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Barnebys HQ
Brahegatan 10
BOX 5038
114 37 Stockholm
All auctions / Asian Art / 11th C. Medieval Georgian Brass Relief of Saint George
Eastern Europe / Western Asia, Georgia, Medieval Period. A haloed warrior saint emerges in low relief from this fragment of hammered brass sheet, his face rendered with the wide almond eyes and small pursed mouth of Caucasian medieval icon work. He wears a short scale or mail cuirass articulated in fine crosshatching, with pleated sleeves and a skirt of lappets below, and an oval shield rides at his left shoulder. The plate is worked in repousse and chased from the reverse, then finished with incised detail; two punched holes along the upper edge survive from the nails that once fixed it to a wooden icon panel. Revetments of this kind sheathed painted or carved images in the churches and treasuries of medieval Georgia, and the military attributes point to one of the soldier saints, most likely Saint George, whose cult dominated the kingdom. Saint George was the patron of medieval Georgia to a degree unmatched elsewhere in Christendom; the kingdom's churches were dedicated to him in the hundreds, and the saint appears on royal coinage and on the great chased silver and gold icon revetments produced for Bagratid patrons between the tenth and twelfth centuries. Georgian goldsmithing of this era, centered on workshops in Tao-Klarjeti and later in the royal capitals, was renowned across the Byzantine world for repousse figural work in precious and base metal alike, with humbler brass and copper alloy plaques serving parish churches and smaller foundations in imitation of the great gilded silver icons. The scaled cuirass, cross-hatched to suggest lamellar or mail, and the sword-and-shield attributes are the standard vocabulary of the military saints (George, Theodore, Demetrios) in the Byzantine and Caucasian sphere. Without a surviving asomtavruli inscription, the individual saint cannot be fixed with certainty, though George remains the strongest candidate on regional grounds. Item # 204864
Estimate:£301.58
To the auctionView all items fromArtemis Fine ArtsorAsian Art
Estimate:
£301.58
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