Reliquary Casket of Saint Thomas Becket
Unknown · c. 1220-1230
A smaller and slightly later Becket casket, made in Limoges around twelve twenty to twelve thirty, tells the same story in a more compact form. Two armed men advance on the archbishop as he celebrates mass at the altar, one of them raising his sword over the saint's head. Figures and furnishings are reserved in gilded copper against a blue enamel ground sown with rosettes in yellow, green and red or blue and red. On the roof slope above, a circular medallion holds Thomas Becket at half length between two winged angels, an image of his glory in heaven. The short sides each carry a standing apostle, the back a field of little crosses, and the roof has a crenellated ridge. The main heads are applied in relief.
The casket was in the Moët de la Forte-Maison collection in eighteen eighty one, as a note in ink on the wooden core records, and then belonged to the architect Edouard Corroyer, restorer of Mont-Saint-Michel. His widow Pauline and daughter Marie-Adèle gave it to the Louvre in nineteen hundred and five while keeping the use of it during their lifetimes; it entered the museum in nineteen twenty three.
Did You Know? A collector wrote the date and his name in ink directly on the wooden core in January eighteen eighty one, and the note is still there.
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