The Gloucester Candlestick
1107 to 1113
A candlestick half a metre high, cast in gilded metal and crawling with life. Its stem and base are a tangle of foliage in which tiny men, monkeys, dragons and beasts climb, bite and struggle. Some figures fight the creatures, others seem lost in the thicket, and among them the four symbols of the Evangelists sit calmly on the central knob. The whole object was cast in three pieces by the lost wax method and fitted together, and the base bears a Latin inscription recording that Abbot Peter gave it to the church of Saint Peter at Gloucester, which dates it to between 1107 and 1113. It is the finest surviving piece of English metalwork from the Romanesque period.
Look slowly and let the figures emerge, because the design was made to be read by candlelight and rewards patience. The mixture of humans and monsters in the vine scroll is often understood as an image of the struggle of the soul in a fallen world, with the light of the candle above representing salvation, and an inscription on the stem says as much: the work of virtue, shining teaching, keeps humanity from the dark. The metal contains a high proportion of silver, perhaps from melted coins, and the black inlay of niello still fills the lettering.
How the candlestick left Gloucester is unknown. It turns up in the eighteen hundreds in the treasury of Le Mans cathedral in France, with an inscription recording that a canon gave it there in the twelfth century, so it may have travelled soon after it was made. The museum bought it in 1861 from a dealer, for a sum that was thought high at the time. Notice how the figure at the top clings to the rim of the drip pan as if about to be burned by the flame.
Did You Know? The inscription on the stem names the object as the work of virtue and light, turning a piece of church furniture into a small sermon.
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