MANSELL PHOTO.][BRITISH MUSEUM
36. TRIPTYCH OF BISHOP GRANDISON OF EXETER
English, fourteenth century
In the late fourteenth century the Italians commenced an entirely original style of carving on narrow strips of bone. The figures with the scenic accessories are closely related to the early schools of painting. These sculptures, unlike the unmixed ivory of the French carvings, were always framed in narrow intarsia borders. Small triptychs ([Fig. 37]) developed into enormous size, as the great altar-piece in the old Sacristy at the Certosa at Pavia and the famous retable in the Louvre, which comes from the abbey of Poissy, and was the gift of the Due de Berri, brother of Charles V., and one of the regents for the young Charles VI. in 1380. It contains his portrait and that of his wife, Jehanne de Bourgogne. The fragments of a third large retable still exist, divided between the John Rylands Library at Manchester and the Victoria and Albert Museum.
These retables are large in size, but not great in design, and though the groups of figures are lovely in detail, they are not impressive as a whole, the low relief giving little scope for the play of light and shade.
There are many beautiful polygonal caskets with domed covers, also combs and other small articles, and a very excellent account of the whole series has been given by Julius v. Schlosser in the Wiener Jahrbuch for 1900.
[VICTORIA AND ALBERT MUSEUM, LONDON
LOAN COLLECTION HON. A. BERESFORD-HOPE, M.P.
37. TRIPTYCH IN CARVED BONE
Italian, early fifteenth century
This short account of the Ivory Workers of the Middle Ages commenced with Italy in the last years of the fourth century, and, having made the round of Europe, returns to her after a thousand years, at the end of the fourteenth century, and must close, just at the outgoing of the mediæval era, with this magnificent group of carvings, which lies half across the border line of the early and true Renascimento.