There are still remaining, in the collections both at home and abroad, some examples of carved ivories from the fifth century to the time of Charlemagne. The woodcut represents one of the most important and remarkable works known of this period. Although there is a great similarity of style between this ivory and a silver vase of the sixth century in the Blacas collection, in the British museum, there is still difficulty in suggesting even a probable date, which can scarcely be later than the early part of the seventh century; nor is it more easy to speculate on the original use of the vase. A loose ring, cut from the same block of ivory, surrounds the foot; and, if the vase was made for some very sacred purpose, we may suppose that the ring carried a thin veil to be thrown over the whole for further security and reverence. The cover is of later date, and where the ivory has cracked there is a repair excellently done by some mediæval jeweller with a small gold chain which extends from the rim downwards about two inches. This piece is in the British museum.
Unlike the vase, which is good both in design and workmanship, the early ivories of western Europe are rude and many of them even barbarous in manner and workmanship; but about the year 800 a sure result of the influx of Greek artists is to be seen, and the style advanced with a very evident progression, subject only to a short interval of deterioration at the end of the tenth century. After this brief check there followed a distinct improvement, impressed, however, with a feeling and type peculiar to the eleventh and first half of the twelfth century. We find the figures calm and, as it were, collected in design, but placed in stiff and unnatural positions, the draperies close and clinging and broken up into numerous little folds, ornamented also still more largely than before with small jewels or beads. The school of the lower Rhine kept itself to a certain extent free from these faults; their figures preserved more movement, their modelling was better, their draperies more natural and disposed with greater art.
Christianity spread gradually though slowly over western Europe from the age of Charlemagne, and, as it spread, ivory was used more and more for the decoration of ecclesiastical furniture, especially of books and reliquaries. The adaptation of the large tablets given by the consuls has been already spoken of: and not only were the old diptychs still remaining in the seventh or eighth centuries applied to their new purpose for the public services of the church, but many new diptychs must also have been provided. Pyxes for the consecrated and unconsecrated wafers, retables or ornamented screens to be placed upon altars, holy water buckets, handles for flabella, episcopal combs, croziers, and pastoral staffs were made in fast increasing numbers.
There is ample evidence, not only from examples which have been preserved down to our own times but from contemporary writers, of the large extent to which the employment of ivory reached in the Carlovingian period, from the end of the eighth to the middle of the tenth century. Eginhard, writing to his son, sends him a coffer made by a contemporary artist, enriched with columns of ivory after the antique style; Hildoward, bishop of Cambrai, a.d. 790, orders a diptych of ivory to be made for him in the twelfth year of his pontificate: an inventory of Louis le Débonnaire, in 823, mentions a diptych of ivory, a statuette, and a coffer; his son-in-law, count Everard, leaves in his will writing tablets, a chalice and coffer, an evangelisterium ornamented with bas-reliefs, and a sword and belt with similar decorations, all of ivory; Hincmar, archbishop of Rheims, in 845, orders covers to be made for the works of St. Jerome with plaques of ivory, and also for a sacramentary and lectionary.
Several of the most important of the existing examples of this famous Carlovingian school are named in Labarte’s useful book: among them, especially, the diptych preserved in the treasury of the cathedral of Milan, and of which a plate is given in the album, pl. xiii.; the two plaques which form the cover of the sacramentary of Metz, now in the public library at Paris; and a bas-relief of a book of gospels at Tongres, in the diocese of Liége, remarkable for the simplicity of the composition, the soberness of its ornamentation and correctness of design, all of which qualities are frequent characteristics of the work of the ninth century.
Georgius says that the very ancient tabulæ eburneæ which he saw in the church of St. Riquier in Picardy (Centulensi thesauro), and those given to his church by Riculfus, bishop of Elne, in Narbonne, a.d. 915, were sacred diptychs.
Mr. Oldfield gives an excellent selection of Carlovingian ivories in his catalogue of the casts of the Arundel society, classes 4, 5, and 6.
