gigi,
Rayelan asked me to post this article I sent her for you. She will comment later on both posts (you may have read her post earlier that she is struggling not only with her own health, but her mother's recent stroke and her husband's health as well...so her time is very limited these days). I must confess that I haven't read your post yet (I will right away)...so I hope I don't look like an idiot here or have put this article in the "wrong place". :~)
Regards,
tuatha

A Map of European Culture in Gold and Silver
by Souren Melikian
International Herald Tribune Saturday, April 7, 2001

NEW YORK Great cultures portray themselves through their rituals and the objects of contemplation these inspire. Few will doubt this after gazing at the reliquaries, the crosses and the censers that once made up the Treasury of the Basel Cathedral, brought together at the Metropolitan Museum of Art here until May 27.
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In a journey through time mapped out in gold and silver, they take the viewer from the ecstatic faces of the Ottonian age lost in meditation to the psychological studies of man's plight in which Germanic artists indulged from the middle of the 13th century on. Nowhere was the goldsmith's art that the two antithetic ages of West European culture inspired quite as powerful as in the Germanic world. Basel, the Swiss metropolis of the upper Rhineland area, took a major part in its evolution, overshadowed until now by the greater fame of Augsburg or Nuremberg.

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From the beginning, its fate was inextricably interwoven with that of the German lands on the other side of the Rhine. An abbot from the great monastic center of the island of Reichenau in Lake Constance oversaw the construction of the first large church in the ninth century.
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The Hungarian invasion of 917 left it in ruins, but when the western strip of Switzerland was pledged in 1006 to the future emperor of the Holy Roman German Empire, Heinrich II, as part of the Kingdom of Burgundy, the fortunes of Basel soared.
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The emperor, who attended the dedication of the new cathedral in 1019, secured for it one of the masterpieces of early medieval art, the gold altar frontal, executed between 1015 and 1019. Too fragile to travel, it must be seen at the Musee National du Moyen-Age in Paris. An abbot and three angels flank Jesus and bend their heads slightly toward him as if to listen to his words. The influence of Byzantium is evident in the tall elongated figures. But gone are the placid faces and the motionless forms suggestive of some immutable superior reality. Wind seems to rustle their drapes and their staring expressions have an intensity alien to Christian Greece.
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That quasi-expressionist feel would remain a recurring feature of Southern Germanic lands. On a base cast in the second half of the 12th century to support a cross, seated figures in low relief enclosed in openwork medallions or perched in high relief over the legs look up with dilated eyes. The stylized lion claws terminating the short legs have a contained energy rarely seen in the blander works of the Eastern Empire.
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The expressionist strain reached an apex with one of the most astonishing three-dimensional portraits of the Romanesque age, carved around 1180-1200 to serve as a reliquary later identified with Saint Eustace. The wooden core revealed in 1955 when the piece was taken apart shows an impenetrable mask with almond eyes and lips quietly pressed that exude imperious certainty.
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The gilded silver casing is curiously different. The pupils of the eyes, indicated in light relief, seem to be glaring. Certainty has given way to rage in a man aghast at some awful realization. Yet the figure remains impersonal, almost aloof. Its rage is not aimed at any one but at a story full of sound and fury.
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What phenomenon triggered a dramatic change of direction in Western European art during the first half of the 13th century has yet to be explained. Within two generations the world in which we live became the Western artist's focus of attention even when the excuse was the rendition of saints and angels.
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Anxious interrogation ceased to be metaphysical and became human. No likeness could be more poignant than the bust of a man in his thirties portrayed by an anonymous Basel goldsmith commissioned to execute the reliquary of Saint Pantalus. The saint, hailed by tradition as the first bishop of Basel, looks at the viewer with panic in his wide-open eyes, made the more striking by the carefully groomed wavy hair. The merest hint of a squint enhances the tragic feeling. This likeness is as haunting as a Rembrandt.
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There were happier moments in the Germanic goldsmiths' gallery of portraits. A young woman with almond eyes in a broad round face lent her appearance to a reliquary purporting to represent Saint Ursula. Plain but charming, she smiles irrepressibly, her plebeian features illuminated by joy. At the back of the head, two pigtails come down over the shoulders. This could be a country girl anywhere in the Alpine hills overlooking the Rhine Valley.
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With the passage of time, the Germanic artists peered ever more closely at life in its raw appearance. As they did so, their search for expressiveness intensified. Around 1380 to 1400, a Basel goldsmith made a reliquary in the form of a raised arm intended to preserve the fragment of a bone reputed to belong to the third-century martyr Saint Valentine.
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Scrupulous attention is paid to anatomical accuracy, including the salient veins on the outstretched wrist or the lines on the palm of the hand. Yet, this raised arm is no wanton exercise in descriptive realism. The thrust of the limb gives the impression of a call for help. The rolled-up sleeve is awry in a frantic effort to raise the hand even higher. This is Expressionism in the Gothic age. How that came about is unclear.
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We might know more about it were it not for the iconoclastic zeal of the Protestant reformers. In 1529, a mob rampaged through the cathedral smashing up most of the sculpture. The sandstone head of a bishop used as masonry infill was discovered in 1947 during restoration work. A smile of bitter irony wrinkles the cleric's face. Whoever carved it between the years 1418 and 1422 was a master.
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The sculptor was not quite as great, though, as the goldsmith who conceived a decade or two later the silver figure of Saint Christopher wading across a torrent.
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The saint is shown as an elderly man with a stoop pausing in midstream. Clutching a branch used as a stick to steady his ill-assured steps, he looks up, suddenly alert. The infant Jesus perched on his shoulder holds the globe of the world in one hand and makes the teaching gesture with the other. There is a drama about the scene and a tragic intensity in the face of the old man, who summons all his faculties to listen and proceed. The 44-centimeter (8.6-inch) silver figure ranks among the masterpieces of 15th-century Germanic art.
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The power and tension that emanate from figural sculpture can be detected in the abstract forms. A reliquary casket in the form of a gable-ended house made around 1380 to 1400 has a squat volume and a steep roof that gives it a monumental appearance. Its short incurving legs are as taut as compressed springs. The 15th-century monstrances shoot up with an ethereal lightness in the tracery of their silver pinnacles.
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The show is brilliantly displayed. Half the pieces, on loan from out of the way regional institutions, are unknown to the general public. The exhibition book written by Timothy Husband with contributions by Julien Chapuis compresses the latest research on the subject in readable form. As a grand overture to the third millennium, the Met could not do better.
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"The Treasury of Basel Cathedral" will travel to the Historisches Museum in Basel from July 13 through Oct. 31.