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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 August 2014
During 1970 the Ashmolean Museum acquired at auction in London two Syriac-inscribed bronze censers of a now well-known but insufficiently studied type decorated with New Testament scenes in relief and with incised ornament on their plain surfaces. The following speculations about these objects are offered in admiration to Sir Max Mallowan, and as a reminder of bumpy but delightful journeys to certain ancient monasteries in the Mosul area where such objects will have been used: forsan et haec olim meminisse juvabit.
Several fresh examples of these censers have come to notice in recent years, so that the number known to exist in museums or private collections must now exceed 30 or even 40, while the number still in ecclesiastical possession is presumably very much greater. All of those recently acquired by museums must once have belonged to churches or monasteries of the Near East; and one may suspect that some of these communities have either recently been robbed or, more probably, have been induced to sell or succeeded in selling some of the more battered contents of their sacristies.
1 Sotheby Sales: 13.7.70, lot 75; 28.7.70, lot 119.
2 Analysis by X-ray fluorescence, for which I thank the Research Laboratory for Archaeology in Oxford, gives the result:—
If polished the metal would have a brassy look; a specimen in the British Museum, described as bronze, does in fact look like brass.
3 Gertrude Bell, for example, in Amurath to Amurath, p. 317, writes of her visit to a monastery outside Midyat in Tur Abdin that: “the monastery possesses … a small bronze thurible of which I succeeded in procuring a counterpart. A similar thurible exists in the British Museum …” She does not say where she obtained her thurible, nor do I know where it is now. No. 19 in the list given on pp. 54–55 is said to have come from the same region.
4 Carswell, J., New Julfa (Oxford, 1968), 69, Pl. 91aGoogle Scholar.
5 Maspero, G., Annales du Service des Antiqués 9 (1908), 148–9Google Scholar, Pls. I–IV.
6 Christie, Catalogue, 23.10.72, lot 43.
7 Every list of these objects becomes incomplete soon after it is written, and I do not attempt here to make a new one. de Jerphanion, G., Mélanges Syriens I, 297 ffGoogle Scholar. assembled twenty-three examples in 1939; but several more have been seen or listed since, and some of them illustrated.
8 The beautiful and meticulously careful drawings for Plate X were made by Mrs. Patricia Clarke at the Ashmolean Museum.
9 They include, so far as I can distinguish the details, Brooklyn, Berlin 967, Berlin 970, Cairo and BM. 1912. A much more developed plant, in effect a tree, with wavy trunk, undercut branches and broad umbels of flower at the top, separates the scenes on Hamburg 1921 and on a fine bronze-gilt censer of similar size and form now exhibited in the Victoria and Albert Museum (V. and A. 1956). On both these objects the scenes are four in number (omitting the Baptism), and move from right to left, Four well-grown trees come between them. On each censer the picture zone is limited above and below by a continuous band of rounded acanthus leaves of closely related form. On the strength of these resemblances we may confidently ascribe both objects to the same workshop. We may also note in passing that a thousand years separate the dates ascribed respectively to them by their owners, Hamburg was in the Zoubaloff collection, Moscow, and is attributed by Eugen v. Mercklin to “Syria-Palestine or Egypt 6th–7th century”. V. and A.1956 was in the Hildburgh Collection and is labelled in London “Armenian 17th century”. The provenance of neither object is recorded.
10 Annunciation: r. arm of Gabriel, l. arm of Virgin; Nativity: l. arm of Virgin; Baptism: arm of Baptist, head of Dove; Crucifixion: both arms of Christ; Anastasis: arm of Angel forearms of Women.
11 Wulff, O., Altchristliche und mittelalterliche … Bildwerke (Berlin, 1909)Google Scholar. I have learnt with regret that all the censers in Berlin illustrated by Wulff were lost or destroyed in the Second War. I am all the more grateful to Dr. Arne Effenberger for sending me two excellent photographs each of Berlin 970 and 971.
12 I suspect, however, that Berlin 971 is very close. It seems identical in form, in size and also in modelling. Only the Anastasis can be seen in Wulff's photograph; but the Crucifixion and parts of both Annunciation and Nativity are seen in prints kindly sent to me by Dr. Effenberger.
13 All ampullae except 2 (Rabula MS.) and 7 (Vatican reliquary). For photographic reproductions see Villette, J., La Résurrection du Christ dans l'art chrétien du IIe au VIIe sièle (Paris, 1957), Pls. XXXIV–XXXVIIGoogle Scholar; Wellen, G. A., Theotokos (Utrecht, 1961), 90, 93Google Scholar; and, for the ampullae, Grabar, A., Les Ampoules de Terre Sainte (Paris, 1958)Google Scholar.
14 In one censer, Cairo 1908, the sepulchre is rather similar, with a conical roof on arches representing what seems to be the Rotunda without the edicule. The persons represented can hardly be Constantine and Helena, as Maspero suggests, for the cycle is the normal one from the gospels and the persons must be the two Maries and the Angel.
15 An exception is Brooklyn on which the faces seem intact (Cooney, J. C., Late Egyptian and Coptic Art, 34Google Scholar). The eyes are punched “with a hollow cylindrical tool”, according to Cooney, and the noses with a straight edge. The effect is very like Ash. 591.
16 Nos. 10 and 17, for example, are close to stucco ornaments at Ctesiphon: S.P.A. IV, Pl. 171 C and J. The slanting or sinuous acanthus is a common motif in Umayyad architecture, in sculpture and mosaic (al Mafjar and Damascus).
17 Berliner Museen NF 20 (1970)Google Scholar, Heft 1, 11–12. Beneath the foot of this censer there is an attractive cock which might well be thought to be Sassanian.
18 New Julfa, 69.
19 Georgian Metalwork, 44. In particular the author cites the long tunic worn by Christ on the cross (a feature common to all the censers, I think, without exception) as proof of early date. The long tunic is indeed habitual in the early works; but the argument depends, of course, on when it ceased to appear, That I do not know; nor does Amiranashvili say.
20 From fabrics in the Louvre dated to the 8th century by du Bourguet, Pierre, Catalogue des étoffes coptes (Paris, 1964), E64, E84, etcGoogle Scholar.
21 Cf. S.P.A. IV, Pls, 171, 221; R. W. Hamilton, Khirbat al Mafjar, Figs. 89 bis b, 176 b, 227.
22 The gap in the decoration of Julfa may, however, mean that that too was cast in two moulds.
23 Professor Charles Dowsett has kindly referred me to the journal of the Rev. Dr.Jacob Wolff who visited Mardin on 22 February 1824 and there met two Armenian Catholic bishops, both speaking Italian. Now the Rev. Abbé J. Leroy kindly tells me that he once visited an Armenian church of St. Sergius at Mardin and found it abandoned. The French General L. de Beylié, in his work Prome et Samara describing a remarkable ‘voyage archéologique en Biramanie et en Mésopotamie’, (Paris, 1907), gives in Fig. 39 the basilical plan of an Armenian church in Mardin dated by him to the 5th and 11th century. He does not name it.
24 But would it be far-fetched to liken the leafy roof of the Sepulchre to leafy domes or gables seen on fairy pavilions in the Umayyad mosaics of the Mosque in Damascus?
