Negroponte Hoard, Part Four

Lombard and Hebrew plaques from the Halkis Treasure.
(Hebrew plaques inverted.  BM photo.)

Continuing the previous entry, which is from my paper to the AIA on aspects of the Halkis Treasure:

Some of the items are demonstrably from Halkis.

The first picture shows two small ornamental plaques with Lombard lettering. One says CLARA. B. and the other says SEABA --probably another name. Halkis -- Negroponte -- was given to the Lombards in 1204 as part of the division of territory after the Fourth Crusade, and it was Lombard Dominicans who built Ag. Pareskevi in the 1260s, as the style of sculpture on the triumphal arch demonstrates.

The Hebrew plaques are tiny, not 2 centimetres long. The first transliterates as ARTINO which seems to be meaningless, as are the other Hebrew plaque inscriptions. Halkis, with Thebes, is of course known to have had Jewish communities from very early.

Venetian belt fastening.

There is no reason to question whether the specifically Venetian items in the Halkis treasure were found locally, although there is no reason to assume that they necessarily were. There was a Venetian presence in Halkis from before the 1082 chrysobull of Alexios Komnenos until 1470, and Venice acquired complete control of the island in the 1380s.

Belt ends.

With these belt ends, we move into questionable territory. They are in the late 14th-15th-century Gothic style, particularly of northern and eastern Italy, and they could have been found anywhere Italians lived in Greece.  Or anywhere Italians lived.

These belt ends are appealing pieces, with their clumsy craftsmanship and the serious interest in architectural forms. These all seem to be from the same workshop,even possibly the same craftsman. Possibly you could have the figure of your choice inserted into a pre-fabricated set of arches. Were they found together? We don’t know.

Here is a belt in use. A great many of the items in the Halkis collection in the British Museum are the small metal belt appliques such as you see on this belt and below.

Belt ornaments.

Lampros offered Fortnum more than 200 buttons -- mostly silver and silver-gilt -- which went on to Franks for his collection. In the British Museum catalog, each button has its own entry, which gives us 60 entries of one style of button, 40 for another style, and 42 for another. Buttons could have been found anywhere.

Silver buttons.

Notice here that this wonderful spherical gold and pearl button has threads from a fabric still attached.

Some pieces strike me as highly unlikely to have been found in Negroponte/Halkis.

These belt ends -- three were found -- with the clumsy three-dimensional classical figures under Gothic arches fascinate me.  Where was a gold-worker seeing classical or Hellenistic sculpture? If you consider that the Florentines held Athens for seventy years, lived on the Acropolis, and had the Parthenon sculptures before their eyes, I think it a reasonable guess that these pieces were made, if not found, in Athens.

I have already written about the three Malatesta stemme -- coats-of-arms -- in the Treasure.  The Malatesta were based at Rimini and Pesaro. This was a large family of condottieri, and there is no indication that any were involved in trade. Possibly one led fanti in Negroponte, but if so, no records have survived. But there were Malatesta in the Morea, which is a much more likely source for these finds. Pandolfo Malatesta was Archbishop of Patras from 1424 to 1430, and his sister, Cleofe, was married to Theodoros II Palaiologos at Mistra from 1421 to 1433.

Double-headed eagle ring.

This signet ring from the Ashmolean with the Palaiologos double-headed eagle strikes me as unlikely to have come from Halkis. It has an inscription which the Ashmolean translates to read,

When you have enjoyed the world then you come to the tomb, Gold comes from the Clay, Flesh from dust, I have experienced both."

A ring in the Franks Bequest -- not identified as part of the Halkis Treasure -- may offer a clue.

Ring of Manuel Kantakuzenos.

It is shown in the Metropolitan Museum of Art catalog of the Byzantium: Faith and Power exhibition of 2004 which identifies it as coming from Mistra, as does this ring in the Mistra museum which was found in the sea off Monemvasia.

Gold ring, Mistra, with Lusignan emblem.

These are the sort of things we would hope to find -- expect to find -- at Mistra, along with many of the other items at least of the quality of the Halkis Treasure.

But with very few exceptions -- the gold ring, a few earrings -- these items below show what has survived to be exhibited in the Mistra museum -- low-quality metal, clumsy craftsmanship. But perhaps these were the items that were left for archaeologists after the pearl rings and the gilt buttons were selected out.

Finds in the Mistra museum.

Lampros had an "agent" in Negroponte. He certainly had an agent in Corfu, which was his home. In this group of 14 letters he mentions being sent items from agents on Kalymnos, Nissiros, Melos, and in the Peloponnesos.

Grave-robbers, Isthmus of Corinth, 1877.

This picture, from a London Illustrated News of 1877 shows people -- who might be called agents -- at work at the Isthmus of Corinth. Barrès, visiting Mistra in the 1890s, speaks of graves in churches at Mistra freshly opened, of the mounds of skulls and tibias.  When Buchon wrote in 1841 about the armor found in Halkis, he said that some of it went missing while it was on the way to Athens, and that pieces were available for sale in Halkis.

The question of sources and agency for the Halkis Treasure cannot really be discussed until the Lampros papers are examined. I hope that someone -- or several people -- will want to pursue this further.  Again, I am glad to make my material available.

Ashmolean Museum Search

http://www.ashmolean.org/ash/objects/makesearch.php?pmu=153&mu=154

Halkis treasure numbers run CDEF.F103, CDEF.F376-F396.

British Museum Search

http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/search_the_collection_database.aspx?numpages=10&orig=%2fresearch%2fsearch_the_collection_database.aspx&currentPage=1

Search term "Halkida"

Particular thanks to Nicky Tsourgarakis who obtained the Lampros letters for me and retranslated sections of them. The Lampros letters are found in: Ashmolean Archives, Fortnum Papers, F/9/i/1-14.  The English translation in the Ashmolean is by Bet McCleod and Nicoletta Norman.

Negroponte Hoard, Part Three

 

 Pavlos Lampros, 1819-1887.
Antiquarian, numismatist, seller of the Halkis Treasure

We should be calling this Negroponte Hoard the 'Halkis Treasure' and I will try to do so.  I have written about it twice before, generally here, and about a specific emblem here.  I am speaking today -- January 6 -- to the American Institute of Archaeology about the treasure, as part of a panel on the relationships of museums to archaeology.  This is some of what I will be telling them, although they will see many more pictures than I have put here.

* * * * * *

The known documentary sources for the treasure are extremely limited and consist of fourteen letters in Italian (with modern English translations) in the archives of the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford.  The letters were written by Pavlos Lampros between November 1867 and December 1872.   He was a well-known Athenian antiquarian and numismatist , father of the great historian (and Prime Minister) Spyridon Lampros, and his coin collection is the core of the Numismatic Museum in Athens.

It is possible that there are more documents in the Lampros papers in the Numismatic Museum: no one has yet looked at these, and I would encourage a student looking for a dissertation topic to consider them.  For various reasons, I cannot rely on plans for  further work on this topic, and I would be glad to send my accumulation of material and photographs to a serious scholar. 

The fourteen Lampros letters at the Ashmolean are to Charles Drury Fortnum, a wealthy and deeply knowledgeable antiquarian scholar and collector, who bought for several collectors and collections, including those of the Ashmolean, the Victoria and Albert, and the British museums.  The 417 pieces that collectively make up the Halkis Treasure are now in the Ashmolean -- 21 rings and a spectacular button, and the BM -- 395 items, mostly buttons.  (Every button -- 65 in one group, 40, 36, 42 in other groups -- gets its own catalog entry.)  Most of these pieces are of Western medieval or Byzantine style, a few earrings and other odd pieces are classical and Hellenistic.  Almost all are gold, silver, or gilded silver.  Mr. Fortnum only wanted the best.

      

Charles Drury Fortnum, 1820-1899.
Antiquarian, writer, collector.

The letters primarily list items Lampros has for sale, negotiates prices, and tells how items are being transmitted, and names agents to receive payment.


 In 1867, when the correspondence began, Fortnum had become an advisor to the British Museum where his good friend Augustus Wollaston Franks was Keeper of British and Medaeival Antiquities and Ethnography. He turned down the position of Principal Librarian (director) in 1878.  Items from the Halkis Treasure in the BM collection can be identified in the letters, as well as items in the Ashmolean.  Franks bought these items personally, with his own funds, and bequeathed them along with 20,000 other items to the BM at his death in 1897.  Nowadays, this blurring of curators, collectors, and collections would be frowned-upon, at a minimum, but I know nothing of museum financing in England in the 19th century, and these men made possible extraordinary collections. 

Augustus Wollaston Franks, 1820-1897.
Collector, curator, philanthropist.

The means of collecting would also be seriously questioned now, and would collide with major issues of international law, not just national.  In the second Ashmolean letter, Lampros writes:

I ask you not to let anyone know that I provided you with these objects, as this could compromise my position. I am prohibited from exporting antique objects.

Whatever the Greek law on antiquities in 1867, it covered the rings and buttons in the Ashmolean and BM collections.  The letters also indicate that Lampros used a number of sources to transmit the items to Franks, and several agents to receive and transmit money back to Athens.

The treasures were preserved for posterity, but with the complete loss  -- as far as we know now -- of information as to the circumstances of their find, either as to dates or to locations, or the contexts in which they were found.  In that second letter Lampros also writes:

I can tell you precisely that all the objects that you first bought, and those that I now possess, were found in the foundations of one house alone situated within the fortress of Halkis. I believe that [they] were treasure belonging to some medieval prince.

 This is not likely to be completely true. This statement seems to hark back to the find in 1840 of the Chalkis Armor, a large store of 15th-century armor, divided between the National Museum of Athens and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  The armor was allegedly found bricked up in a wall next to the military hospital, but the exact circumstances of the find are not now known.  But the topos of a single-find-in-Halkis was firmly set in the minds of European collectors.

The single-find topos is also firmly set in modern consciousness.  The on-line Ashmolean catalog of rings from the Halkis Treasure states that they were found in Halkis in 1840.  In a variant on the single-find, in January 2009, the Gennadius in Athens gave a presentation on the Halkis Treasure.  All three speakers -- an Ephor, a Library Director, a BM Curator -- chose as their default position the statement that the treasure was a hoard from the fall of Negroponte to the Ottomans in 1470. 

This is extremely unlikely, even impossible, if one has read the original sources pertaining to the defense and siege of Negroponte, and suggests to me something like a whiff of chauvinism. The Curator has wavered since, concluding a 2010 article, "It is clear that the Treasure comprises object from different hoards and different dates, but how and when these came together remains a mystery." Although she and her editor did not seem to notice that she had written on the first page, "it has to be assumed that the deposit of the Chalcis Treasure was made in 1470 when Chalcis was invaded by the Ottoman Turks."  

The Lampros letters do not say when various finds were made, although one has a strong impression that they are ongoing during the period of the letters.  The most reliable information  we can get from the letters is that certain items were being sold between 1867 and 1872.

 To be continued:

Ashmolean Museum Search

http://www.ashmolean.org/ash/objects/makesearch.php?pmu=153&mu=154

Halkis treasure numbers run CDEF.F103, CDEF.F376-F396.

British Museum Search

http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/search_the_collection_database.aspx?numpages=10&orig=%2fresearch%2fsearch_the_collection_database.aspx&currentPage=1

Search term "Halkida"

Particular thanks to Nicky Tsougarakis who obtained the Lampros letters for me and retranslated sections of them. The Lampros letters are found in: Ashmolean Archives, Fortnum Papers, F/9/i/1-14.  The English translation in the Ashmolean is by Bet McCleod and Nicoletta Norman.