66 IVORY AND THE ELEPHANT
ardent
love for this art he caused two noted carvers to come to his court and
remain permanently in his service. These were Egidius Lobenigk of
Cologne and Georg Weckhardt, a Bavarian. Of the latter, the Grüne
Gewölbe Collection possesses fifty works dated between 1581 and 1589,
and of the former some forty specimens may be seen there. The sons of
Weckhardt worked for Elector Johann Georg I, as did also another noted
carver, Jacob Zeller. Hence much of the ivory material in the Grüne
Gewölbe was, so to speak, produced on the spot, and undoubtedly in
many, if not in most, cases, at the direct suggestion of the princely
patron. An interesting exhibit here, from a historical point of view,
is a small cup said to have been made by an imperial votary of the art
of ivory carving, Emperor Leopold I of Germany.*
The
ingenuity of a certain class of ivory carvers is exhibited effectively
in a work shown in the National Museum of Florence. The carver, Filippo
Planzone of Nicosia (flourished in the seventeenth century, until
1636), called II Siciliano, has, by dint of painstaking effort, cut out
from a single piece of ivory the figure of a horse enclosed in an outer
network. The animal carving had to be done after the execution of the
network and through its openings, so that the great difficulty of the
task may well excuse any shortcomings in the equine figure, which,
however, is better than might be expected, f
In
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the art of ivory carving
followed the prevailing tendencies in painting and sculpture. While
technical skill showed no falling off, the higher ideals of art were
generally lost sight of in a striving after originality and variety of
design at the expense of true harmony. The four acknowledged masters of
the period
"Julius and Albert Erbstein, "Das Königliche Grüne Gewölbe zu Dresden," Dresden, 1884, pp. 11,13.
fChristian Scherer, "Die Elfenbeinplastik seit der Renaissance," Leipzig [1902], p. 19.
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