Enamel Plaque: Warrior Fighting a Dragon
Unknown · c. 1160-1170
Ten centimetres square, bordered by a beaded edge and pierced with twelve fixing holes, the plaque shows a knight killing a dragon at close quarters, driving his sword through its body as the beast writhes against him. The subject is unusual for its date and was surely read as the struggle of good against evil. The plaque was made together with a companion showing a centaur or sagittarius, and the two belong to a set of twelve known plaques that once covered a cross, an altarpiece or an altar frontal. The technique is champlevé: the copper is hollowed out, the cavities filled with coloured glass enamel, and the remaining metal surfaces gilded, a method that reached its height around eleven fifty at the abbey of Stavelot in the Meuse valley, in present-day Belgium.
The plaque was in the collection of Hollingworth Magniac in England and was sold at Christie's in London in eighteen ninety two, where the dealer Goldschmidt bought it for ninety four pounds. It then joined the Paris collection of Victor Martin le Roy, whose family gave fifteen medieval and Renaissance objects to the Louvre in nineteen thirteen; the plaque itself entered the museum in nineteen twenty nine.
Did You Know? Twelve plaques from the same set are known today, scattered after the object they decorated was taken apart.
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