Candlestick with a Woman on Horseback
Unknown · 1140-1160
A woman sits on a horse and holds up in her right hand a branch whose spreading top forms the drip pan for a candle. The whole object is cast in bronze and stands just over twenty centimetres high. Figural candlesticks of this kind were among the small luxuries of Romanesque households, and the choice of a rider rather than a saint or a beast suggests a secular owner. Look at the stiff, frontal pose of the horse, the simplified folds of the rider's dress and the way the branch grows straight up from her hand like a stem, all typical of twelfth-century bronze casting in northern Germany. The piece has been attributed to Magdeburg, though this remains a hypothesis.
The candlestick belonged to Alexandre-Charles Sauvageot, a Paris customs official and violinist who assembled one of the great collections of medieval and Renaissance objects. His purchase book records buying it in eighteen forty four for sixty francs as a fourteenth-century candlestick with a woman on horseback. Sauvageot gave his whole collection to the Louvre in eighteen fifty six. It was on deposit at the Musée de Cluny from nineteen fifty six to nineteen eighty six.
Did You Know? Sauvageot paid sixty francs for the candlestick in eighteen forty four and thought it was two centuries younger than it is.
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