fluting and the spiral coils of wire that cover the surfaces of the goldsmith work.

NARRATOR:
This chalice was made around a thousand years ago in France, by expert craftsmen working for the Abbot of the royal Catholic church of Saint-Denis, just outside Paris. They started with an ancient carved stone cup.

ALISON LUCHS:
We believe it was made in ancient Egypt, in the first or second century B.C., so just a little before the time of Cleopatra. And it represents the belief that beautiful, veined stones were infused with a kind of divine power and lifeforce.

NARRATOR:
The craftsmen set it in gilded silver, studded with jewels and decorated with golden filigree wire in coiling patterns.

The chalice, placed on the church altar, would have contained wine made sacred by the priest. Pointed arches and stained-glass windows allowed richly colored light to flood the Gothic-style church – a feature also reflected in the chalice.

ALISON LUCHS:
What the chalice has in common with this is not so much the shapes as the belief in the power of light to represent holiness and to bring people closer to God.

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