Ivory Cataloging Project

The Department of Medieval Art and The Cloisters recently completed its second year of a major research initiative. With the support of two curatorial fellowships from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the department has catalogued its great collection of carvings in ivory and bone. As the repository of some 400 works from 300–1500 AD, the department rivals only the Musée du Louvre and the Victoria & Albert Museum in terms of the number, quality, and importance of its holdings. To study ivory is to engage with one of art history’s most alluring and problematic sculptural materials. Not only does it shed light on fundamental practices related to medieval power, spirituality, and trade, it exposes the ecological costs of one of the favored luxury arts. The collection has never been examined or catalogued in a systematic way, and the time is ripe.

Two Mellon fellows, Nicole Pulichene and Scott Miller, were embedded full-time within the department to conduct this important work. They worked closely with Melanie Holcomb, Curator, and Christine Brennan, Research Scholar and Collections Manager to dive deeply into object-based research, producing original scholarship and developing collaborative partnerships with museum staff. Both Nicole and Scott made important discoveries in the course of their work, and the fruits of their labor are now starting to appear on the Museum’s online collection.

A Work in Progress? Zooming in on an Ivory Shaft Segment from a Twelfth-Century Crozier

Nicole D. Pulichene, Andrew W. Mellon Curatorial and Research Collections Specialist, Department of Medieval Art and The Cloisters, 2020–2022

Seen from a distance in processions or rituals like church consecrations, a bishop’s ivory crozier would have signaled to medieval laypeople and clerics the wealth and status of its owner. The lively apocalyptic imagery on this late twelfth-century shaft segment from Northern Spain hints at the complexity and dynamism that almost certainly characterized the original crozier’s lost elements.

(fig. 1:Segment of a Crozier Shaft, late 12th century, North Spanish, elephant ivory, 11 5/16 x 1 3/8 in. (28.7 x 3.5 cm), The Cloisters Collection, 1981 (1981.1)

Thanks to high resolution images, today we can zoom in to enjoy every detail of the remaining segment’s relief carving. But was this object intended for such careful scrutiny?

While the craftsperson or workshop carved almost every surface of this shaft segment to absolute perfection, some areas are left unfinished. Take a close look at the Virgin and Child enthroned within an almond-shaped halo (or “mandorla”) on the upper register.

(fig 2: Detail of Figure 1, the Virgin and Child enthroned)

Mary’s hooded upper and lower eyelids are a hallmark of this carver’s distinctive style. But the round, unarticulated eye sockets of some figures, including the young Jesus pictured here, lack incised lines differentiating eyeballs from eyelids. The craftsperson beautifully articulated the Christ Child’s bare feet with jointed digits but only loosely shaped his hands. Similarly, three fingers on the Virgin’s left hand appear together as an undercut block, whereas the noodle-like thumb and forefinger delicately pinch the base of her scepter. The bulbous feet of the Virgin’s footstool are merely incised into an otherwise plain border, and the lower edge of the star-studded mandorla terminates in a rough v-shape between them. This is quite different from the complete, inhabited mandorla and footrest of the Resurrected Jesus which was cut below the surface of the plain margin on the shaft segment’s opposite side.

(fig 3: Detail of Figure 1, Christ in Majesty)

The uncarved frame intersecting with both mandorlas is intriguing because of its simplicity with respect to the shaft segment’s otherwise dense figural or ornamental carving (see, for example, the topmost border). While it is possible that a metal ring could have covered the plain border, and therefore hid the carver’s incised “sketches” from view, the craftsperson might have intended to fill the area with low relief carving to match the rest of the shaft segment. To the right of the Virgin’s unfinished footstool, for example, two circles are also pricked into the surface of the ivory: one large and one small (at right).

(fig 4: Detail of Figure 1) 

Were these tiny pinpricks the beginning of something more elaborate? It is difficult to explain these discrepancies in the level of finish between different parts of the same figural group. Rather than blaming the ivory carver for cutting corners, perhaps he or she deserves more credit. Any number of hypothetical scenarios might be proposed, for example: an unrealistic work schedule, a canceled commission, miscommunication between coworkers, or honest oversights. We will likely never know the true conditions of this unique object’s making and use, but the traces of sculptural creativity that it preserves are precisely why it fascinates us today.

For more insights into the illusive history of this shaft segment, including other unfinished details, visit the associated catalogue entry (1981.1)

The Many Lives of Medieval Bone and Ivory Carvings

Scott Miller, Andrew W. Mellon Curatorial and Research Collections Specialist, Department of Medieval Art and The Cloisters, 2020–2022

Medieval artworks often survive as fragments, in heavily restored states, or as elements in modern assemblages. As such, art historians are often called upon to explain why medieval artworks look as they do at present, deduce which parts are in fact medieval, and to characterize the scope of changes made by modern restorers and re-users. Met Museum 17.190.490a, b a cabinet frontal covered in early fourteenth-century Embriachi carving, presents many of the questions that we hope to resolve in this type of research. “Embriachi carving” refers to opulent jewelry boxes and altarpieces composed of carved bone panels depicting narrative scenes trimmed with dazzling marquetry in colored woods and stained bone. The style gains its name from a receipt dated to 1409 that claims that the monks of the Certosa (or Carthusian monastery) of Pavia still owed the Florentine merchant Baldassre degli Ubriachi part of the astronomical sum of 1000 florins for two boxes covered in bone carvings and for a similarly adorned altarpiece for their chapel. While the current object, a cabinet frontal with a plinth and pediment, does not much resemble that description, we know from the object’s provenance (that is to say its life history), that it is composed of fragments of these boxes. Working backwards from the present, we can use documentary records to verify that the carvings left the Certosa de Pavia upon its secularization in 1782 and passed into the collection of its former abbot, Benedetto Torodorò. They later belonged to Caetano Cattaneo, Director of the Mint of Milan, then to the famous collector Giovanni Battista Cagnola, and then to J. Pierpont Morgan in 1912, from whom The Met received them as a gift in 1917.

(fig 1: Cabinet frontal with panels from two Embriachi caskets, Baldassare degli Embriachi (Italian, active 1390–1409), ca. 1400–1409, made in Florence, Italy, bone and Certosina (inlays of stained woods, bone and horn) with traces of gilding, 81 3/4 × 70 7/8 × 3 3/8 in. (207.7 × 180 × 8.5 cm), Gift of J. Pierpont Morgan, 1917 (17.190.490a, b)

If the carvings began their life as the ornaments for a pair of boxes, how did they end up in their current configuration, and what parts were added or lost? Research into documentary records, including wills, deeds of sale, receipts for restoration, drawings, and photographs, can help to reveal this aspect of the carvings’ complex history. Until recently, scholars believed that the carvings underwent three major renovations. The first was in the mid-eighteenth century, when the boxes were broken up and transformed into an “ivory” cabinet and a second took place after passing into the hands of Benedetto Torodorò. In 1805, Caetano Cattaneo reconstructed the frontal for a third time to make it a presentable gift for Josephine, Empress of France. Using this knowledge, we can firmly attribute some elements to the modern period, namely the marquetry, architectural moldings, and fleur-de-lis, the last almost certainly intended to flatter a French ruler. Olga Piccolo, Conservator of Villa Cagnola has recently discovered photograph of the cabinet frontal from its time in the Cagnola Collection, which has revealed evidence of a fourth reconstruction. The photograph shows the cabinet installed as a piece of built-in case furniture in the Villa Cagnola near Lago di Varese, and it looks quite different to the present composition. The four hinged, vertical panels have much broader wooden frames than at present, the horizontal panel that currently forms its base is much longer than seen today and is installed above it, and the cabinet lacks the current triangular pediment. Clearly, at some point between the snapping of photograph and J.P. Morgan’s purchase in 1912, an unknown artist narrowed the borders, removed the hardware, cut the horizontal board down the middle, and built the triangular top to rescue two of the eight-sided stars lost in the reassembly. The photograph has also helped to resolve an enigma about the narratives depicted in the bone panels. All the carvings on the cabinet show scenes from the stories of The Golden Eagle and Heylas and The Swan Princes, all except the uppermost left register, which incongruently shows a fragmentary narrative of the story of the Argonauts

(fig 2: Cabinet frontal installed in the Cagnola Collection)

(fig 3: Detail of Figure 1, story of the Argonauts)

The photograph from the Cagnola collection alerts us to the fact that this cabinet was previously displayed next to a small panel adorned with Embriachi-style carvings. Jason and the Argonauts was a popular story for Embriachi boxes, and many complete works that survive to the present depict this story. Using this photograph, we can hypothesize that one of the early restorers, perhaps Caetano Cattaneo, disassembled a third fourteenth-century box representing this story when he transformed fragments of a major medieval work of art into a piece of modern drawing-room furniture.