Artifact in ‘Crowning the North’ exhibit tells twisted story
A bridal crown made between 1590 and 1610 greets visitors to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston’s exhibition, “Crowning the North: Silver Treasures From Bergen, Norway.” The piece is amply regal in and of itself.
A set of interlocking triangular, leaf-like pieces of silver rise like spires, gently arcing outward toward the top. Gaze closer, and the piece will truly absorb you. Humanoid figures emerge from the metal-like wraiths from the Well of Souls, their torsos twisting at the bottom. More clearly defined faces peer out from the top. Flukeshaped spangles hang from the sides.
All that glitters is not gold, though some of it is: The piece is silver and silver gilt, in which a thin layer of gold is applied. The piece is one of about 200 objects in the exhibition, which tells an epic global story from the vantage of a coastal town in Norway. It is one, curator Misty Flores says, “that has to do with global exchange, global economies, immigration, nation-building. … Some things I think we can all relate to and that resonate with people in a city like Houston.”
The era was a boom time for Norway as an exporter of cod and timber. A large mural in the exhibition
acknowledges the other side of the exchange: exploitation and colonialism. Much of the silver was sourced by the gold-seeking Spanish, who commanded its extraction from mines in the Andes and Mexico.
During a period that included
crafting that particular bridal crown — the specific goldsmith who made it is unknown — the Potosí mine in present-day Bolivia produced almost half of the silver in the world.
“Crowning the North” presents a view of Bergen as a guild-centric
mercantile system. Flores describes an apprenticeship system that started around age 12 and lasted about seven years. The young goldsmith apprentice would leave home and travel to “be exposed to new artistic traditions and new artistic languages.”
Upon returning to Bergen, the artist would spend a year on a masterpiece to present to the guild for approval.
“They established an artistic language that would resonate throughout the centuries,” Flores says. A wall of intricately detailed silver spoons in the exhibition speaks to one way wealth was accumulated and displayed without a centralized banking system.
But it’s hard to ignore crowns when crowns are in the room.
The exhibition has a half dozen of them, of fewer than a dozen that circulate through galleries. These are not the crowns of royalty.
Rather, Flores says, they served as a conduit to medieval times and the cult of the Virgin Mary. The pieces were far too lavish for a citizen to purchase. Rather, they could be rented, for lack of a more elegant word, from the church to allow a bride a gleaming moment as queen for a day.