International Medieval Society, Paris
Société Internationale des Médiévistes, Paris

Symposium 2008 Abstracts

For late medieval goldsmiths’ working in the cities of Paris, London and Bruges amongst others, the issue of blood played a significant part in two key aspects of their working lives. Firstly through its representation in the objects commissioned by royal houses and the increasingly affluent merchant classes and secondly through the impact on their own blood of the materials and processes employed in their workshops. This paper focuses on the depiction of blood in works of the period, but sets that development against the physical costs paid by goldsmiths working in often exceedingly unhealthy conditions.

The depiction of blood, mediated through the use of precious and semi-precious materials, represented a constant and demanding challenge in terms of design and technical manufacture. The pressures on design content for the inclusion of iconography and implied allusion to biblical and philosophy-related references brought pressure to bear on goldsmiths’ to find and develop innovative approaches to the representation and fabrication of blood in their works. The range of materials and techniques used spanned from the inclusion of gemstones and cuts that had widely understood blood-related lore associated with them to piercing and chasing techniques that raise intriguing parallels to the techniques used to draw blood – violently or medically – from the human body.

This paper examines the materials and techniques used to depict blood in goldsmiths’ work in the late medieval Northern Europe in a period overshadowed by the pre-eminence of Paris as a centre of manufacture.