Coffret à estampe

09:18 Aug 1, 2018 

Hi Tony, the text just says Antwerp school in the style of Joachim Patinir.

21:54 Jul 31, 2018 

You're welcome!

I in turn got my artistic wires crossed: the Flight into Egypt mentioned is indeed a painting and the coffret is depicted in it. Sorry!

20:46 Jul 31, 2018 

Thanks a lot! Long time since I read the Bible, and now I'm a confirmed pagan ;-)
Sad, really, when the sum total of my OT religious knowledge is summed up in one song from Boney-M! :)

20:23 Jul 31, 2018 

I think you've got your biblical wires crossed. The Flight into Egypt is Joseph, Mary and the Infant Jesus escaping Herod, having been tipped off by the angel of the Lord (Matthew 2:13–23). They didn't go via Babylon (at least the gospel account doesn't say they did). "By the rivers of Babylon" is the exiled Israelites weeping as they remember their distant homeland (Psalm 137).

Many of these early prints (not a painting in this case) are undocumented and the artist is usually impossible to identify unless they are monogrammed.

19:37 Jul 31, 2018 

I'd love to see this 'Flight from Egypt' painting, may we know whom it is by?

19:36 Jul 31, 2018 

"By the rivers of Babylon
There we sat down..." — presumably to rest? Though I'm a little geographically challenged as to quite why it was necessary to pass via Babylon to get from Egypt to Judæa — but I guess I'm just misisng something...

12:49 Jul 31, 2018 

Thanks to all!

12:40 Jul 31, 2018 

I recently translated an exhibition catalogue on German early Renaissance prints, and one of the curators referred to coffers with religious prints stuck inside them to prevent the coins they contained from being stolen. No footnote, unfortunately, so I don't know the source of that idea, but I doubt she made it up. People do seem to have attributed talismanic qualities to religious prints. She also notes that prints hung in homes or taverns were thought to protect them against fires.

12:32 Jul 31, 2018 

The rather beautiful term ‘Minnekästchen’ is used for German examples, such as this one in the Met Museum’s collection: https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/471357

12:16 Jul 31, 2018 

http://www.omnia.ie/index.php?navigation_function=2&navigati...

http://www.themagazineantiques.com/article/late-gothic-coffe...

http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/193362

"Suzanne Karr Schmidt, Altered and Adorned, Using Renaissance Prints in Daily Life, The Art Institute of Chicago & Yale University Press, 2011, p. 59: « Approximately one hundred such ornamented boxes are known, but their purpose and even their intended users remain uncertain. (...) The variety of names given the genre since the early 1900s reveals this confusion, with some labels highlighting their proposed roles as messenger or dispatch boxes, alms or offering boxes, book or missal boxes, and others more descriptive of their hybrid nature (coffrets à estampe or Kassetten-Holzschnitten)."
http://www.pba-auctions.com/html/fiche.jsp?id=2213739

12:12 Jul 31, 2018 

Whatever you choose to call it, don't use the word "engraving"! All the references I've seen indicate that the "estampe" pasted inside the lid was a woodcut, and woodcuts are not engravings. The safe generic term is "print".

It seems clear that nobody actually knows what these boxes or small coffers were for, so although there are references to them as "missal boxes" this is a supposition, and personally I don't think that term should be used because we can't be sure it is accurate. The article Helen has cited uses the term "print box" at one point, but I would be a bit reluctant to use that on its own. I think it would be best to use the French term with some kind of explanatory translation in parentheses, possibly just "print box" but preferably perhaps something like "box/coffer with woodcut/print inside lid".