Panel from a Casket: Sir Gawain on the marvelous bed,

1300–50

In fourteenth-century Paris, ivory caskets showing scenes from popular chivalric romances were produced to serve as courtship gifts. These carved panels once formed the front and one side of such a casket. The relief that formed the front of the casket has been interpreted as a provincial replacement of the original panel; alternatively, it could be the original and have been executed by a different workshop than the rest of the casket. Here, courting couples play games. In the left field, a lady with a pet ­squirrel and a man with a hawk on his wrist are below a man separated from his love by a couple in a tree, who make a chin-chucking gesture. In the second segment, a game of Hot Cockles is below a man offering his heart to a lady. In the third, the game is Frog in the Middle, and a lady is about to crown a man with flowers. In the fourth, at the far right, ladies vie for a man below and the god of Love above will decide the contest with his arrow. The relief from the end of the casket shows a more typical, Arthurian scene: Sir Gawain on the Marvelous Bed, from the twelfth-century romance <em>Perceval</em>, by Chrétien de Troyes, a favorite subject. Sir Gawain comes upon a castle filled with widows and fatherless maidens, guarded by marvelous but lethal machines. Depicted here are the castle battlements, lined with imprisoned women, and the interior room where Gawain spends the night on a wheeled bed with silver bells. After miraculously surviving a shower of mechanical arrows and an attack by a lion, whose severed paw remains embedded in his shield, he frees the women.