Crozier of Abbot Aimon de Mollain
Unknown · c. 1200
The curling head of an abbot's staff, made in Limoges around twelve hundred, ends in a stylised palmette flower. Start at the socket, where three medallions hold haloed saints at half length, engraved in reserve against turquoise enamel, with interlaced scrolls and fleurons of red, green, yellow, pale blue and white on a lapis blue ground. The flattened spherical knop above is a separate, movable piece of chased and pierced copper with four medallions of haloed angels, each holding a book and raising a hand in blessing, their heads cast in relief and applied; four smaller medallions with four-petalled flowers link them. The palette of seven enamel colours shows the Limoges workshops at their most ambitious.
The crozier was found in March eighteen sixty two under the paving of the chapel of Saint Nicholas in the abbey church of Saint Peter at Luxeuil in eastern France, at the site of the tomb of Abbot Aimon de Mollain, with whom it had been buried. The town of Luxeuil sold it to the Louvre in eighteen sixty four.
Did You Know? The crozier spent some six centuries underground before workmen lifted the chapel floor in eighteen sixty two.
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