This large and dazzling chest embodies the dual relationship in the Gothic period between monumental architecture and human-scale design. By the fifteenth century, the Gothic style had developed for centuries as the international art style of the whole of Europe, with its design grammar appearing in every art form, from the architectural devices seen in painting, tapestry and manuscript illumination, to the elongated human figures in sculpture, to the miniature tracery and crockets in metalwork, jewels and arms and armor. Simultaneously, joinery techniques had developed to a stage where a three-dimensional, movable chest—a luxurious and relatively new development—presented an uninterrupted space for decoration, and thus the Gothic coffre could be born.

This example is exquisitely carved with the signature feature of the Gothic style: a row of pointed arches. Although executed in blind-carving, this motif has been called ‘fenestration’ by scholars for its obvious evocation of the windows and tracery on a cathedral façade. The artisans responsible for this carving were themselves instrumental in Gothic architecture, carving choirstalls and wood sculpture for cathedral interiors, and their work on case furniture in turn found a sacred purpose, being used for the storage of vestments. Stylistically, this piece is firmly of the fifteenth century, coinciding with the lavish flamboyant period, when the greatest innovations in sacred architecture were less in the structural engineering of churches and cathedrals than in the magnificence of their ornamentation. In furniture, carvers took advantage of the softness of wood—and especially, in Southern Europe, of the workability of local walnut—to achieve an even greater degree of crispness and inventive curvilinearity than was possible in stone.

Although this coffer is carved with lancet arches rather than the more famous ogee shape, it nonetheless reflects the influence of the Late Gothic in the depth of its decoration: in a kind of fractal scheme, each arch contains smaller arches, and each blind-carved rose window encloses a cluster of smaller rosaces. The carved masks between the arches and the deeply carved foliate rosettes to the short ends reflect the period's delight in ornament. Even the lock, the work of a serrurier rather than a chest-maker, is adorned with diminutive pinnacles and small ogee piercing, as a work of miniature architecture.

A chest with a similar lock is illustrated J. Boccador, Le Mobilier Français du Moyen Age à la Renaissance, Saint-Just-en-Chaussée, 1988, fig. 20, p. 27. Boccador also illustrates a walnut chest, originating in Eastern France, similar to ours in its large dovetail joints, solid (rather than paneled) front and top, and pierced iron corner braces, see ibid., pp. 35-37, figs. 28-29. The same large-scale dovetailing, without the pierced ironwork, also appears on a walnut chest in the Louvre Museum, where it is catalogued as French or Flemish (inv. no. OA 7371). For similar arcaded carving in walnut, see a second chest in the Louvre, inv. no. MRR 63; another, possibly from the Loire Valley, in the Victoria and Albert Museum (acc. no. W.17-1914); and a coffer-front sold Christie’s, London, 30 October 2012, lot 437. Intact Gothic walnut chests are especially scarce on the open market; one known example was sold Christie’s, New York, 6 February 2002, lot 187.