The Victoria and Albert Museum and New York’s Metropolitan Museum are competing to purchase the Deposition, a rare medieval English ivory sculpture. Unless the Victoria and Albert can raise the £2m by 14 June, it will go to the US.
Please write in support to the V&A or donate. (see link at end)
The museum believes that the Deposition of Christ was originally part of a much larger ivory artwork, and is therefore appealing to the public not only for funds to help keep it in the UK, but also for information about where other fragments of the original priceless masterpiece might be.
Made of walrus tusk ivory, the original artwork would almost certainly have consisted of around seven scenes from Christ’s final days. At present only two fragments are known but other fragments may survive, in private collections or small museums.
It’s likely that it was commissioned from a 12th century York sculptor by one of Norman England’s richest and most powerful noble families, the de Warennes who had Sandal Castle and were Lords of the Manor of Wakefield. The available evidence suggests that the sculpture was probably housed, for much of the Middle Ages, in one of the chantry chapels inside the parish church or perhaps even in one of Wakefield’s four independent chantry chapels.
The article points out that Wakefield has yielded more hidden medieval Catholic treasures than almost any other English town. One fragment of the same sculpture showing Christ, at the Last Supper, offering Judas Iscariot a piece of bread was discovered in 1769 in a secret hiding place inside a house on Northgate near the church. In 1756, around 25 sacred Catholic sculptures were found hidden above a false ceiling in what had, in the mid-16th century, been the home of one of the church chantry chapel priests. In the mid 19th century, in the same area, two 5ft-tall religious stone statues were discovered hidden in a wall inside another house near the church.
The ivory and other artworks were, in a sense, part of the resistance to the 16th century Protestant Reformation. In 1536 a pro-Catholic revolt, known as the Pilgrimage of Grace, started in Pontefract, which almost certainly had substantial support from many of Wakefield’s residents. And just five years later, in 1541, Wakefield itself was at the heart of a major Catholic plan to overthrow Henry VIII and his Protestant government. Interestingly there are links to Wakefield Historical Society’s recent project “Treason, the Truth about the Battle of Newland”: https://www.wakefieldhistoricalsociety.org.uk/treason-the-truth-about-the-battle-of-newland-revealed/
Read the full article at: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/archaeology/v-a-art-ivory-last-supper-b2503282.html
An information and donation page is on the Victoria and Albert Museum website: https://www.vam.ac.uk/shop/donation?pid=donation-appeal-deposition-from-the-cross