Panel from the Lid of a Box

This pierced ivory panel is divided into four panels. Within each panel, a figure stands on a stony groundline between pillars that rise into a canopy of gables, pinnacles, crenellations, and rooflines adorned with tracery and crockets. The youthful male figures wear fashions that became popular in royal courts in England in the second half of the fourteenth century. The sleeves of their short tunics narrow into long strips of fabric called tippets and the hoods that drape over their chests terminate in decorative slits called dags. The female figures that gesture to their male counterparts to suggest speech wear garments that were at the height of fashion in the decades leading up to 1400, namely long, form-fitting kirtles that flair at the waist, sleeves adorned with tippets, and hair bound at the temples into a pair of crispinettes. The artist has introduced rhythm and avoided repetition in this composition by alternating the gender of the figures, the direction of their gaze, and the details of the roofline above them, producing a design that is microscopically detailed, varied, and tightly unified. Like the clothing, the razor-thin details of the canopy evoke the luxurious adornments of royal castles built in the late fourteenth century and contemporary representations of architecture in stained glass, tomb sculpture, and manuscript painting. The panel is in generally good condition, but has suffered four cracks, three of which pierce the edges and one of which has damaged the architectural frame of the figure on the furthest right.

This panel is associated with three panels in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London (inv. nos. 284-1867; 284a-1867; 284b-1867) and two in the Museo Nationale del Bargello in Florence (inv. nos. 118c and 119c). The matching dimensions suggest that the panels once fit together as a four-sided box. The three grooves for hinges on the top of the current panel and the single groove for the locking mechanism on the bottom demonstrate that the current panel served as the box’s lid. While iconographic elements point to the late fourteenth century for the creation of this group of panels, the date and artistic milieu of their creation has been a subject of some scholarly debate. The repetition of standing figures beneath a complex architectural frame is out of keeping with Parisian ivory boxes from the fourteenth century, which are normally carved in low relief and favor narrative imagery derived from popular romance lyric. Margaret Longhurst and Raymond Koechlin, two early specialists in medieval ivories, therefore attributed the group to an English workshop of the fourteenth century. In 1969, Jaap Leeuwenberg questioned these and other irregularities, namely the flattened hands and the heavily-modelled musculature on the calves of the male figures. He proposed that this panel and its associated panels were eighteenth or nineteenth-century fabrications by an artist he named, "The Master of the Elegant Figures." However, radiocarbon dating of objects in the Wyvern Collection that Leeuwenberg had attributed to forgers invariably demonstrate a medieval date for the ivory (Williamson 2019, 261-264). Modern scholars now generally assert that this panel is indeed medieval, and comparison to drawings and manuscripts such as the Remede de Fortune and the Pepsyian Sketchbook have suggested a possible Parisian origin (Little 2014, pp. 22-25).

Controversy surrounding the date and locale of this panel’s manufacture stems more from its apparent departure from the general aesthetic conventions of earlier fourteenth-century Parisian ivory boxes than from any specific details in its execution. The makers of earlier ivory boxes (see acc. nos. 17.190.173a, b; 1988.16) carved reliefs into solid panels and incorporated color by painting the ivory surface. By contrast, the makers of the current box lid created a diaphanous, lace-like effect by drilling all the way through the 1.3 cm thick ivory panel. And, in contrast to older approaches to color, surviving pierced ivories from the fifteenth century and the inventories of contemporary royal households demonstrate that carvers produced lively coloristic and textural effects by setting pierced ivory panels like this over painted parchment, dyed leather, or precious materials. The current ivory heralds a fifteenth-century vogue for personal ornaments and household articles decorated with miniature architectural elements laid over a colorful material. This trend animates the decorative iron lock plates, likewise from boxes, in the collection (see acc. nos. 55.76.3 and 55.76.2a–f).

It appears that courtly patrons also appreciated pierced ivories without backing, extending a larger taste for openwork articles in luxury materials like gold and silver. On his death in 1380, Charles V, King of France, owned one ivory box entirely pierced to let the daylight through, "boiste d’yvire toute percée à jour," (Labarte 1879, p. 290). The presence of this box in the king’s collection suggest that European royals admired the appearance of pierced ivory alone, appreciating the contrast between bright white and dark shadows of ivory without a backing. Thus, whether this panel originally adorned an open and cage-like box or shone against a colorful ground, it demonstrates the continued dexterity, adaptability, and innovation of ivory carvers at the closing of the Middle Ages.

Further Reading:

Jules Labarte, ed., Inventaire du mobilier de Charles V, roi de France (Paris: Imprimerie nationale 1879).

Jaap Leeuwenberg, "Early Nineteenth-Century Gothic Ivories," Aachener Kunstblätter 39 (1969), pp. 111-148.

Anne Hagiophian van Buren and Roger Wieck, Illuminating Fashion: Dress in the Art of Medieval France and the Netherlands (1325-1515) (New York: The Morgan Library & Museum, 2011).

Paul Williamson and Glyn Davies, Medieval English Ivory Carvings, Part 2 (London: Victoria and Albert Publishing, 2014), pp. 670–73.


Charles T. Little, "The Art of Gothic Ivories: Studies at the Crossroads," Sculpture Journal 23 (2014), pp. 13-29.


Paul Williamson, The Wyvern Collection: Medieval and Later Ivory Carvings and Small Sculpture (London: Thames and Hudson, 2019), 261.



Catalogue Entry by Scott Miller, Andrew W. Mellon Curatorial and Research Collections Specialist, Department of Medieval Art and The Cloisters, 2020–2022

J. Pierpont Morgan (American), London and New York (until 1917)

Koechlin, Raymond. Les Ivoires Gothiques Français: Volume I, Text. Paris: Editions Auguste Picard, 1924. no. 1280, p. 484.

Koechlin, Raymond. Les Ivoires Gothiques Français: Volume II, Catalogue. Paris: Editions Auguste Picard, 1924. no. 1280, p. 449.

Longhurst, Margaret H. English Ivories. London: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1926. LIXb, pp. 55, 110, pl. 48.

Longhurst, Margaret H. Catalogue of Carvings in Ivory. Vol. 1. London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 1927. Part 2, pp. 8–9.

Egbert, D. D. "North Italian Gothic Ivories in the Museo Cristiano of the Vatican Library." Art Studies 7 (1929). p. 198 n. 4.

Leeuwenberg, Jaap. "Early Nineteenth-Century Gothic Ivories." Aachener Kunstblätter 39 (1969). pp. 140–41, fig. 46.

Schmidt, Gerhard. Gotische Bildwerke und ihre Meister. Vienna: Böhlau Verlag, 1992. pp. 158–59.

Little, Charles T. "The Art of Gothic Ivories: Studies at the Crossroads." The Sculpture Journal 31, no. 1 (2014). pp. 23–24, fig. 11.

Warren, Jeremy. Medieval and Renaissance Sculpture in the Ashmolean Museum: Volume 2, Sculptures in Stone, Clay, Ivory, Bone and Wood. Oxford: Ashmolean Museum, 2014. pp. 594–95.

Williamson, Paul, and Glyn Davies. Medieval Ivory Carvings, 1200–1550. Vol. 2. London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 2014. pp. 671–72, fig. 2.

Ciseri, Ilaria, ed. Gli avori del Museo nazionale del Bargello. Milan: Museo Nazionale del Bargello, 2018. p. 289.