Ivories Ancient and Mediæval

by William Maskell

Modern taste runs generally, with regard to this question, in opposition to the old; but we are not, therefore, hurriedly to decide against colour as altogether barbarous or improper. Sculpture, people thought in former days, gained an improved effect by such additional help, and certainly the use of colour was an attempt to give a more real appearance and more true to nature. The carvers in ivory could moreover (if they had known the fact) have appealed to the best period of the Greek school; to the works of Phidias and Praxiteles. The chryselephantine statues in the temples of Athens and Olympia had the same character of ornament and variety of material.

Writers on art who hold that the legitimate province of sculpture is simply to represent by form are inclined to condemn any addition of colour as interfering with that definition. They say that if sculpture be painted it is a mixture of two arts: as it is also if a picture be relieved or raised in any part; after the manner of the Byzantine pictures by Italian painters of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. But it by no means follows that such a mixture is necessarily false in taste; rather it must be left to the judgment and decision of the time and of the country for which the sculptures are made.

A recent contributor to an art periodical, writing of imitation of nature in statues by colour, dogmatises without doubt or hesitation and even goes so far as to say that such statues are “not to be regarded as sculpture. Nor can those representations of the human form which are made to counterfeit life itself, and dressed it may be in the actual attire of the person pourtrayed, be spoken of as sculpture. Regarded from the sculptor’s point of view, such productions can only be regarded in the light of tricks, or, at the best, of clever forgeries of nature.” Criticism such as this seems to want the right quality of discretion.

Although it is quite true that the works of the Greek sculptors, during the two or three hundred years of the greatest perfection to which the art of sculpture has ever reached, are not to be praised as the greatest and most successful of all statues because they were coloured or otherwise made to imitate reality; yet the intention was good, and in obedience to the universal demand and feeling of a people wonderfully fitted by nature, education, and experience to come to a right conclusion on the matter. We are unaccustomed in our own days to statues except those which, whether draped or undraped, are left in the original pure whiteness of the ivory or marble; we think that nothing is to be so much approved as what we call simplicity. We may be right, not only as to what we hold to be pleasing to ourselves, but as to what ought to be pleasing to and held to be correct by every one and in every age. On the other hand, we may not be right after all; and a little more caution and hesitation might be advisable before we condemn, merely as a matter of abstract taste, a practice which seems to have recommended itself to almost every people of the world, as in some way in accordance with the common sentiment of humanity itself; which was accepted by highly civilised nations from the days of the Egyptian and Assyrian kings down to the fifteenth century of the Christian æra; and which can appeal in its support to artists whose works have ever been acknowledged to be the masterpieces of the world.

It has just been said that the great works of Phidias and his pupils are not to be praised merely because they were coloured nor because no mode of enrichment, gold or jewels or ivory or enamelling, was grudged as being too costly in order to adorn them. So, again, the use of colours is not to be condemned because the statues of some very ancient nations are coarse and rude, or because the idols of the old Mexicans or of the savages of Africa and New Zealand are made by it even more hideous than they would otherwise be. The wide-spread observance of the practice is the point to be considered; and the fact that it rests upon some deep-seated and universal feeling in the mind of all men, of all countries, and of almost every age.

Regarded as a mode of handing down to future generations the memory of much which would have been lost for want of it, who can complain of the careful colouring of mediæval tombs and monuments? We are indebted to it for exact details of dresses and jewelry and armour: about which there can therefore be no longer any dispute, and which give the answer at once to many difficulties and many interesting subjects of inquiry. Nowadays we should almost shudder at a statue painted and coloured to imitate the muslins and silks worn in Hyde Park by women, and the various coats and trowsers of the men. But five hundred years hence some of our descendants would be grateful if, in spite of our own prejudices, we had given them even one statue among the many of our Queen or of the prince Consort, not left in the bare uncoloured silence of the marble.

Crucifixes in ivory of the middle ages are extremely rare; they may remain still in use in some churches abroad, but whether abroad or at home they are seldom found in the collection of any museum. There is one, although a fragment yet very beautiful, in the South Kensington collection: no. 212. The figure is represented after death; but the still suffering expression of the drooping head, the strained muscles across the breast showing the ribs, and, as it were, the struggle of the legs contracted in the last agony, are admirably given. The eyes are closed, the forehead drawn with pain, the mouth open. The body is clothed with a garment crossed in white folds over the loins and falling to the knees. It is greatly to be regretted that this beautiful figure has been so mutilated. The conception of the artist is full of true feeling and devotion, and his treatment of the subject an excellent example of the right union of conventionality with enough of what is real. As with regard to the heads of pastoral staffs, so also it is not easy to say why mediæval crucifixes should be so uncommon: for, although there must have been hundreds wilfully destroyed and broken in England in the sixteenth century, the same reason does not apply to other countries, where the demand and the supply both for the churches and for private use must have been continual and almost without limit.

There are numerous records still remaining in our public offices and in the muniment-rooms of many dioceses, which leave us in no doubt as to the extent and completeness of the destruction of the furniture and goods of English churches and cathedrals from the year 1550 to 1570. In the very valuable series of returns made by the commissioners for the county of Lincoln, the lists of items are generally summed up, “with the rest of the trash and tromperie wch appertaynid to the popish service.” Even with respect to objects for which one would have supposed that some slight reverence would have still been felt, such as crucifixes and altars, we have entries like the following in one parish alone: “Item ij altar stones; which is defacid and layd in high waies and sarveth as bridges for sheepe and cattall to go on;” in another, “Item, iij altar stones broken and defacid, thone [the one] solde vnto Thomas Woodcroft, who turned it to a cestron bottom, thother aboute the mending of the church wall and the thirde sett in a fire herthe.”

An unusually good and large ivory crucifix is preserved in the Catholic chapel in Spanish Place, London. It was given to the chapel about thirty years ago but for some time retained by the late cardinal Wiseman, by whose permission it was shown in the Great Exhibition of 1851. The date is, perhaps, late in the seventeenth century; Spanish work; about a foot in height; and the arms of the suspended body are less extended than in the mediæval times. The figure is coloured with great care to imitate life; blood flows from the wounds, and the streams where they meet are jewelled with small rubies. The flesh of the knees is broken and mangled.

Excellent as this crucifix is as a mere work of art, it utterly fails in calling forth expression of pure religious sentiment. The reality of treatment in the figure of our dying Lord is too near truth, and is at the same time untrue. So far as it has left the old type it has lost power to influence devotion. The earlier conventional crucifix, which left all to the imagination and never aimed at perfectly representing a man dying on a cross, was immeasurably more fitting and more reverential.