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Moylough Belt-Shrine
The Moylough Belt-Shrine is a highly decorated 8th-century Irish reliquary shaped in the form of a belt. It consists of four hinged bronze segments, each forming cavities that hold strips of plain leather assumed to have once been a girdle belonging to a saint and thus the intended relic. It remains the only known relic container created as a belt-shrine,O'Kelly (1965), p. 149 although such objects are mentioned in some lives of Irish saints, where they are attributed with "remarkable cures", and there are surviving reliquary buckles in continental Europe. The belt may have been influenced by 7th-century Frankish and Burgundian types. The shrine was found in a peat bog by John Towey in April or May 1945, while he was cutting turf near Moylough, a small village on the outskirts of Tubbercurry, County Sligo. It is dated to the 8th century based on the similarity of its decorations, particularly the glass studs, to those on the Ardagh Chalice (8th or 9th century). The art histori ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Alloy
An alloy is a mixture of chemical elements of which at least one is a metal. Unlike chemical compounds with metallic bases, an alloy will retain all the properties of a metal in the resulting material, such as electrical conductivity, ductility, opacity (optics), opacity, and lustre (mineralogy), luster, but may have properties that differ from those of the pure metals, such as increased strength or hardness. In some cases, an alloy may reduce the overall cost of the material while preserving important properties. In other cases, the mixture imparts synergistic properties to the constituent metal elements such as corrosion resistance or mechanical strength. Alloys are defined by a metallic bonding character. The alloy constituents are usually measured by mass percentage for practical applications, and in Atomic ratio, atomic fraction for basic science studies. Alloys are usually classified as substitutional or interstitial alloys, depending on the atomic arrangement that forms the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ardagh Hoard
The Ardagh Hoard, best known for the Ardagh Chalice, is a hoard of metalwork from the 8th and 9th centuries. Found in 1868 by two young local boys, Jim Quin and Paddy Flanagan, it is now on display in the National Museum of Ireland in Dublin. It consists of the chalice, a much plainer stemmed cup in copper-alloy, and four brooches — three elaborate pseudo-penannular ones, and one a true pennanular brooch of the thistle type; this is the latest object in the hoard, and suggests it may have been deposited around 900 AD. The chalice ranks with the Book of Kells as one of the finest known works of Insular art, indeed of Celtic art in general, and is thought to have been made in the 8th century AD. Elaborate brooches, essentially the same as those worn by important laypeople, appear to have been worn by monastic clergy to fasten vestments of the period. Find The hoard was found in late September 1868 by two boys, Jim Quin and Paddy Flanagan, digging in a potato field on the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
