BRITISH MUSEUM. - In London, alongside the Victoria and Albert Museum, which contains a large collection of Paleo-Christian objects, Coptic fabrics (Kendwick catalogue), ivories (Loughurst catalogue), and glassware, with a special section for plaster casts, the British Museum houses a remarkable collection of art from late antiquity to the early Middle Ages. The British Museum was founded by the British Parliament in 1753, and its current building was constructed between 1823 and 1852 by Robert and Sydney Smirke.
In 1893, Paleo-Christian and early medieval objects were arranged in special rooms among the major collections on the history of religions. However, musical instruments from Africa, ivories, gems, and glassware remain dispersed in other galleries, for example: coins and lead seals in the numismatic cabinet, the collection of glassware and ivories in the medieval hall, goldsmithing in the gold room, British antiquities in the Romano-British section, stelae and Coptic fabrics in the Egyptian rooms, and illuminated manuscripts, such as the Cotton Genesis, among the manuscripts.
The Christian section consists of three collections: Paleo-Christian, Byzantine, and post-1553 objects; among these are many works from Abyssinia, Egypt, and Russia. The organization and cataloguing are largely due to O. M. Dalton.
The collection was never intended to document the development of ancient Christian art, but it contains pieces of the highest value, such as the Esquiline treasure, that of Cyprus, and that of Lampsacus. The ivory collection also includes world-famous masterpieces, such as the Archangel Michael, the pyxis of St. Menas from the Nesbit collection (1879), and the casket with the Crucifixion from the Maskell collection. Other ivories and minor objects come, in addition to the aforementioned collection (1856), also from the Slade and Hawkins collections. Rings and high-quality gems are compared with the Hamilton collection in 1865, with the Castellani collection in 1897, and with the Francks collection. Glassware, especially gold-glass, is compared with the Bunsen and Disch collection in 1854 and with the Matarozzi collection in 1863. Other objects, such as bronze lamps, polycandela, ceramic lamps, and ampullae, are largely the result of more recent acquisitions. O. M. Dalton’s catalogue meticulously records the provenance of all these pieces. Sculptural material and architectural fragments, however, are scarce.
In July 1939, in the eastern part of Britain, near the Deben estuary at Sutton Hoo, an imposing artistic treasure was discovered beneath one of the burial mounds inside a large rowing ship; the treasure was donated to the British nation by the landowner. After the museum’s galleries reopened in 1946, the material from this treasure is gradually being displayed as it emerges from restoration. It is the most impressive treasure in terms of both quantity and value, including a standard-holder, a silver disc bearing the seal of Emperor Anastasius I (491–518), drinking horns, a large silver basin with a classical head, silver plates, silver spoons—two of which bear the inscriptions SAUL and PAUL—a helmet, a sword, a belt buckle, and a large gold purse clasp with enamels and filigree, 37 Merovingian gold coins, and more. All of this likely belonged to King Æthelhere, who died between 655 and 656 and is mentioned by Bede (Hist. eccl., III, 24: PL 95, 156).