The Program of the Leningrad Joseph Pyxis

The program of an Early Christian pyxis with scenes of the patriarch Joseph, now in the Hermitage Museum, Leningrad, can be explained by reference to patristic sources rather than to the apocryphal Jewish legends cited in earlier literature on the object. The stories represented on the pyxis are here seen to have been used as metaphors for both the Eucharist and the divine gift of grace in sermons by St. Ambrose and Quodvultdeus, Bishop of Carthage, written in response to the controversy over the definition of grace engendered by Pelagianism in the late 4th through mid-5th centuries. Contemporary preoccupation with this issue in Italy and North Africa provides an appropriate context for the carving of the pyxis and accordingly may suggest a reattribution of the ivory, formerly given to 6th-century Constantinople.