SIB: Welfenschatz

Hi Everyone!

Thanks for the responses about Welfenschatz.  I checked out the photo on
worldiris.com just now.  LOVELY!  I think it's very appropriate to have a
yellow Siberian named Welfenschatz because it calls to mind the gold objects
in the Guelph Treasury.  

And now, whether you really care or not, I'm going to inflict upon you a
synopsis of the Guelph Treasury's history:  :-)

It began back in the early 11th century when Countess Gertrude of the
Guelphs married into the house of Brunswick and founded a chapel.  She
filled it with precious ecclesiastical objects.  A descendant, Duke Henry
the Lion, went on crusade and got lots of relics from Constantinople (he
intimidated the sultan who paid him off in precious relics like John the
Baptist's head, etc.).  Reliquaries were made for these objects well into
the 14th and 15th centuries and other objects were added when people married
into the family.  There were a few losses (robberies, etc).  The treasure
survived until the 1930s when it was sold off (the Duke of Brunswick needed
cash) and a lot of it was purchased by U.S. collectors and museums.  Both
the Cleveland Museum of Art and the Art Institute of Chicago have a lot of
objects from the treasure (9 objects in Cleveland and 8 I believe in
Chicago), and there are also pieces at Harvard, Kansas City (Nelson-Atkins
Museum), Houston (Museum of Fine Arts) and San Francisco (De-Young Museum).
There are a few other objects scattered here and there but most of the
remainder is in Berlin.  What's special about the treasure is that it
survived so long without major losses.  (It's rare for Medieval treasuries
to survive intact.)

My work on the treasure has been with a particular type of reliquary called
a monstrance.  I've examined 8 objects from the Guelph and 6 objects from
other collections.  I'm studying their construction.  All of these are very
elaborate, gilded pieces so again I think a yellow iris is a very
appropriate namesake.

So that's more than you needed to know about the Welfenschatz...  Thanks for
bearing with me.

Heather Bruhn

********************************
Paul L. Bruhn            plb123@psu.edu            Heather McCune Bruhn
State College, Pennsylvania, zone 5 (almost zone 6 but not quite!)
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