King of the Confessors : The Quest for the Bury St. Edmonds Cross
Thomas Hoving, former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, describes in loving detail the circumstances surrounding the acquisition of the Bury St. Edmonds Cross for the Cloisters in Fort Tryon Park. The prize is a 12th century walrus ivory Romanesque altar cross decorated with ninety-two intricately carved figures and ninety-eight inscriptions, with most of the fully carved figures masterfully detailed at one-half of one inch in height each. The tale is a detective story filled with tireless legwork, a spy intrigue featuring vaults of dubiously priceless treasures, a chase across several continents, a huge back-room business deal and an art history lesson rolled into one, with added weirdness that the iconography on the 12th century cross is most likely highly anti-semitic in nature. The unravelling of the secrets of the artifact is left incomplete; we still don't fully understand the message of cross or know the location of it's origin with certainty, but it is a grand tale all in all.
