Treasure from early medieval Ireland, the Ardagh Chalice

The central rite of Christianity is the Eucharist, that is, the taking of the bread and the wine in reference to the body and blood of Christ. And so it follows that religious communities put a tremendous amount of effort into creating beautiful, luxurious objects for this ritual. And that could include a plate to hold the wafer, which is known as a patent, and a glass or a chalice to hold the wine. And we're looking at an exceptional early example of a chalice that comes from around the year 800 and is from Ireland. This is the Arda Chalice, and this is considered one of the finest examples of early medieval art generally, but certainly one of the best examples, if not the best example, of early medieval metalworking. So this chalice is made in three parts. We have a silver hemispherical bowl that has small handles attached to it. Then we have a gilt silver stem attached to the bowl with golden discs, and then the foot of the chalice. It's very lustrous, and that's punctuated by these design elements. We see circular bosses on the sides, and the lip is made of brass color. And then there's a band with gold filigree. And filigree work is essentially wire work. In this case, gold wire that is intertwined and elaborately patterned. Within that band, we see what almost looks like small circular enamels, but they're not quite. True enamel are grains of colored glass that are fired and fused together. This glass was actually cut to fit. And the filigree is so fine that it's almost impossible to make out the details. But if you are looking through a camera and you can zoom in, you can see beasts, you can see birds. And in the surface of the silver bowl itself, you can see an inscription with a kind of square lettering that is quite similar to the painted letters that we see, for instance, in the Lindisfarne Gospels. What that inscription says is the names of the 12 apostles except for Judas, who is substituted with the name of Paul. On the stem, there are spiral designs, and that is related to designs brought from mainland Europe. The Celtic peoples, when they migrate here, bring those traditions with them. But Celtic art comes to Ireland in the pre-Christian era. Nevertheless, those designs are adopted into a broader vocabulary and become part of the Christian tradition when it is established in Ireland. And we could say the same thing about the elaborate interlace in the filigree work. This looks similar to the type of interlace work in Northumbria or in the metalworking objects that we find at places like Sutton Hoo in England. But in order to see all of the work of the chalice, it would have to have been tipped up, and then the bottom is revealed. There's a mirror placed underneath this so that we can see below the chalice, and there's another golden disc with more filigree, and then there's also rock crystal or quartz. The rock crystal would have been imported. There is also small pieces of amber on this chalice that would have been likewise imported from the Baltic region. Typically, people call this type of art insular art, meaning from the isles of Ireland and Great Britain, and that it's really looking inward. But what these materials demonstrate is that people were trading and acquiring things from elsewhere. In fact, the tradition of elaborate chalices can be found at quite a distance in this period. One could look to the Byzantine Empire and their precious goblets. What it suggests is that artists in different places were looking to ancient Roman prototypes. When this was made in the 8th century, we do not have large churches being constructed in Ireland. What we find are smaller structures, and in textual records, it's noted that churches were often built in wood, and so they no longer survive. What that suggests to us, too, is that people were channeling their energy, their time, and their resources into finely crafted objects like this chalice or the patent that we see near us. And given Ireland's violent history of invasions by Vikings and by other outsiders, one of the reasons that objects like this survive is that they were portable. They could be hidden, and they could be safeguarded. This was found buried along with an unadorned bronze chalice and several other objects, which suggests that it was so precious that at some point, someone decided it needed to be buried perhaps as a dedication or vote of offering, but more likely to protect it. And so we have in this chalice an object that both signifies the great history of Irish art, but also its connections to a wider world.