22 IVORY AND THE ELEPHANT
height,
26 in.; the comparative shortness indicating a slight flexion of the
dead body. As restored, the inlays on the side are placed as follows: a
lion head, a bust, a winged head, a bust, and lastly a lion head; at
the corners are figure groups. The rather spindly legs are made up of
many pieces, incrusted with bone inlays. Another, but inferior example,
is in the Papa Giulio Museo in Orvieto.
In
one of his scathing denunciations of the venality and rapacity of the
infamous Caius Verres, for a time praetor of Sicily, the great orator
Cicero, in 70 B. C, recounts how this shameless Roman functionary
wrenched off the rich ivory and gold adornment of the Temple of Minerva
in Syracuse. The ivory carvings here were of the very highest artistic
excellence and famed for their surpassing beauty throughout the Greek
world; one of the most notable offered an awe-inspiring representation
of the Gorgon's head with its writhing serpents. All these splendid
carvings, and also the massive gold bosses, elaborately chased,
adorning the temple doors, works of art in which the workmanship was
even more precious than the metal, were ruthlessly stripped off and
borne away to Rome by Verres as though the spoils of war. Indeed, as
Cicero says, even a conquering enemy with any claim to civilization
would not have wrought such wanton havoc, only possible for barbarians.*
The
very large size of the pieces of ivory which must have been required by
the Greeks in the production of their colossal gold and ivory statues,
some of which were forty feet or more in height, the face, hands, and
feet being of ivory, and even the large size of some of the consular
and other diptychs that have come down to us, have raised the
question, how did the ancients secure pieces of ivory of sufficient
size? In our day, with the processes now in use, this would not be
possible. Hence it has been conjectured that they
*M. Tullii Ciceronis, "In Verrem Lib. IV; De Signis"; Oratio nona, cap. 56.
