[VICTORIA AND ALBERT MUSEUM, LONDON
14. OLIPHANT
Oriental-Byzantine, ninth and tenth centuries
The civil art went on uninterruptedly, and in such a luxurious city the objects of secular use must have been very rich and varied. A large series of caskets have come down to us, preserved in the treasuries of churches as shrines for the relics of saints, also large oliphants, or complete tusks, hollowed out and thickly covered with linked patterns of strongly oriental style; these were first imported from the East and afterwards imitated more or less exactly by Byzantine craftsmen. In early ritual they were used as horns to announce the commencement and the end of the Mass, and also to contain relics, and it was the latter use which brought them in such numbers to the West. The miniaturists, also, continued their art, copying and illustrating texts of Homer and Virgil and other classical writers.
The iconoclastic movement, though lasting a century and a quarter, had no permanent effect in checking the natural development of art. In fact, the greater impetus given to the civil art had rather the effect of purifying the Byzantine style by constant reference to the antique, and prepared the way for the Renaissance of the tenth century. Byzantine art is still so little known that it is probable that many ivories now classed in the tenth may belong to the preceding century.
Molinier attributes even the Vienna and Bargello diptych ([Fig. 5]) to the mid iconoclastic period, to that lull in the storm during the reign of the Empress Irene (end of eighth century), whose portrait he considers it to be. This ivory, though more probably of the sixth century, has some slight likeness in the wide face and full neck to the two busts of Christ and the symbolic angel of St. Matthew in the Library, Ravenna (the eagle of St. John is in the Victoria and Albert Museum). These must be classed with another ivory of this period in the Louvre, a figure of Christ standing under a richly decorated arch, but the low forehead and staring eyes, with the pompous attitude, in imitation of the beautiful British Museum angel, make it positively ridiculous.
Another plaque in the Berlin Museum, the only dated ivory of the ninth century, represents an emperor being crowned by the Virgin, and bears the name of a “Basileus Leo.” The early emperors of this name are too ancient, and the last three were rabid iconoclasts, so that brings it to the Emperor Leo VI., crowned in 886. Unfortunately this work, which should be most useful for comparison, is of rough technique, and evidently a provincial production, for no craftsman of the great metropolis could have produced such uncultivated work, even on the morrow of the iconoclastic crisis.
II. Byzantine Caskets.
We owe to the series of secular caskets most of our knowledge of this transitional period. They do not appear to have been articles of great luxury and were usually made of bone and sometimes indifferently carved. The fashion continued for several hundred years, and side by side with these secular caskets we have others decorated with scenes from Old Testament history, which, though very few in number at first, become more frequent as time goes on. The religious caskets have many details in common with the secular, but draw their inspiration from a different source.
There is great similarity in the design of the secular caskets, the box itself being made of wood and covered with ivory plaques. The lids are either in the shape of a truncated pyramid, and hinged, or flat and sliding into grooves. The decoration consists of an elaborate border surrounding either long scenic plaques, as in the Veroli casket in the Victoria and Albert Museum ([Fig. 15]), or more often little squares containing a single figure (Bargello, etc.). The borders show strong oriental influence, and invariably consist of ringed rosettes connected by a pointed leaf; these rosettes sometimes alternate with coin-like medallions, and there are occasionally additional bands of varying pattern, as on the Volterra casket (late Spitzer Collection) at the Musée de Cluny.