The British Museum citole is a unique surviving musical instrument and virtuoso work of art, widely admired for the dense decorative scheme that runs across its sides and neck. It is notable for the lively interplay of imagined and pastoral scenes which inhabit a range of lush arboreal landscapes. Made of boxwood, it is believed to have been carved around 1310-1320 by a woodworker based in East Anglia and was destined for the English royal court. The instrument has long been of interest to musicologists as well as art historians, who have investigated the citole’s iconography and style from the perspective of manuscript marginalia and architectural sculpture. However, it has never been examined in terms of its real and imagined environment: as an object both from wood and of woods. This talk will present an analysis of the citole from an ecological perspective, considering the object as a response to and reflection of English woodlands during the first decades of the 14th century. Although scientific analysis of the citole published in 2008 included a discussion of the wood’s identification, beyond this there has been little work on the object’s materiality. Through mapping the scenes on the citole and identifying their relationship to each other, as well as the species depicted, a three-dimensional picture can be created of the variety and use of woods as evidenced in the citole. This talk will conclude by exploring the instrument through the socio-political context of the time, with a particular focus on the management of the English forest around the years of its carving.
Naomi Speakman is Curator of Late Medieval Europe at the British Museum where she has works on the Western European collection from ca. 1100 to 1500. She received her PhD from The Courtauld Institute of Art for her thesis on the collecting and reception of medieval ivory carvings in 19th-century Britain and is preparing a monograph drawn from her thesis. Her research has focused on the art and material culture of Northern and Western Europe, their afterlives and the intersection between art history and museology.
Organised by Dr Jessica Barker, Senior Lecturer in Medieval Art History, The Courtauld, as part of the Medieval Work-in-Progress Series.
