Some Hampshire Relics: A Grandison Ivory

Extract

A few months ago a Southampton lady, a recent convert to the Catholic Faith, showed us an ivory triptych, about nine inches high, which appears to have been in the possession of her family since the reign of Queen Elizabeth, and proves to be a fourteenth century ivory with the arms of John Grandison, Bishop of Exeter (1327-1369). In the centre piece (slightly damaged) are carved the Crucifixion in the upper compartment, and in the lower the Madonna and Child. The wing on the left has standing figures of St. Peter and St. John the Baptist; and that on the right corresponding figures of St. Paul and St. Thomas Becket. The authorities of the British Museum have arranged to secure this ivory for their collection of mediaeval antiquities.

There now exist but comparatively few English ivories of the later Middle Ages; doubtless their rarity is due to the Reformers’ fanatical zeal for the wholesale destruction of sacred images. In the British Museum have been for some time two ivories with the arms of Bishop Grandison : one of them is a triptych somewhat similar to the one mentioned above, and the other a panel of a diptych of which the other leaf is in the Louvre at Paris. There also is a mediaeval English diptych in ivory in the Salting Bequest at South Kensington. Such ivories now have a market value of nearly ;£ 1,000 each.

St. Thomas Aquinas in Art.

Perhaps not many are aware that there is in the Manor House, Mottisfont, a curious antique painting, which represents two events in the life of St. Thomas Aquinas, and is said to have belonged to the ancient Priory of Mottisfont.