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.