Casket

Italian · 12th century

Medium

Ivory, brass, tempera, and gold leaf

Original size

9.5 × 15.9 × 9.7 cm (3 3/4 × 6 1/4 × 3 13/16 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Medieval

This small but richly worked casket offers a vivid window into the luxury craft traditions of medieval Italy, where ivory, gilding, and painted ornament came together in objects made to be both used and treasured. Produced in twelfth-century Italy — likely in a workshop influenced by the cultural crossroads of Norman Sicily, where Byzantine, Islamic, and Latin traditions met — the casket combines carved ivory panels with brass fittings and delicate tempera painting highlighted with gold leaf. This layering of materials was deliberate: each element signalled wealth and refinement, and the painted and gilded surfaces would have glimmered by candlelight in a way no single medium alone could achieve. Such caskets were made to hold small valuables, relics, or keepsakes, and their intimate scale only intensifies the care given to every surface. Ivory of this quality was a rare commodity in medieval Europe, sourced through long-distance trade networks stretching back to sub-Saharan Africa and the Islamic world, making the raw material itself a statement of status before a single tool touched it. The hand-painted oil reproduction translates the warmth of aged ivory and the quiet luminosity of the original gilding into a form that rewards close looking, preserving the intricate ornamental spirit of a centuries-old craft tradition.