Reliquary of the True Cross Carried by Two Angels (Jaucourt Reliquary)
Unknown · Byzantine reliquary 1100-1300; mount c. 1345-1360
Two kneeling Gothic angels in gilded silver, their faces and hands painted, hold aloft a Byzantine reliquary of the True Cross. The reliquary itself is a shallow box with raised edges and a sliding lid, its wooden core covered with repoussé gilded silver. Inside, below the busts of the archangels Michael and Gabriel, Constantine and his mother Helena in imperial dress stand on either side of the cross-shaped cavity with its double crossbar, recalling the emperor's conversion and Helena's finding of the Cross. The box was made in Byzantium between the twelfth and thirteenth centuries; the angels and the gilded copper base were added in Champagne around thirteen forty five to thirteen sixty.
An inscription in French on the base says that the noble lady Marguerite d'Arc, dame de Jaucourt, had the reliquary mounted in this way, and asks the reader to pray that God grant her a good life and a good end. Her arms and those of Jaucourt appear on enamelled plaques and on the angels' clasps. The object stayed in the parish church of Jaucourt in the Aube until nineteen fifteen, when the Louvre bought it from the village.
Did You Know? The inscription asks every reader to pray for Marguerite d'Arc, so visitors have been reminded of her name for more than six centuries.
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