Time Ravishing Youth and Beauty
This remarkably ambitious yet stylistically conventional allegorical ivory carving presents the morose and grizzled winged figure of Time in the act of seizing the voluptuous open-mouthed Beauty, leaving behind her protesting companion, Youth. The animated spirit of the group, the sinuous beauty of its intricate composition, and the enchanting characterizations of its principal actors hold the onlooker's attention in an extraordinary fashion given the group's small scale. During the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries in Germany and Austria a few virtuoso ivory workers delighted in the challenge of extracting intricate compositions from a single precious tusk, delineating minute anatomical features with exquisite precision. Here the carver has also exploited the natural texture of the ivory grain to emphasize the contrast of bony aged fingers against youthful flesh and to evoke the detailed texture of hair. The composition derives from a large late seventeenth-century sculpture at Versailles that represents Boreas and Orithyia. However, in altering the subject to express a melancholy fact of mortality and Vanity, the artist has transformed the character of the group, couching its evident eroticism in a quasi-moralizing guise.
Artwork Details
- Title: Time Ravishing Youth and Beauty
- Date: first half 18th century
- Culture: Southern German or Austrian
- Medium: Ivory
- Dimensions: H. 11-3/16 in. (28.4 cm.)
- Classification: Sculpture-Miniature
- Credit Line: Purchase, Blumka Gallery, Alexis Gregory, and Alexis Gregory Foundation Gifts, and Promised Gift of Alexis Gregory, 1998
- Object Number: 1998.116
- Curatorial Department: European Sculpture and Decorative Arts
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Master of the Martyrdom of St. Sebastian
probably mid-17th century
Ignaz Günther
ca. 1755
Southern German
mid-18th century
Balthasar Permoser
ca. 1680–85
Johann Valentin Gevers
Johann Andreas Thelot
ca. 1710
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