Very Rare Old Silver Box From The Greek Orthodox Tradition

Very rare wooden box covered with red velvet and thick silver plates, finely chiseled and engraved, presenting phytomorphic elements, representations of angels and other liturgical elements, associated with exceptional representations of architecture, and other elements, typical of Moorish art. The work constitutes one of the few known examples, outside of museums, of "Byzantine-Ottoman" art, where the stylistic elements of the Greek Orthodox tradition are fused with the artistic coordinates of the Ottoman tradition, which had colonized many regions of continental Europe, including Greece, from the 16th century. The inscriptions in Greek clearly show that this extraordinary object was made in Greece, or at least in territories where Greek was widely used, at least for liturgical purposes (for example in Macedonia or other neighboring countries). Although cartouche-like elements resembling Baroque "rocaille" can be discerned, which might suggest a date around the early 18th century (which might be accepted on a very conservative basis), one must assume that the his work could also be much older, very probably between the end of the 16th and the beginning of the 17th century, and certainly represents a small masterpiece of liturgical goldsmithery, of extreme beauty and rarity. For certain technical characteristics, this work shows similarities with one of the oldest signed works of the workshop of Chiprovtsi, bearing a Byzantine-Ottoman decoration, namely the metal cover of the Gospel of Cherepish of 1612, today in the Museum regional Vratsa (Bulgaria), made, according to the inscription, by the artists Nikola and Pala for the monastery of Cherepish. Greece, Byzantine-Ottoman art, 17th century.