IVORY CARVINGS 73
showing
both strength and beauty of design; this was from the Musée des
Antiquités de la Seine-Inférieure. A remarkable diptych
(fourteenth-century work, loaned by M. Boy) shows six bold, strongly
marked reliefs embodying designs from New Testament history, the Entry
into Jerusalem, the Washing of Feet, the Scene in the Garden of
Gethsemane, the Last Supper, the Gift of Tongues, and the Ascension; in
the last-named scene, because of the exiguity of the available space,
the artist is able to show only the lower part of the garment of the
ascending Christ, giving somewhat the effect of a figure disappearing
in the flies of a theatre. From the fifteenth century perhaps the most
important piece was an Annunciation from the Musée de Langres, the two
figures of the Virgin and the Angel Gabriel (kneeling) being sculptured
in the round and placed on a base. While the attitudes are animated and
the composition effective in its way, it somehow fails to impress us
as do the best of the Early Renaissance figures; the straining after
effect is a little too apparent in spite of the unquestionable
technical excellence of the work.
The
very fact that the ivory carver's task is rendered more difficult by
the strictly limited size of the mass or surface at his command forced
him to intensify the quality of his design, and to tax his ingenuity to
the utmost in his effort to portray his theme effectively within such
narrow limits; indeed, he had to contend with much the same
difficulties as those confronting the medallist. In statuettes the
obligation to adapt the pose of the figure to the curve of the tusk led
to certain peculiar and constrained attitudes, and it is an exceedingly
curious circumstance that we can trace in some of the stone sculpture
of the heyday of ivory carving a strong tendency to copy this slight
distortion or twist of the figure although the stone sculptor had no
excuse for so doing. This peculiarity can be accounted
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