Either pass the salt or bend the knee
Iwas curious about one of the objects chosen by Ian Hislop, the editor of Private Eye, for his Radio 4 series I Object! this week. All were designed to express dissent, openly or secretly.
This one was a saltcellar that might have been used secretly as a pyx, that is, a container for the Blessed Sacrament, the consecrated bread from the Mass. To celebrate Mass was against the law in England in 1577, when this object was made.
I knew what some grand saltcellars or “salts” look like and I knew what some old pyxes look like, so I was intrigued to discover how one could be like the other. The bizarre appearance of this one is hinted at by the little picture below. But Elizabethans had a taste for the bizarre, setting ostrich eggs or nautilus shells in rich metalwork.
This silver-gilt salt looks a little like a cup designed by Hans Holbein as Henry VIII’S wedding present to Jane Seymour. But it looks far more like many a medieval reliquary in which a saint’s bone was displayed in a hollow mounted column of rock crystal. Here, there are rock crystal columns, but no relics.
Other salts from the 16th century had an upright configuration like this, and here the salt grains might have gone in the shallow dish under the ornate lid.
Certainly, in the 20th century there was doubt about whether it was a piece of religious plate or dining plate. The object is called the Stonyhurst Salt because it was long in the care of the Jesuit school in Lancashire, which had its own museum.
The school forgot where it had come from, but in 1914 Fr
John Hungerford Pollen, the historian son of the architect, and Fr Herbert Thurston, an indefatigable historian too, decided it had been made as a secular salt.
So Stonyhurst sold it.
Sir John Noble
Bt bought it and his son sold it in 1957. It was bought by the British Museum for £6,000, with the help of £1,500 from the National Art Collections Fund. Even in 1957, this article of extreme rarity was a snip at £6,000. The price reflected uncertainty, perhaps, as to what it was.
When Ian Hislop spoke about it on the radio, he singled out the rubies and carbuncles set in the ball-and-claw scroll legs. There are 52 in all, set as cabochons, that is, not cut with flashy facets, but presented in the underappreciated manner of medieval jewels, with a subtle inner light. The question Mr Hislop raised was: “Would these not immediately remind the viewer of the sacred blood of Christ?” The answer, in 1577 would be: “Definitely.”
But here we meet a difficulty. In 1577, bits and pieces of chalices, pyxes, reliquaries, and other sacred vessels were flying about dealers’ shops and goldsmiths’. Craftsmen sought new uses for old parts.
The so-called Walker Salt, for example, belonging to Trinity College, Oxford, was made in 1549 reusing a hollow stem of rock crystal, replacing the original relic with a goldsmith’s figurine of Lucretia, heaven help us. It was like using a modern Catholic monstrance (which displays the Blessed Sacrament) as a table-lamp.
So I’m not convinced that the I Object! Stonyhurst Salt was an object of devotion that could be passed off as a domestic item of tableware if the pursuivants of the state poked their noses in. I’m not even convinced that Stonyhurst used it as a sacred object in the years it owned it. There’s no record that it held a relic then, and it would not have been useful as a pyx.
I’m afraid that, when it was made, the Stonyhurst Salt, represented the cannibalism of an old culture by a new, just as gentry set themselves up in old abbeys, and embroidered frontals of altars were turned into bedspreads.