Head Reliquary of Saint Martin of Soudeilles
Unknown · Head 1325-1350; bust 1400-1500; some enamels and mitre plaques replaced by copies in 1906
The bishop's head, in silver worked in repoussé, chased and gilded, looks out from under a tall mitre. The mitre's faces are engraved with leaves on a stippled ground and carry plaques of translucent enamel: ten rectangular bands and four trefoils with a frieze of gilded quatrefoils inside red circles, each holding a brightly coloured bird. The shoulders, in gilded copper, wear a chasuble whose stamped orphrey around the neck and broad engraved scrolls again stand on a stippled ground. On the chest sits a large oval cabochon of rock crystal surrounded by eight small coloured stones. The head was made in Avignon, then the papal city, in the second quarter of the fourteenth century; the bust, probably from the Limousin, was added in the fifteenth.
The reliquary comes from the church of Saint Martin at Soudeilles in the Corrèze, where it held relics of the saint. In nineteen hundred and six it was with the dealer Joseph Duveen in London, where copies of some enamels and mitre plaques were made; the American banker John Pierpont Morgan bought it in nineteen hundred and seven and gave it to the Louvre in nineteen eleven.
Did You Know? Some of the enamel plaques on the mitre are copies made in London in nineteen hundred and six, when the reliquary passed through the hands of the dealer Duveen.
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