British Museum polishes off £1.3m deal to buy medieval silver chalice

http://www.theguardian.com/culture/2013/dec/23/british-museum-acquires-lacock-cup

Version 0 of 1.

This is the time of year when somebody would have been given the job of polishing one of the most magnificent English silver cups – a survivor from the middle ages which, judging from its pristine condition, has never been dropped, despite weighing almost a kilo.

In the past 500 years the Lacock Cup, a masterpiece by an unknown silversmith, has been passed from hand to hand at banquets and then among the congregation of a Wiltshire parish church. It has survived the Reformation, the English civil war and the melting pot, which was the fate of most English silver when it went out of fashion. Now it has been acquired by the British Museum for £1.3m. It is unmarked, but dated by its style to about 1429 and probably made in London. It is so rare that it is of international importance.

Ancient church silver, after centuries of religious turmoil, is rarely found. Secular silver is even rarer, and although the cup became a sacred chalice when it was presented 400 years ago to St Cyriac's church in the Wiltshire village of Lacock, it was originally made as a status symbol for a nobleman's table, to be filled with wine and passed around at the great feasts of the year.

The cup, too valuable to insure, display or store in the Grade I-listed church, was loaned to the British Museum in 1963. For the first 20 years, it was regularly couriered back to Wiltshire for Christmas and Easter. That was discontinued when the operation was judged too risky.

The decision was taken to sell the cup caused some anguish in the parish, and permission had to be sought from an ecclesiastical consistory court.

"It's a great thing," said Roger Bland, keeper of prehistory and Europe at the British Museum. "It's the biggest thing of its kind the museum has acquired since that very rude Roman cup."

That artifact, the Warren Cup, which depicts two male couples having sex, was even more expensive, at £1.8m, bought by the museum half a century after it was turned down for a fraction of the price as too rude to exhibit. Its first owner in the UK, the American art collector Edward Perry Warren, kept it at his home in Lewes, and referred to it as the holy grail. In contrast, the Lacock Cup, which looks much more like the Monty Python vision of the holy grail, is blamelessly chaste.

The museum's acquisitions budget– like most of the national collections – is minimal. The money was raised with grants from the National Heritage Memorial Fund, the Art Fund charity, and friends and patrons. It is sharing the acquisition with the Wiltshire Museum in Devizes.

It is not known for whom the cup was originally made, but Bland, a coins expert, worked out that the silver alone cost £5 in the 15th century, with much more added for the immaculate workmanship. It was hand-beaten from three sheets of silver, so elegantly plain that any mistake would be visible. The three bands of ornate pierced decoration cover the welds that joined the bowl and the two sections of the trumpet-shaped foot. The gilding on the ornamental bands and the lip and foot of the cup, is original.

It is believed that it was presented to the church in the 17th century by a member of the local Baynard family, though the early parish records were destroyed in a fire. Such cups were associated with royalty, and contemporary images, including a stained glass window from Norfolk, show such precious objects among the gifts brought by the three magi to the stable in Bethlehem.

Experts at the museum, including medieval curators Lloyd DeBeer and Naomi Speakman, are itching to study the cup, and tests may yet reveal exactly where and when it was made. Mike Neilson, the British Museum's metalworker, will be looking at it in detail. He has previously created uncannily accurate replicas, including medieval mail and Bronze Age gold cloaks. This time he must make by hand, out of silver, identical copies for the Wiltshire museum and St Cyriac's church, which will once again have a magnificent silver goblet for communion services.

"Baynard – or whoever it was that gave this cup – would have thought he was ensuring his own immortality by giving such a magnificent and high-status object, which would be seen by everyone in the parish in daily use," DeBeer said. "It's nice to think of the replica in use in his church again after half a century."

Our editors' picks for the day's top news and commentary delivered to your inbox each morning.