Wing of a Polyptych: Presentation in the Temple

This panel is unusual in its design and style, suggesting an origin outside the French ivory-carving centers of Paris and Île-de-France, possibly in Northeastern France. Generally wings of this format are horizontally divided into two sections, containing compact figures with naturalistic proportions, rather than the high stylization seen here. Similarly elongated figures may be found on an ivory wing with the Annunciation and two Magi in the Metropolitan Museum, on the wings of an ivory polyptych in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, and on the side panel of a choir stall in the Cleveland Museum of Art (1). The figures in the lower sections of the wings of a Parisian, late thirteenth-century polyptych now in Berlin do not relate as closely to the Lehman ivory (2).
Notes:
1. Metropolitan Museum, 1979.521.4 (New York 1999,
no. 158 [as Northern French, ca. 1350]); Victoria and
Albert Museum, London (Koechlin 1924, vol. 2, no. 171);
Cleveland Museum of Art, 71.270 (Wixom 1979,
pp. 105 – 10, figs. 48, 51, 52).
2. Braunschweig – Darmstadt – Munich 1999 – 2000, no. 38.

Robert Lehman, New York