Details

Images inspired by a popular medieval motif known as the "Siege of the Castle of Love" adorn this casket, or small box. They depict knightly figures using ladders to scale ramparts defended by maidens in a series of vignettes that echo poems and tales on the theme of courtly love. Despite its medieval appearance and iconography, this object is a revivalist metalwork made in the late 1800s. It copies a fourteenth-century wooden casket once owned by the well-known collector and antiquarian Jakob von Hefner-Altneck that had been published in a lavishly illustrated catalog in 1882. It is one of many such copies of medieval artworks created by European firms in response to nineteenth-century demand for affordable goods that evoked the popular vision of medieval and Renaissance. The existence of several identical bronze copies of the Hefner-Alteneck casket, including this example, attests to the widespread interest in the Middle Ages that animated popular culture at the time.