[Rarebooks] FS Great Chalice of Antioch -1933 Study

[Joslin Hall Rare Books]

TITLE: “The Great Chalice of Antioch”

By Gustavus Eisen.
Published in New York by Fahim Kouchakji in 1933.
"1934 Century of Progress Edition".

DISCUSSION: A popular guide to the famous chalice, following Eisen's own
deluxe, mammoth 2-volume study of the Chalice, published in 1923, in which
he assigned a date in the First Century A.D. to it. Few doubted Eisen's
credentials, but his dating was suspected to be a wee bit optimistic by
some. "The silver-gilt object originally identified as an early Christian
chalice is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York
City, It was apparently made at Antioch in the early 6th century and is of
double-cup construction, with an outer shell of cast-metal open work
enclosing a plain silver inner cup. When it was first recovered in Antioch
just before World War I, it was touted as the Holy Chalice, an
identification the Metropolitan Museum characterizes as "ambitious". It is
no longer identified as a chalice, having been identified by experts at
Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, Maryland, believed to be a standing lamp,
of a style of the 6th century."

In the arts we continue to think of Gustavus Eisen simply as an art
historian, but he was actually much more-

"Gustav Eisen [1847-1940] worked at the California Academy of Sciences. He
became a member of the Academy in 1874 and a Life Member in 1883. In 1893,
he became the 'Curator of Archaeology, Ethnology, and Lower Animals' at
the Academy. He later changed titles to 'Curator of Marine Invertebrates'.
In 1938, he was appointed as an 'Honorary Member', which is considered the
highest honor from the Academy. He was known to have diverse interests,
including "art and art history, archeology and anthropology, agronomy and
horticulture, history of science, geography and cartography, cytology, and
protozoology, as well as marine invertebrate zoology". A 2012 article in
the San Francisco Chronicle describes him as, "One of those 19th century
polymaths, Eisen also studied malaria-vector mosquitoes, founded a
vineyard in Fresno, introduced avocados and Smyrna figs to California,
campaigned to save the giant sequoias, and wrote a multivolume book about
the Holy Grail." In addition, he is considered to have been responsible
for the introduction of the avocado and the smyrna fig to California and
he wrote a detailed history of figs. He was a correspondent of Charles
Darwin and his work was referenced by Darwin in The Formation of Vegetable
Mould through the Action of Worms. Mt. Eisen, in the Sierra Nevada in
California, was named after him."

DESCRIPTION:  Hardcover. 10"x13.5", 22 pages, color frontispiece and black
& white illustrations, dust jacket.

CONDITION NOTES:  The dust jacket has some wear and soil (please see the
photos, above and below). The book itself has some minor soil, but
otherwise is clean and nice, with a tight binding.

PRICE: $150 -

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Fine books of the 16th-20th centuries
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