Description
Exceptional medieval silver and velvet girdle. Such belts are regularly depicted in portraiture and sculpture of the period, but few survive today.
This shimmering medieval girdle comprises 19 individual silver-gilt mounts, 17 of which take the form of slender vertical bars punctuated at their centers with a rotund knop motif and shaped at either end into opposing fleurs-de-lys. They are finely pierced at the top and bottom for attaching to the fabric of the belt by way of slender rivets. At either end of the girdle are larger cast plates. The buckle-chape end has a looping buckle in the form of a pulled bow with a sturdy cusped bar against which the fixing pin strikes. At the center of the buckle-chape, two fantastical beasts known as Senmurvs are depicted in a pseudo-heraldic rampant pose, turned in profile to face each other on either side of a central sprouting fleur-de-lys. The pendant is similarly decorated, with a griffon in profile above a scrolling, rinceaux; surrounding the edges of both sections are raised framing lines.
Provenance:
Private collection, Essex, acquired in the early 1990s
Literature:
Popular throughout the royal courts of Europe since the thirteenth century, such belts and girdles appear frequently in contemporary sculpture and painted portraiture. However, few have survived.
They were worn around the waist (or higher under the ribcage) by both men and women over a long-sleeved garment called a houppelande, with the pendant allowed to hang down at the front, almost to the ground in many cases. Such examples could be bought ready-made on the open market or made to order. Fourteenth-century goldsmith accounts specify the use of red silk for the mounting of the metal ornaments and further forbid the use of base metals.
Our girdle relates most closely to a small corpus of precious metalwork thought to have been made in the Serbian Empire and especially in the region between Dubrovnik and the Adriatic coast, in the second half of the fourteenth century. Serbia was an expanding state during the later Middle Ages, its boundaries extending right up to the Aegean Sea thanks especially to the military campaigns of King Milutin (1282-1321) and his grandson Czar Dušan (1331-1355). By the first decades of the fifteenth century, Serbia controlled the largest silver mining centers in the Balkans. Goldsmiths flocked to the region’s urban commercial centers from as far afield as Germany and Italy to fill the increasing demand for exquisite secular and liturgical plate. They produced precious metalwork not only for local courts, at which girdles like ours may have been given as part of an amorous liaison or a wedding trousseau, but also for export further afield.
Several well-known examples of precious Serbian silver incorporating repoussé images of Senmurvs with elaborate snouts and tails exactly like ours in scale and treatment are today preserved in both public and private collections. Of these, a group of silver-gilt drinking bowls excavated at Stobi in modern-day Macedonia are especially similar and were discovered with a small cache of coins minted during the reign of King Vukašin (1366-1371), which offers evidence for dating this type of highly decorated metalwork. Our girdle was most likely produced by goldsmiths working in the same artistic orbit and at a similar moment in time given the strong stylistic continuity it shares with the Stobi hoard and others. Its fantastical imagery reveals evidence of Byzantine influence, and as a secular object, it evokes the fluid and interconnected cultural map that spanned medieval Europe during the period.
Literature:
R. Whitehead, Buckles 1250-1800, Witham 2003; Ilse Fingerlin, Gürtel des hohen und späten Mittelalters, Munich and Berlin 1971; Claudia Schopphoff, Der Gürtel: Funktion und Symbolik eines Kleidungsstücks in Antike und Mittelalter, Cologne and Weimar 2009; Mila Gajić, Silver Bowls from the Late Middle Ages in Serbia, Exh. Cat., Belgrade, Museum of Applied Art, 2010, pp. 39-41; Bojana Radojković, Masterpieces of Serbian Goldsmiths’ Work: 13th – 18th Century, Exh. Cat., London, Victoria and Albert Museum, 1 July – 2 August 1981; Nobiles Officinae: Die Königlichen Hofwerkstätten zu Palermo zure Zeit der Normannen und Staufer im 12. und 13. Jahrhundert, Exh. Cat., Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum, 31 March – 13 June 2004, cat. 45, pp. 213-4; Clifton Olds ed., The meeting of Two Worlds: The Crusades and the Mediterranean Context, Exh. Cat., University of Michigan Museum of Art, 9 May – 27 September 1981; R. W. Lightbown, Mediaevel European Jewellery, London 1992.
Full description with comparisons available on request.