Brescia Casket [SEP] material used
Brescia Casket
The Brescia Casket or Lipsanotheca (in Italian "Lipsanoteca") is an ivory box, perhaps a reliquary, from the late 4th century, which is now in the Museo di Santa Giulia at San Salvatore in Brescia, Italy. It is a virtually unique survival of a complete Early Christian ivory box in generally good condition. The 36 subjects depicted on the box represent a wide range of the images found in the evolving Christian art of the period, and their identification has generated a great deal of art-
, which is also the home of the much later Anglo-Saxon Franks Casket. This has only one Christian scene, with others from northern myth and Mediterranean history, and includes texts which mingle Latin and Old English in both Roman letters and Anglo-Saxon runes. However it shares with the Brescia Casket great programmic complexity, and an equal ability to arouse scholarly debate; it seems clear that the full meaning of both boxes would have represented a puzzle, or riddle, even to well-educated contemporaries used to the iconographies