Fragment of a Comb

Both sides of this small ivory panel are carved with figural compositions. The obverse is adorned with a group of four ladies in long gowns adorned with long tapers or liripipes, a fashion element which allows this carving to be dated to the final decade of the fourteenth century. These figures emerge from a building into an outdoor environment with trees. On the reverse, a crowned woman facing frontally bestows helmets onto a pair of knights in a similar outdoor environment with vegetation and trees. To the left, a herald with a pennant stands in attention. The asymmetry of the composition and the damage to the knight on the right demonstrate that the panel has been cut down from its original length. The serrated top and bottom edges further reveal that the panel was cut down from a double-sided comb similar to others in the collection of the Victoria & Albert Museum (inv. no. 151-1879), the Walters Art Museum (inv. no. 71.78), and Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum (inv. no. KK 171). Indeed, these compositions so resemble each other that they must have been taken from the same model, albeit by different carvers.

Stylistically, this carving resembles a group of late fourteenth-century ivory carvings localized to the north of Italy. While diverse in terms of quality, suggesting they are the work of several artists, these carvings are united by their squarish, blocky figures, vertical pleated clothing, beveled tracery borders that resemble a wood and metalworking technique called "chip carving," and the bent knees on male figures. Works displaying these characteristics may be found in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art (acc. no. 17.190.257), the Walters Art Museum (inv. nos. 5607-1859; 71.269), the Victoria & Albert Museum (inv. nos. 5607-1859; 151-1879), the Bargello Museum in Florence (inv. no. 140 C), and the National Museums Liverpool (inv. no. M 8051). As an example in the collection of the Victoria & Albert Museum demonstrates (inv. no. A.7-1984), this group of ivory carvings shares stylistic features with the contemporary Italian carvings in bone normally referred to under the umbrella of "Embriachi Carving." That these two groups should resemble each other should not be surprising. Baldassare degli Embriachi, after whom the school of late medieval carving in bone is named, was more an entrepreneur than a carver. It is likely that he assembled talent for his highly productive and lucrative bone-carving workshop among ivory carvers already working in Tuscany, Umbria, Lombardy, and the Veneto, and that they brought to the emerging craft of bone carving stylistic features that had characterized their previous work in ivory.

Further Reading:

Richard D. Randall, Jr. Masterpieces of Ivory from the Walters Art Gallery (New York: Hudson Hills Press, 1985), pp. 233-235.

Paul Williamson and Glyn Davies, Medieval Ivory Carvings, 1200-1550, Part II (London: V&A Publishing, 2014), pp. 609-631.


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)

Egbert, D. D. "North Italian Gothic Ivories in the Museo Cristiano of the Vatican Library." Art Studies 7 (1929). pp. 180, 183, 190, fig. 29.

Randall Jr., Richard H. Masterpieces of Ivory from the Walters Art Gallery. Walters Art Gallery, 1985. p. 232.

Williamson, Paul, and Glyn Davies. Medieval Ivory Carvings, 1200–1550. Vol. 2. London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 2014. p. 619.