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  LOCATION: Walters Art Gallery, Baltimore, Maryland.

  THE ANTIOCH CHALICE

  DATE: Sixth century or early seventh century.

  WHAT IT IS: A plain silver cup embedded in an outer cup that is artistically decorated with images of Christ and the apostles. A worldwide sensation attended the chalice when it was asserted to be the sacred relic believed for nearly two millennia to be one of the greatest of all lost treasures, the Holy Grail.

  WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE: The inner cup is ovoid and dented, and its lip is bent over the rim of the outer cup, which is cut through to form human figures, animals, and vines. The outer cup is set on a base. The chalice measures more than 7½ inches high, and the diameter of the outer rim is over 7 inches.

  Within a two-year period beginning early in 1908, four silver Byzantine treasures came to light in Syria. The first one surfaced in Stuma and was eventually confiscated by Turkish authorities, who handed it over to an Istanbul museum. In 1909 a British archaeologist discovered a treasure from Riha that was in private hands and held in low profile, since the owner feared it would be impounded by government officials as the first had been. Then in 1910 it was announced that another silver hoard had been unearthed in Hama, and some months later a fourth cache of silver objects was revealed to have been discovered in Antioch.

  A bit of mystery shrouded the last treasure, which stood out from the others because it contained the ornate double chalice. According to Gustavus Eisen, in his two-volume publication The Great Chalice of Antioch, the treasure was discovered by Arab workers digging a cellar in Antioch. The workers refused to reveal the cellar’s location, but it was believed to have been near the subterranean ruins of an ancient church. This would accord with a tradition that Constantine the Great, founder of the Byzantine Empire, distributed great treasures of silver to the empire’s churches sometime early in the fourth century. The workers split the hoard between them.

  The Antioch treasure was eventually acquired in its totality by the Kouchakji Brothers, an antiquities firm of Aleppo (in Syria), Paris, and New York. Salim and Constantin Kouchakji spent two years gathering the pieces from their different owners. When the timing was right, they sent the items to their brother George in Paris, who hired a prominent specialist to clean the pieces of oxidation. When World War I erupted, the objects were dispatched to New York, where they could be kept safely and where another Kouchakji brother, Habib, lived with his son, Fahim.

  Of the seven objects of the Antioch hoard, Fahim sensed the double cup was an article of extremely special provenance. He sought out the Swedish anthropologist Gustavus Eisen to study and write about it. Dr. Eisen made an exhaustive study of the chalice: the separate vessels, the artwork, the biblical symbolism of the decorations.

  The chalice is a double cup, one inside the other. The inner cup is plain and rough, not decorated as is the outer one. It has an ovoid shape typical, Eisen pointed out, of chalices from the time of Christ. Eisen believed that it was made by a different person and at a different time than the outer cup; it was simple and not tampered with by any artisan because, he suggested, it “was a relic of great sanctity.”

  The Antioch Chalice

  Apparently, the outer cup was sculpted at a later time. A relief occupying the majority of the exterior depicts twelve seated human figures. Elaborately intertwined around them are twisting vines with hanging clusters of grapes, perched animals, and objects that may be interpreted as symbols. Near the rim, where the inner cup’s top is bent over, is a chain of rosettes.

  Of the human figures, Eisen identified two as Christ, first as a boy and then after his resurrection. The boyish figure’s face is innocent and bright; the resurrected Christ bears a gentle, pensive expression. Above and below his resurrection image are, respectively, a dove and an eagle, the former the symbol of the Holy Ghost, the latter of the Roman Empire.

  Seated around Christ at different levels in the post-resurrection illustration are several apostles: Peter, John the Divine and his brother James, Mark, Andrew, Jude, James the Lesser, Paul, Matthew, and Luke. Workmanship of the highest artistic caliber provided the distinctive character associated with each of the apostles. In his detailed investigation of the human figures, animals, and objects, Eisen refuted earlier interpretations and used the Bible and ancient records to painstakingly identify the characters and the significance of the objects. Eisen concluded the inner cup to be “a precious relic of the earliest years of Christianity.” The Holy Grail? The cup from which Christ and each of the apostles drank at the Last Supper? Although the Last Supper took place in Jerusalem, Antioch would not be an improbable burial site for the Holy Grail, if indeed it ever existed. According to the New Testament (Acts 11:26), Antioch is where believers in Jesus “were first called Christians.” Eisen and others claimed that the inner cup was indeed the very sacred relic associated with Christ and arduously sought through the millennia. If this were true, here was a find of profound importance.

  The Holy Grail as the Last Supper cup is the central symbol of a tradition that has inspired many myths; some have taken on complex spiritual and philosophical meanings. It is said that Joseph of Arimathea used the cup to catch the blood of Christ during the Crucifixion. There are references to a holy cup in the New Testament: “The cup we use in the Lord’s Supper and for which we give thanks to God; when we drink from it, we are sharing in the blood of Christ” (1 Corinthians 10:16). According to other traditions, the Holy Grail is said to be a fountain of inexhaustible nourishment, always replenishing itself with sustenance to cure the ailing who drink from it; those who imbibe from the cup are protected from evil. The New Testament says, “You cannot drink from the Lord’s cup and also from the cup of demons” (1 Corinthians 10:21).

  After the first millennium, the search for the Holy Grail became the subject of a variety of romances, involving, among the notable characters, King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, Sir Galahad, Parsifal, and Gawain. In these romances the grail had many different manifestations—a stone or vase or plate, for instance. This has led some scholars to speculate that the grail is not a physical object but a spiritual force that provides life in whatever form it appears. Thus it may present itself to different groups in different ways, but it is said that as a symbol of religious purity it may appear only to those noble enough in character to perceive it.

  Some scholars say it is not the grail itself that is important, but rather the symbolism attached to it, the eternal quest for the highest human potential. Still, the search for the grail—the object—however fantastic, has been and continues to be an active endeavor, one that the searchers believe will bring them eternal life. Some hold that Joseph of Arimathea, who caught Christ’s blood from the cross, brought the grail to England, specifically to Glastonbury, where according to legend it still resides at the bottom of the well in which Joseph hid it. No one has ever been able to find it there.

  The attachment of the grail legend to the chalice found in Antioch caused its value to rise dramatically. The Kouchakjis, obviously delighted by the controversy, sought a rich collector to purchase the object. One candidate was the banker and philanthropist John Pierpont Morgan. One of Morgan’s assistants in New York examined it before its cleansing in Paris, but Morgan died in 1913 before he could even see it. The Kouchakjis’ piece de resistance was then exhibited around Europe, where people flocked to gaze at it; its home base later became a Wall Street bank vault.

  Despite scholars’ almost unanimous rejection of Eisen’s chalice as the Holy Grail—it was generally agreed it could not have been made before the fourth or fifth century—the object eventually priced itself out of the private market. Was the chalice’s association with the grail a fabrication for commercial purposes? Had Eisen been a pawn of the Kouchakjis, hired to call attention to, and hence raise the value of, the object?

  By this time, the chalice was an object of intrigue. Thomas Costain wrote a novel about it, The Silver Chalice, which Warner Brothers turned into a movie st
arring Paul Newman in his first motion picture role. Clearly, the chalice had captured the public’s imagination. In 1950 it found a home when it was purchased by the Cloisters, a museum of Western medieval art in New York City that is a branch of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

  Outrageous claims surrounded the chalice even then. The most remarkable story comes from 1963.

  It was Easter Sunday morning. A guard at the museum was making his rounds before the doors opened to the public. He peered through a heavy safety door with a small window into the Cloisters’ treasury, where the chalice was kept. Awestruck, he saw the chalice quiver and then suddenly rise three inches off its display block. The guard, frantic, retrieved the head watchman, who also witnessed the chalice levitating. The first guard fell to his knees in prayer. The chalice had levitated at approximately the same time that, according to the Gospels, the Lord Jesus Christ was raised from death almost two thousand years earlier.

  The phone rang at the Greenwich Village apartment of Thomas Hoving, the assistant curator of the Cloisters. A hysterical voice told him a phenomenon had taken place at the museum and that he had better rush up there before the premises were besieged by reporters and camera crews.

  Arriving at the Cloisters, Hoving found the guards on the verge of religious ecstasy, ready to announce a miracle and summon thousands of pilgrims to the museum that very day. Hoving, ever calm, took a careful look around the treasury and was able to provide a rational explanation for the mystical occurrence.

  Between the lights hidden in the pedestal and the interior of the display case was a plastic grid that served to diffuse the beam of the spotlights. A burglar-alarm system had been arranged so that if a thief were to lift the chalice off its display surface, a spring-loaded peg would rise, triggering an alarm in the main office. The plastic grid just happened to collapse at that particular time, making the chalice rise and setting off the alarm. The spring-loaded peg lifted the grid—and the chalice—into the air.

  A coincidence? Perhaps. But the guards were never convinced the levitation had anything to do with the alarm system. In any case, the Cloisters kept the story quiet.

  Although the Antioch Chalice-Holy Grail identification has been thoroughly discredited—soon after the publication of Gustavus Eisen’s books in 1923, scholars began making detailed refutations—the mystery, or at least the obscurity, of the Antioch Chalice’s provenance continued to trouble other scholars over the years. It seemed odd in retrospect that the great Stuma, Riha, Hama, and Antioch treasures had been discovered so close together in time. The finds appeared to be linked in other ways as well: by similar workmanship, inscriptions, corrosion, and damage. Could the treasures all have originated in the same place? Could the different treasures in fact have all been part of one large treasure, buried together?

  In her book Silver from Early Byzantium, Dr. Marlia Mundell Mango offers compelling evidence that there was in fact only one treasure—the “Kaper Koraon Treasure,” unearthed in the same place and at the same time: Stuma, 1908—and that the four different “discoveries” were actually a clever ruse devised by antiquities dealers, the Kouchakjis in particular, to avoid confiscation of the valuable objects by the Turkish authorities. (According to Mango, Kaper Koraon was a village whose church received dozens of silver objects between A.D. 540 and 640.)

  Some controversy still remains about the chalice itself: scholars disagree over whether it is indeed a liturgical chalice or a goblet or a hanging lamp. But whatever doubts and controversies remain, what cannot be denied and what is universally agreed upon is that the Antioch Chalice is incontrovertibly a most magnificent work of art from early Christian civilization.

  LOCATION: Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, New York. (On loan from the Cloisters.)

  THE BOOK OF KELLS

  DATE: Circa 780 to 830.

  WHAT IT IS: One of the greatest illuminated manuscripts ever made.

  WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE: It contains 340 leaves (680 pages) bound in four volumes. The pages measure 13½ inches by 9½ inches.

  We are fortunate that some marauder of the early eleventh century saw fit to discard—and not destroy—an elaborately decorated parchment manuscript after stealing it and purloining its gold cover. Thankfully, serendipity stepped in to rescue the leavings from obscurity so that they would be available for future generations to savor, and from which to learn about the medieval artisans who created them.

  The Book of Kells is a masterpiece among illuminated manuscripts—the term applied to texts ornamented with lavishly designed letters and color pictures—ranking with Les Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry (Condé Museum, Chantilly, France) as the best ever created. Indeed, the Book of Kells has sometimes been called “the most beautiful book in the world.”

  Illuminated manuscripts were a product primarily of medieval times and followed other forms of written communication set down on materials such as stone tablets, clay tablets, wood boards, bamboo strips, papyrus, leather, vellum, and parchment. Book production began thousands of years earlier, in such ancient places as Egypt, Sumeria, and Babylonia, and continued over the centuries in other cultures throughout the Roman Empire, which began about 27 B.C. and endured until about A.D. 400.

  On various mediums, people set down everything from law codes and religious codes to philosophies and mythologies, and in the first millennium prior to the birth of Christ the Greeks and Romans especially achieved a high level of literary accomplishment. Several epic poems were written, including the Iliad, attributed to the Greek poet Homer (ninth to eighth century B.C.), and the Aeneid, by the Roman poet Virgil (70 to 19 B.C.). Accompanying texts with colored drawings existed prior to the first millennium A.D.—the Papyrus Book of the Dead (British Museum, London), created about 1250 B.C., is an example—but the actual practice of producing manuscripts with meticulously written letters and copious illustrations executed in painstaking detail did not realize its potential as an art form until the Middle Ages, which began about A.D. 500 and continued until about 1450.

  Unlike previous eras, where libraries flourished and learning was held in high esteem, during the Middle Ages’ early centuries—the Dark Ages, as they came to be called—it was survival, not books, that occupied most people’s attention. Barbarians swept through Europe destroying the Roman Empire, seizing land, razing libraries, devastating trade and industry, and uprooting social systems. Eventually a feudal system arose in western Europe; the farmers, who gave their land over for protection to noblemen and toiled long, hard hours, were basically ignorant, unable to read or write. Over time the church rose in prominence and power, collecting taxes and asserting political influence. The church also became the center of learning, albeit primarily for its prelacy, but it was here that high culture was preserved.

  The chi-rho page from the Book of Kells. Brilliantly drawn animals, human figures, letters, and objects in the ninth-century work, also known as the Gospel of Columcille, celebrate the four Gospels.

  In the monasteries monks would work in rooms called scriptoria and labor painstakingly to copy and illuminate old Latin and Greek texts. Great care was given to producing books that were actually works of art in themselves. Many illuminated manuscripts were produced throughout Europe during the Middle Ages—for the church or for the wealthy nobility—and they have traditionally been categorized by the place of origin, such as Celtic or Byzantine or Anglo-Saxon or Dutch, each category being known for particular artistic styles and embellishments, the Book of Kells, with its exquisite ornamentation, is an outstanding example of Celtic art produced by the Irish monasteries.

  An elaborate reproduction of the Four Gospels with pictures, the Book of Kells contains handsome cursive lettering, imaginative designs, skillful portraits, and masterful coloring. The Latin text of the Gospels is written in majuscule script. The paragraphs begin with unique decorative capital letters that take on different shapes picturing creatures and plants and geometric forms, and that stand out from the rest of the text. The interlaced desi
gns of various objects suggest a variety of interpretations, including life and death, immortality, etherealness, and mystery.

  The text of the manuscript is brought to life with pictures of various events in the life of Jesus Christ. Whether it is the scene of Jesus’ birth or his arrest before the Crucifixion, the illustrations reflect the warmth or despair of the event. Numerous exotically drawn animals adorn the pages, including cats, birds, mice, fish, lizards, scorpions, and horses, and are often depicted in funny ways. In their decorations the monks exhibit a range of emotions, from humor to religious devotion, from a love of life to an appreciation for nature, and provide through their illustrations an extraordinary view of medieval culture and civilization. Many mysteries surround the provenance of this masterpiece. Who were its scribes and painters, and how many were there? Where was it created? How long did it take to produce? There is scholarly conjecture, but no definitive answers exist.

  The anonymous Book of Kells is believed to have been created by monks working in a scriptorium on the island of Iona, part of the Inner Hebrides, off the northwest coast of Scotland. Here a monastery was founded by Saint Columba (Columcille) in the early 560s. Probably sometime in the late eighth century—almost two centuries after the death of Columba in 597—a group of monks set themselves to the painstaking task of creating this ornamental manuscript for religious services. Analysis of the style of the letters and of the painting seems to indicate several monks were actually engaged in its production.