Many celebrated artists have doubtless worked in ivory, but there is nothing to prove this except the supposed hand-work of the artists. Michelangelo is credited with working in ivory; Cellini, Donatello, Agostino, Carracci, and other famous names in Italian art have been mentioned as ivory carvers; and in the seventeenth century a celebrated ivory carver named Copé, but better known as Fiamingo, who was Flemish by birth. He made many basins, ewers, tankards, and carved figures of children in bas-relief. Fiamingo worked and lived in Rome at the end of the sixteenth and during the first ten years of the seventeenth centuries. He died in 1610. His work, like that of many other artists of this period, was greatly influenced by the style of Rubens, and a strongly marked realism in the manner of treating allegorical subjects was the prevailing taste in painting and carving. Very fine tankards in ivory, and basins, were carved by Fiamingo with bacchanalian scenes in a realistic manner. The tankard from the Jones Collection (Fig. 124) is believed to be the work of Fiamingo. It is a Flemish ivory mounted in silver-gilt work of good design. The body of the tankard is spiritedly carved with the figures of a nymph and satyr dancing, Silenus, and some children carrying grapes.
Another Flemish artist in ivory was Francis von Bossuit, who spent a great part of his life in Rome, and whose figure carvings are of great value. Alessandro Algardi was an Italian artist of the seventeenth century, who carved the ivory bas-relief of St. Leo going out to meet Attila, now in St. Peter’s at Rome, and also a very fine bust of Cosimo II. de’ Medici. One of the best ivory carvers that ever lived was François Duquesnoy, known better as François Flamand (1594-1644); he was a native of Brussels, and went to Rome when a young man for the purpose of study. He supported himself in his wanderjahr period by carving little figures in ivory and wood. In the Cluny Museum and in the Louvre some groups, and bas-reliefs of females and children, may be seen, executed by Flamand, that are full of roundness and life, boldly conceived and extremely graceful.
Fig. 124.—Ivory Tankard, Silver-gilt Mounted; Flemish; Seventeenth Century. (S.K.M.)
We have noticed how plentiful the ivory carvings were of the fourteenth century period; but at the end of that century ivory sculpture fell in abeyance, which lasted during almost the whole of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. This was due to the very great impulse given to wood carving by the French, and even more so by the German wood sculptors. Large wooden altar-pieces, or “retables,” came into fashion, and also minute wooden portraits and statuettes, which for a long period superseded ivory carvings; and in Germany a good deal of carving was executed in “Speckstein” or Soapstone, a kind of drab-coloured lithographic stone that was not difficult to work. Albert Dürer and Lucas Cranach carved some very fine works in Speckstein. At the beginning of the seventeenth century ivory carving became again in great request.
The Germans carried the arts of ivory and miniature wood carving, as they did the larger style of wood carving, to great perfection; in fact to an astonishing degree of dexterity, that would compare with Chinese or Japanese carving, but lacking in the restrained artistic power of the latter nation’s productions. All kinds of astonishing creations are preserved in the museums of subjects such as little ivory carvings of skeletons in company with groups of female figures, miniature hunchbacks, and beggars with diamonds for buttons on their dresses. Leo Pronner, of Nuremberg, carved on a cherry-stone a hundred heads, that required the aid of a magnifying glass to see the expressions, and later Simon Troger, of the same city, produced many marvels in ivory figures with brown wood dresses and other accessories in wood.
Many good ivories have been the work of Spanish carvers, and as a rule they are tinted or coloured.
Nearly all the carvings in ivory that we have noticed have been statuettes, reliefs, or objects in which the human figure predominates.
As a matter of fact there are very few ivories of any artistic value in which the human figure is not the most important part of the composition, purely ornamental work being very rare. Even in Saracenic work, where the figure and animal representations are not found, the amount of carved ivory work is limited, and the specimens are very scarce.
