Although the narrative of the sacred Scriptures does not, with the
exception of the first eleven chapters of Genesis, reach back so far as
the known history of the kingdom of Egypt, it may be best to mention,
first, some places in the Old Testament in which reference is made to
works in ivory.
King Solomon, we are told, “made a great throne of ivory, and overlaid
it with the best gold.” “The ivory house which Ahab made,” is
particularly mentioned among his memorable acts. The Psalmist speaks
of garments brought “out of ivory palaces,” or from what may rather be
translated wardrobes. The original text is ﬤﬢﬣיﬤﬥישׁן. In the earlier
Hebrew the word ﬣיﬤﬥ meant a small house or palace; in the later,—and
the 45th Psalm is not of early date, and was moreover written in a
foreign country,—it meant more commonly a wardrobe, or what we now call
a vestry or sacristy. The prophets Ezekiel and Amos tell us of “benches
of ivory brought out of the isles of Chittim,” of “horns of ivory,” and
of “beds of ivory.” There are other evidences in the Bible of the value
and high estimation in which ivory was held by the Jews; and its beauty
of appearance, its brightness, and smoothness are used as poetical
illustrations in the Song of Solomon. From a verse in the fifth chapter
of this last book we also learn that the ivory was sometimes inlaid
with precious stones.
It is quite evident that in those days works in ivory were regarded in
Judæa as a possession only to be acquired by very great and wealthy
persons; nor may it be too much, perhaps, to say that they were looked
upon as insignia of royalty. We may entirely agree with De Quincy, in
his book upon the statue of Jupiter at Olympia: “L’ivoire constitua
les ornaments distinctifs de la dignité royale chez les plus anciens
peuples. L’antiquité ne parle que de sceptres et de trônes d’ivoire.
Tels étaient selon Denis d’Halicarnasse les attributs de la royauté
chez les Étrusques. A leur exemple, Tarquin eut le trône et le sceptre
d’ivoire, &c.”
But, as has been already observed, there are specimens and remains of
Egyptian works in ivory still existing which date by many centuries
from an earlier time than the days of Solomon or Ahab. These must be,
of course, of excessive rarity: partly because of their antiquity and
fragile nature; partly because of the smallness of their size, owing
to which they must have been frequently overlooked or thrown aside.
The collection in the British museum includes some examples, a few of
which, particularly two daggers inlaid and ornamented with ivory, are
of the time of Moses, about 1,800 years before Christ. Several chairs,
ornamented in a like manner, may be attributed to the sixteenth century
B.C. Some woodcuts are given of chairs and stools ornamented with
ivory, in Sir Gardner Wilkinson’s account of the ancient Egyptians.
Among the Egyptian antiquities in the British museum may also be
mentioned the handle of a mirror in hippopotamus ivory; an ivory
palette of about the same period; two ivory boxes, in the shape of
water fowl; and a very remarkable figure or statuette, a woman, of
perhaps the eleventh century B.C.; and, again, a very curious casket of
considerable size but of much later date; probably of the first century
of the Christian æra: Roman work and decoration. This was found at
Memphis, and is made of ivory plaques laid upon a framework of wood.
The plaques are incised with figures and coloured. The shape is oblong,
with a sloping cover; it measures about twelve by ten inches.
The use of ivory for ornament and the adapting it to works of art must
have been known by the Egyptians from a most remote antiquity. There
is a small ivory box in the Louvre, which is inscribed with a prænomen
attributed to the fifth dynasty. Labarte, quoting De Rougé, mentions
another of the sixth dynasty:—“On voit au musée Égyptien du Louvre
une quantité d’objets d’os et d’ivoire. Ce sont de petits vases, des
objets de toilette, des cuillers dont le manche est formé par une femme
nue, et une boîte ornée d’une belle tête de gazelle. La pièce la plus
curieuse est une autre boîte d’ivoire très-simple, mais d’une excessive
antiquité, puisqu’elle porte la légende royale de Merien-ra, qui est
placé vers la sixième dynastie.” Dr. Birch in a paper printed among the
transactions of the Royal society, on two Egyptian cartouches found at
Nimroud, refers to a tablet of the twelfth dynasty, which describes a
figure whose “arms are to be made of precious stones, silver and gold,
and the two hinder parts of ivory and ebony. In a tomb at Thebes record
is made of a statue composed of ebony and ivory, with a collar of gold.”
The date of the Egyptian statuette in the British museum and of
numerous smaller objects in that and in the great foreign collections,
such as spoons, bracelets, collars, boxes, &c., most of which are
earlier than the twenty-fourth dynasty and long before the time of
Cambyses, brings us to about the same period as the famous Assyrian
ivories, which were found at Nineveh, and which are also preserved in
the British museum.
These were chiefly discovered in the north-west palace; and almost all
in two chambers of that building. We cannot do better than listen to
the general description of them given by Mr. Layard himself:—“The most
interesting are the remains of two small tablets, one nearly entire,
the other much injured. Upon them are represented two sitting figures,
holding in one hand the Egyptian sceptre or symbol of power. Between
them is a cartouche containing hieroglyphics, and surmounted by a
plume, such as is found in monuments of the eighteenth and subsequent
dynasties of Egypt. The chairs on which the figures are seated, the
robes of the figures themselves, the hieroglyphics and the feather
above, were enamelled with a blue substance let into the ivory, and the
whole ground of the tablet, as well as the cartouche and part of the
figures, was originally gilded,—remains of the gold leaf still adhering
to them. The forms and style of art have a purely Egyptian character,
although there are certain peculiarities in the execution and mode
of treatment that would seem to mark the work of a foreign, perhaps
an Assyrian, artist. The same peculiarities, the same anomalies,
characterise all the other objects discovered. Several small heads
in frames, supported by pillars or pedestals, most elegant in design
and elaborate in execution, show not only a considerable acquaintance
with art, but an intimate knowledge of the method of working in ivory.
Scattered about were fragments of winged sphinxes, the head of a lion
of singular beauty, human heads, legs and feet, bulls, flowers, and
scroll work. In all these specimens the spirit of the design and the
delicacy of the workmanship are equally to be admired.”
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.
We remember the destruction of these and similar works with the utmost
regret; and the more so, because that destruction was owing in many
instances to the mad violence of Christian fanatics; the iconoclasts
of the eighth century. The remains which we possess even of smaller
objects are not only of excessive rarity, but they cannot with any
certainty be attributed to artists working in Greece itself. Ivory and
metal have perished under conditions which have left uninjured fragile
vases. There are some examples of carvings in ivory in the British
museum, and especially in the collection lately purchased from signor
Castellani which have been found in Etruscan tombs. Many of these are
perhaps the work of Greek artists.
Etruscan sculpture was probably derived at first from Egypt: but
the art of the one was entirely and unchangingly conventional, and
never seems to vary from a certain fixed style. The Etrurian, on the
contrary, soon cleared itself from the bondage of old traditions and,
even when rudest, was free and attempted to imitate nature in the
representation of muscles, hair, and draperies.
Neither the beauty nor the wonderful spirit of the execution of some of
the ivories in the British museum has been exceeded or perhaps equalled
in any later time. Among them the following ought to be particularly
mentioned:—
A large bust of a woman, of the Roman republican period, and a small
carving of the head of a horse, scarcely inferior to the work of any
Greek artist of the best time. A very important head of a Gorgon, as
seen on Athenian coins, with eyes inlaid in gold, about two inches in
diameter; probably the button of a woman’s dress. Two lions, the heads
and part only of the bodies, lying across each other, very admirable
and full of character; and another lion’s head, the top perhaps of the
handle of a mirror. These were chiefly discovered, with numerous other
fragments, at Chiusi and Calvi. At Chiusi also were found the panels of
two small caskets which have been put together; both are of early date;
one it may be of the fourth century B.C. and Phœnician in style. There
is also in the same case a fine small ivory statuette, much later,
perhaps of the second century: a boy, still partly embedded in the
mortar or refuse in which it was found.
The workers in ivory during the first centuries of our æra were, as a
class, sufficiently numerous to be exempted by law from some personal
and municipal obligations. Pancirolus, in his “Notitiæ,” gives a list
of these bodies of artificers. He mentions as exempt, architects,
medical men, painters, and others, with references to the various laws
under which they were excused; and among them are “workmen in ivory,
who make chairs, beds, and other things of that sort.”
Nevertheless, carvings in ivory of the Roman imperial times before
Constantine are extremely scarce. In the superb collection in the South
Kensington museum there are two only which can safely be so attributed.
One is the fragment, no. 299; the other is the beautiful leaf, no. 212.
The British museum (not to mention a large number of fragments
chiefly of caskets or decorations of furniture, tesseræ and tickets
of admission to theatres and shows, dice, and the like) possesses
a few pieces, of which one is extremely fine in character and in
good preservation. The subject is Bellerophon, who is represented on
Pegasus, killing the Chimæra; and it is executed in open work. The age
is somewhat doubtful. Professor Westwood places it as early as the
third century, and his judgment must be treated with great deference.
Others, of no slight authority, are indisposed to give it an earlier
date than the fourth century. This admirable ivory has somewhat of the
character of the book-cover in the Barberini collection, engraved by
Gori, in the second volume of his great work on diptychs. That famous
piece is not perfect, nor is there any name upon it. Gori fairly argues
that it represents the emperor Constantius, about the year 357. The
Bellerophon is of finer work.
The gradual and uninterrupted decline of art from the days of Augustus
is to be traced as distinctly in the ivories which have been preserved
as in ancient buildings. But we can scarcely agree with D’Agincourt
as regards its rapidity. Speaking of sculpture generally, he says:
“On vit celle-ci successivement grande, noble, auguste sous le prince
qui mérita ce nom; licencieuse et obscène sous Tibère; grossièrement
adulatrice sous Caracalla; extravagante sous Néron, qui faisait dorer
les chefs-d’œuvre de Lysippe.” D’Agincourt probably refers to the
barbarism of Caligula, who proposed to put a head of himself upon the
Olympic Zeus by Phidias; or to Claudius, who cut the head of Alexander
out of a picture by Apelles, to replace it with his own. Suetonius
has recorded the first of these atrocities (can we speak of them by a
lighter name?) and Pliny the last.
In the collection given to the town of Liverpool by Mr. Mayer there are
two very celebrated pieces, possibly of the third century; they were
originally the leaves of a diptych. On one is Æsculapius, on the other
Hygieia.