The Antioch 'Chalice'

A sixth-century Syrian silver vessel of two parts, a plain inner bowl inside a gilded openwork shell of grapevine holding twelve seated figures, which was sold out of Paris and New York from 1910 as a first-century object. Gustavus Eisen dated it in print in October 1916, with certainty, to the second half of the first century after Christ; the identification of its plain inner cup as the Holy Grail followed from that date, was carried by the owner, and was what the object was exhibited as. It was shown as the Holy Grail at the Century of Progress exposition in Chicago in 1933 by the dealer who owned it, and bought by The Cloisters in 1950.

Every large claim made for it has since been withdrawn by the institution that owns it. The Museum dates it 500 to 550, states that the Grail identification has not been sustained, records that its authenticity has at times been challenged, keeps the word chalice inside quotation marks because the shape is now read as a sixth-century standing lamp, and gives the find-spot as Antioch or Kaper Koraon with a question mark.

The find was witnessed by no archaeologist, part of it was melted for scrap before anyone recorded it, and the whole surface was cleaned by a commercial restorer in Paris before it was first published. In 1985 a magazine named a Damascus coin forger as its probable maker. No metallurgical analysis has ever been published.

The Museum puts the word chalice in quotation marks

The label reads The Antioch Chalice, with the second word inside inverted commas, and the Museum has kept those commas for years. They are doing a lot of work. They record that this object was sold as the cup of the Last Supper, was published as first-century, was displayed at a world's fair as one of the holiest relics on earth, and is now dated 500 to 550, thought to be a lamp rather than a cup, and possibly not from Antioch at all.

Almost every claim ever made about it has been withdrawn. What has not been withdrawn is the object, which is a first-rate piece of early Byzantine silver whatever it was for, and the file, which is one of the most instructive in the history of collecting because every stage of it was published while it was happening.

What it is, physically

Two vessels, one inside the other. An inner bowl of plain, ungilded silver, hammered from a thick sheet with its rim turned outward into a collar about a centimetre wide. Around it, an openwork shell of silver, gilded, carved as a fruiting grapevine inhabited by birds including an eagle, animals including a lamb and a rabbit, and twelve human figures seated in high-backed chairs holding scrolls. Below, a stand and foot turned out of a solid block of silver.

The Museum gives the overall dimensions as 19.6 by 18 by 15.2 centimetres, with a foot of 7.4 centimetres. Eisen, measuring it in 1916, gave the height as 19 centimetres and noted that the greatest diameter at the top of the bowl was 18 centimetres and the narrowest 13, a discrepancy he attributed to the upper part having been crushed by falling debris. He calculated the original diameter at about 15 centimetres and the original capacity at about two and a half litres.

The openwork was made by the method Eisen called chased-applied: the ornament was carved on a sheet of silver, the edges cut through, the background removed, and the resulting openwork soldered onto the bowl. Two different golds were used for the gilding, deep red for the figures on the bowl and pale yellow for the lotus cup, stand and foot. The inner bowl was never gilded at all.

The find, as the dealers told it

Everything known about how this object came out of the ground comes from the people who were selling it, written down six years later by the man they had engaged to publish it. That is the whole evidential problem in one sentence, and it should be read before the rest.

Eisen's account in 1916 is specific. What he calls the Kouchakji Silver Treasure of Antioch numbered six pieces: two chalices, three book covers and a large ceremonial cross. They were procured by Kouchakji Freres in Paris directly from the excavators in 1910. A seventh object, a smaller silver cross supposed to be from the same find, was acquired by the French archaeologist Wilhelm Froehner and stayed in Paris. The objects were all said to have been found together by Arabs digging a well at Antioch on the Orontes, in Syria, in 1910; at a depth of many metres the diggers came upon underground chambers, and the treasure was in them. The Kouchakji pieces were moved to New York for safety at the outbreak of the war.

One detail in that paragraph is worth more than the rest of it. Besides the seven entire pieces, the diggers found enough crumbled fragments of silver to fill a sack, and those fragments were smelted for the value of the metal. Whatever the treasure was, part of it was melted down before anyone recorded it, and no archaeologist ever saw the chambers. Eisen himself noted that no excavation had been made to establish what the building above them had been.

A restorer named only as M. Andre

Eisen records that when the chalice was found the whole surface was covered with a coating of oxide several millimetres thick, and that this was skilfully removed by the renowned restorer M. Andre in Paris. No first name is given, in 1916 or anywhere in the sources read here.

The best-known Paris restorer of that surname at that date was Alfred Andre, the goldsmith whose workshop supplied the dealer Frederic Spitzer with mounts and settings and whose name now appears on the Metropolitan's own labels beside nineteenth-century Renaissance-style plate. The Metropolitan holds objects attributed to him. Whether Eisen's M. Andre is that man is not established by anything consulted here, and the identification is offered as a question rather than a fact. It matters because the first thing that happened to this object in Europe was that a commercial restorer took its entire surface off, and because that is precisely the circumstance a later generation would use to argue the object had been made rather than cleaned.

Eisen also recorded something that argues the other way. The silver matrix, he wrote, had crystallised and become so brittle that a slight tap would break the vessel into fragments, and it could only be handled with the utmost care. Crystallisation of that kind is a consequence of long burial, and it is not a property a workshop can supply on request.

Eisen, and the first century

Gustavus A. Eisen, 1847 to 1940, was a Swedish-born naturalist turned archaeologist. His preliminary report in the American Journal of Archaeology in October 1916 set out the claim without hedging: the seven pieces belong to two distinct periods, the book covers to the fifth century, and the great chalice can with certainty be dated to the second half of the first century after Christ.

He built a context for it. Local tradition put a large vanished Christian church on the site. Constantine the Great had built a great cathedral at Antioch, a city bound to Peter and Paul and the place where the word Christian was first used, and Eisen thought it not improbable that an object of such importance had come into the emperor's possession and been given to that sanctuary. The cathedral, he noted, stood until the earthquake of 526 levelled the city during an assembly of 250,000 Christians.

If the chalice is first-century and was venerated in Antioch, only one identification is available for the plain inner cup it encloses. Eisen returned to the dating in a further article in April 1917 and published a two-volume monograph in 1923 under the title The Great Chalice of Antioch; a short popular version followed in 1933, printed by the object's owner. How much of the Grail claim was Eisen's own argument and how much was made for him by his readers and by the man who owned the object cannot be settled from the 1916 article, which is the only piece of his writing read for this entry. What is certain is that the object was exhibited as the Holy Grail, that its owner exhibited it that way, and that the Museum now says the identification has not been sustained.

What the vine was understood to mean

Within three months of the preliminary report, James A. Montgomery of the University of Pennsylvania published a note on the iconography that is still the most interesting thing written about the object's meaning, and that has survived the collapse of the date it was written under.

The vine, Montgomery observed, is the natural symbolism for a eucharistic cup, but it corresponds specifically to the opening of the eucharistic prayer in the Didache, which gives thanks to the Father for the holy vine of David. The Didache is Syrian, some say Antiochene, and early. Montgomery went further and proposed that the whole design is Jewish and drawn from the eightieth Psalm and its parable of the vine that is Israel: the beast at the foot of the design answers to the wild boar out of the wood that ravages it, and the sheep beside the figure of the Lord to the Shepherd of Israel who leads Joseph like a sheep.

He also noticed the arithmetic that still governs the argument. There are twelve figures, but two of them are the Lord, as a youth and as a man, so they cannot be the twelve apostles. Montgomery suggested the twelve tribes. The Museum's present text offers the alternative that the ten are philosophers of the classical age who, like the prophets, had foretold the coming of Christ, and points to the sixth-century Antiochene chronicler Malalas as a writer who made exactly that link. Nobody has settled it.

Montgomery wrote all of this believing the object was first-century. The reading of the vine does not depend on that, which is why it is the part of the early literature still worth reading.

The Grail on the midway

The object was exhibited in Europe and written about extensively through the 1920s. In 1931 it was in the Exposition internationale d'art byzantin at the Musee des Arts Decoratifs in Paris, catalogued as number 335. In 1933 and 1934 it was in the Hall of Religion at the Century of Progress International Exposition in Chicago, shown as one of the world's holiest relics and among the most publicised attractions of the fair. In December 1935 the Brooklyn Museum gave it an exhibition of its own under the title The Chalice of Antioch and Associated Objects.

It was also being published by its owner. Eisen's short account of 1933, twenty-two pages with a coloured plate, was printed in New York by Fahim Kouchakji. Eisen explains in it that the 1923 monograph was both technical and expensive, and that this briefer untechnical version had been prepared in response to demand. The scholar who authenticated the object wrote the popular book about it; the dealer who owned the object published that book; and it appeared in the year the object went on show at the world's fair. None of that is concealed. It is on the title page.

The Cloisters buys it, 1950

The Metropolitan bought the chalice in 1950 from Fahim Joseph Kouchakji, 1886 to 1976, of New York, using the Cloisters Collection fund endowed by John D. Rockefeller Jr. It carries the accession number 50.4. James J. Rorimer reported the acquisition in the Museum's Bulletin the following summer and, in 1954, published an essay titled The Authenticity of the Chalice of Antioch in a volume of studies for Belle da Costa Greene.

The title of that essay is the point. Four years after the Museum had bought the object, its own medieval curator was in print defending its authenticity, which means the question was live inside the institution at the moment of purchase and not raised for the first time by journalists thirty years later. No purchase price has been published in any source consulted here.

The object stayed at The Cloisters for decades in a lit case of its own. By 1985 it had been moved into a corridor at the Fifth Avenue building among other early Christian and Byzantine material, labelled simply as early Christian, with nothing in the display to single it out. It is now in Gallery 300.

The 1985 allegation

On 5 April 1985 the wires carried a story that an article prepared for the May issue of Art & Antiques, by the magazine's senior editor Jeffrey Schaire and two co-authors, would argue that the chalice is a twentieth-century forgery. The article named a probable forger: Constantine Christodoulos, a Cypriot Greek known as a master forger of ancient coins, who lived in Damascus, and who the article said was a cousin of the Kouchakji brothers. It suggested both the inner cup and the openwork shell may have been made by him about 1910, the year the object was said to have been dug up.

The evidence offered was testimony at two removes. An unidentified trustee of the British Museum was quoted saying that he met Christodoulos in Damascus in 1938 and that the elderly Greek admitted the forgery in his presence and that of a French diplomat, Count Stanislas Ostrorog; Ostrorog was said to have told the Briton that the object had been found in a garden belonging to a cousin of the forger and sold with the guarantee of a corrupt archaeologist. The report noted that no thorough modern metallurgical or chemical test had ever been made on the chalice, and called on the Museum to reopen the investigation. No comment was available from the Museum on the day.

This record does not adopt that allegation. An anonymous witness recalling a confession he heard forty-seven years earlier is not evidence of the kind that settles anything, and no scholarly literature since has adopted the forgery position: the object is catalogued as sixth-century by the Metropolitan, appeared as a sixth-century object in the Walters Art Gallery's 1986 Byzantine silver exhibition and in the Royal Academy's Byzantium in 2008, and the Museum's own summary says only that its authenticity has at times been challenged. What the 1985 story does establish, and what stands, is that the object's chain of custody begins with a family of dealers, that no archaeologist witnessed the find, and that the scientific testing the article asked for had not been done.

Not a chalice: the lamp

The quietest reversal is the largest. The complete vessel was believed for most of the twentieth century to be a chalice for the Eucharist. The Museum now states that its shape is recognised as more closely resembling sixth-century standing lamps, and reads the decoration accordingly, with the vine and the light referring to the words in the eighth chapter of John, I am the light of the world.

That changes what the object was for, which on the house view is what it means. A eucharistic chalice is handled by a priest at an altar and touched by communicants; Eisen thought the wear on the faces of the two principal figures came from repeated touching by worshippers. A standing lamp burns in front of something. The twelve seated figures with their scrolls read differently in each case, and the argument about whether they are apostles, tribes or philosophers is not independent of the argument about whether the thing is a cup or a light.

Not Antioch: Kaper Koraon

The Museum's geography field now reads: made in Antioch or Kaper Koraon, with a question mark. The alternative comes from the reconstruction of the Syrian church treasures published by Marlia Mundell Mango in the Walters Art Gallery's 1986 catalogue Silver from Early Byzantium: The Kaper Koraon and Related Treasures, where the chalice is number 40.

The argument is that the object belongs to a treasure of liturgical silver found in 1908 that had served the Church of Saint Sergios at Kaper Koraon, a town southeast of Antioch. The Museum adds a human gloss: if so, the parishioners of Saint Sergios might well have travelled into Antioch to buy the object and give it to their church, which would make it a village congregation's donation rather than an imperial treasure.

Note the date. The Kaper Koraon treasure is recorded as found in 1908; Eisen's dealers said this object came out of a well at Antioch in 1910. Both dates cannot be right for the same object, and the discrepancy is not a rounding error. It is the difference between the find story the trade supplied and the find story the scholarship has reconstructed from where the rest of the silver went.

What is left standing

The first-century date is gone. The Holy Grail identification is gone; the Museum says flatly that it has not been sustained. The Constantinian cathedral is gone. The word chalice is in quotation marks. The find-spot has a question mark against it. The forgery allegation of 1985 has not been adopted by the literature and has not been laid to rest by testing either.

What survives is a piece of sixth-century Syrian church silver of exceptional quality, whose openwork vine is among the finest surviving, and a documentary record in which every wrong answer was published under a respectable imprint at the time it was believed. The object is worth a page. The file around it is worth more.