Attribution
Unknown

Polychromy - Gilding
Traces of gilding and polychromy: red (borders) and gold (hair).

Reverse
Back turned with a depression for (missing) mirror. Edges on the back have been filed or thinned. The back has been shaved down to fit into a later setting, so that the raised rim, although still visible, shows no sign of the usual screw thread.
Crosshatching in the recessed centre.
Monsters carved in the round.
Pencil inscription '138' and South Kensington Museum label, and traces of glued paper.

Object Condition
Three small holes drilled around the kneeling lover, and a further hole below the top of the rim (all probably post-medieval).
Edges on the back have been filed or thinned. The back has been shaved down to fit into a later setting, so that the raised rim, although still visible, shows no sign of the usual screw thread.

Comments
See Gaborit-Chopin 2003, who attributes it to the same workshop as a mirror case in the Louvre (OA 118).
P. Williamson suggests the two halves may have originally formed a pair (Williamson and Davies 2014).

Provenance
Préaux collection, Paris (by 1846): sale, 9-11 January 1850, lot 148; Rattier collection, Paris: sale, 21-24 March 1859, lot 193; in the possession of John Webb (b. 1799, d. 1880), by 1862, London: purchased from him by the Museum in 1867.

Bibliography
A. Du Sommerard, Les Arts du Moyen Âge (Paris, 1838-1846), album: 5th series, p. 110, pl. XI, 3.
Catalogue of the Special Exhibition of Works of Art of the Mediaeval, Renaissance, and more recent periods on loan at the South Kensington Museum, June 1862..., revised edition, exhibition catalogue (London, 1863), no. 138.
HMSO, Inventory of the Objects in the Art Division of the Museum at South Kensington, arranged According to the Dates of their Acquisition, (London, 1868), p. 7.
W. Maskell, Ivories Ancient and Mediaeval in the South Kensington Museum (London, 1872), p. 82.
J. O. Westwood, Fictile Ivories in the South Kensington Museum (London, 1876), no. 876 ('73.329).
R. Koechlin, Les Ivoires gothiques français (Paris, 1924), I, p. 378; II, no. 1002; III, pl. CLXXVI.
M. Longhurst, Catalogue of Carvings in Ivory, Victoria and Albert Museum, 2 vols (London, 1927 and 1929), II (1929), p. 44, pl. XLII.
L. Grodecki, Ivoires français (Paris, 1947), p. 116.
Art and the Courts: France and England from 1259 to 1328, exhibition catalogue, Ottawa, The National Gallery of Canada, 28 April-2 July, 1972, vol. I, no. 76, pl. 101.
D. Gaborit-Chopin, Ivoires du Moyen Age (Freiburg, 1978), pp. 148, 207, pl. 219.
Les Fastes du Gothique: le siècle de Charles V, ed. by F. Baron, exhibition catalogue, Paris, Grand Palais, 1981, no. 122.
P. Williamson, An Introduction to Medieval Ivory Carvings (London, 1982), p. 44, pl. 27.
A. Blamires, 'The Religion of Love in Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde and Medieval Visual Art', in Word and Visual Imagination (Erlangen, 1988), pp. 18-21, fig. 2.
M. Camille, The Gothic Idol: Ideology and Image-Making in Medieval Art (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 308-10, fig. 167.
C. Jean-Campbell, 'Courting, Harlotry and the Art of Gothic Ivory Carving', in Gesta 34 (1995), pp. 14 and 17, fig. 6.
Images in Ivory. Precious Objects of the Gothic Age, ed. by P. Barnet, exhibition catalogue, Detroit, The Detroit Institute of Arts, and Baltimore, The Walters Art Gallery, 1997, no. 55, pp. 226-227.
L'art au temps des rois maudits: Philippe le Bel et ses fils (1285-1328), exhibition catalogue, Paris, Grand Palais, 1998, no. 96.
M. Camille, The Medieval Art of Love: Objects and Subjects of Desire (London, 1998), pp. 111-112, fig. 97.
H. Arnhold, Spiegelkapsel: Die Darbringung des Herzens (Das Kunstwerk des Monats, August 2001), Westfälisches Landesmuseum, Münster, 2001, p. 1, f. 1.
B. Roy, ‘Archéologie de l’amour courtois; note sur les miroirs d’ivoire’, Miroirs et jeux de miroirs dans la littérature médiévale, ed. by F. Pomel (Rennes, 2003), pp. 233-251 (p. 237, fig. 4).
D. Gaborit-Chopin, Ivoires médiévaux, Ve-XVe siècle (Paris: Musée du Louvre, 2003), pp. 352, 354, fig. 128a.
The Making of Sculpture. The Materials and Techniques of European Sculpture, ed. by M. Trusted (London, 2007), p. 119, pl. 216.
P. M. Carns, ‘Cutting a fine figure: costume on French Gothic Ivories’, in Medieval Clothing and Textiles, Vol. 5 (2009), pp. 55-91.
D. Gaborit-Chopin, ‘Gothic Ivories: realities and prospects’, in Gothic Art and Thought in the Later Medieval period. Essays in Honour of Willibald Sauerlander, ed. by C. Hourihane (Princeton, 2011), p. 173, fig. 16.
J. Warren, Medieval and Renaissance Sculpture in the Ashmolean Museum, 3 vols (Oxford, 2014), Vol. 2: Sculptures in Stone, Clay, Ivory, Bone and Wood, p. 567, in relation to no. 164 and no. 163.
P. Williamson and G. Davies, Medieval Ivory Carvings 1200-1550 (London, 2014), no. 191.