There are altogether more than fifty of these Assyrian ivories in the British museum: a detailed account of nearly all is given by Mr. Layard in the appendix to his first volume. Dr. Birch says they cannot be later in date than the seventh century b.c.; and thinks it highly probable that they are much earlier. Mr. Layard believes that about the year 950 b.c. is the most probable period of their execution.
There can be no doubt that from the year 1000 b.c. down to the Christian æra there was a constant succession of artists in ivory in the western Asiatic countries, in Egypt, in Greece, and in Italy. Long before ivory was applied in Greece to the making of bas-reliefs and statues it was employed for a multitude of objects of luxury and ornament. Inferior to marble in whiteness, and of course greatly inferior in extent of available surface, ivory exceeds marble in beauty of polish and is less fragile, being an animal substance and of true tissue and growth. From the time of Hesiod and Homer numerous allusions are to be found in classic authors to various works in this material: such as the decoration of shields, couches, and articles of domestic use. As to statues, Pausanias tells us that, so far as he could learn, men first made them of wood only; of ebony, cypress, cedar, or oak. The passages from the earlier classics have been referred to, over and over again, by all the later writers on the subject; and it would be not merely wearying but unnecessary to repeat them here.
In the sixth century before Christ, ivory statues of the Dioscuri and other deities were made at Sicyon and Argos. Sir Digby Wyatt, in the lecture before referred to, speaks of them as having been rude in character, but there is no evidence left for so disparaging a decision. Other works were statues of the Hours, of Themis, and of Diana. The names of some of the sculptors have been preserved: among them Polycletus, Endoos of Athens, the brothers Medon, and Dorycleides.
The style in which objects of this kind were executed was called Toreutic: from τορεύω, to bore through, to chase, to work in relief; signifying chiefly working the material in the round or in relief. Winckelman, in his history of art, explains the term at first with insufficient exactness: “Phidias inventa cet art appelé par les anciens toreutice, c’est à dire, l’art de tourner.” In his second edition he corrects this, and rightly says, “la racine de cette dénomination est τορός, clair, distinct, épithète qui s’applique à la voix. C’est pourquoi on donne ce nomme au travaux en relief, par opposition au travail en creux des pierres précieuses.” A long disquisition on the meaning of the word, and its etymology, is given by De Quincy.
One of the most famous of such toreutic works, and of which Pausanias has left us a tolerably accurate description, was the coffer which the Cypselidæ sent as an offering to Olympia, about 600 b.c. It seems to have been made of cedar wood, of considerable size; the figures ranged in five rows, one above the other, along the sides which were inlaid with gold and ivory. The subjects were taken from old heroic stories. De Quincy has given a large plate with a conjectural restoration of the chest; which he supposes to have been oblong with a rounded cover. Others believe it to have been elliptical.
Pausanias, in his description of Greece, mentions the existence in his time of numerous ivory statues and of chryselephantine works. In the first section of the seventeenth chapter of the fifth book he enumerates ten or fifteen, which he says were all made of ivory and gold; and a table of ivory. At Megara he saw an ivory statue of Venus, the work of Praxiteles; at Corinth, many chryselephantine statues; near Mycenæ, a statue of Hebe, the work of Naucydes; in Altis, the horn of Amalthea; and in another treasury there, a statue of Endymion entirely of ivory, except his robe; at Elis, a statue made of ivory and gold, the work of Phidias; near Tritia, in Achaias, an ivory throne with the sitting figure of a virgin; at Ægira, a wooden statue of Minerva of which the face, hands, and feet were ivory. And, to name no more, a statue of Minerva, the work of Endius, all of ivory, long preserved at Tegea, but at the time when he wrote placed at the entrance of the new forum at Rome, having been taken there by Augustus.
There are two men whose travels and the sights they saw we cannot but envy; one was Pausanias, the other our own Leland.
It should be observed that Pausanias believed ivory to be the horn and not the tooth of the elephant: and he has a long argument about it in his fifth book, where he refers to and mentions the Celtic stag. Declaring it to be horn, he says that, like the horns of oxen, ivory can be softened by fire and changed from a round to a flat shape.
The famous chryselephantine statues of Phidias and his contemporaries were somewhat later than the statues of the Dioscuri and the chest at Olympia. One of the most celebrated was the figure of Minerva in the Parthenon, which was in height nearly forty English feet. It would be wrong to omit all notice of the attempt to reproduce this statue which was made by order of the late Duc de Luynes, and was shown in the Paris Exhibition of 1855. “M. Simart, qui l’a exécutée, s’est montré le digne interprète de Phidias, et a su retrouver, par ses études approfondies, le vrai sentiment de l’art antique. La statue, de trois mètres de hauteur, est d’ivoire et d’argent: la face, le cou, le bras et les pieds, la tête de Méduse placée sur son égide, ainsi que le torse de la Victoire qu’elle tient dans la main droite, sont d’ivoire de l’Inde. La lance, le bouclier, le casque, et le serpent sont de bronze; la tunique et l’égide d’argent ont été repoussées et ciselées.”
Even more colossal than the figure of Minerva was the Jupiter at Olympia; the god was represented sitting, and reached to the height of about fifty-eight feet. De Quincy has some conjectural restorations of this statue engraved in his book.