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Miracles on a microchipby ALEXANDER MURRAY a review of |
One day in the early fourth century ad an elephant – probably in East Africa (Mediterranean countries had cleared their elephants by then) – fell into a trap and was killed. Its tusks found their way to a workshop in Rome, where they were stored until an occasion arose to capitalize on their high value. This came around 400, when a marriage or similar event joined two of Rome’s wealthiest families, the Symmachi and Nicomachi, and the ivory became a diptych (“folded-in-two”, like a book). Each leaf of the diptych, with the name of one family running across the top, depicted a series of mysterious rituals, destined to tease modern scholars out of thought. Ivory, the main weapon of the largest of land animals, is hard, and outlasts most of the purposes for which men use it. The Symmachi, the Nicomachi, and their Empire faded away, and in c.650, a Frankish monk called Bercharius came to Rome in search of martyrs’ relics, found the diptych, added it to his basket and took it north to his new monastery at Montier-en-Der, near Troyes. The diptych served to add lustre to a relic box, and was still doing so in 1717 when a visiting antiquarian sketched it. Then, in 1790, the monastery was plundered, and the diptych disappeared, until, in 1860, a local resident found one leaf, the Nichomachi leaf, down a well, and sold it to the Musée de Cluny. That coaxed the other leaf out of its hiding place with the descendants of its first finder. They offered it to the Louvre, without success; but an English dealer, John Webb, was haunting European markets for just such ivories, in tacit understanding with the curators of the South Kensington Museum. He bought the Symmachi plaque, and first lent it, and in 1865 sold it, to the Museum, renamed as the Victoria & Albert in 1899.
This enduring fragment of the elephant is on display today near the entrance to the museum’s new Medieval and Renaissance Galleries. A more circumspect version of its history may now be found in the magnificent new catalogue of the V&A’s early medieval ivories (to c.1200), latest of the labours of Paul Williamson, head of the Museum’s sculpture division. The book covers 120 ivories, including six “copies and fakes”, all given photographs, from all angles, with explanations of the ivories’ imagery and likely history in ten divisions: Late Antique and Early Christian, Byzantine, Early Medieval (c.800-1000), Anglo-Saxon, Romana esque (in five national categories), Gaming Pieces, and finally Copies and Fakes. Most of the best ivories in the catalogue are currently on display in the new gallery. I visited them in situ twice, before and after reading the catalogue, and the two experiences were quite different. After the second, it struck me that the in-case labelling could be improved – to match the intellectual calibre of the catalogue entries – and that a lighter and cheaper version of the book should be made available, to explain the items on display.
To see the odyssey of the Symmachi plaque as representative could be misleading. Each item’s history is unique, reflecting in its own way the vicissitudes of Europe as a whole, with its wars and shifts in trading patterns and tastes, and each finishing with the chances that brought the ivory to public attention and to the Museum: typical phrases are: “got from an old man”, “found in the ruins of an abbey” or “bought from a navvy digging for a railway station extension”; and one pectoral cross, found by workmen near Norwich Cathedral in 1878, was probably dropped there in 1272, when rioters are known to have pillaged Norwich Priory. The catalogue is a history of Europe in 114 objects.
But the histories share common features, and here the Symmachi odyssey is more typical. Many feature John Webb, effectively the Museum’s freelance ivory scout in the 1860s and early 70s, when loftier establishments still disdained them: as one Director of the British Museum explained in 1860, “if you buy medieval ivories, you do not buy Greek statues”. And all the histories, like that of the Symmachi plaque, combine few certainties with much speculation, informed and regularly updated by specialist study.
The first object of speculation is an ivory’s date of manufacture. Slivers from sixteen items were sent for radio-carbon dating, to give an estimate – to within a century or two – of when the elephant died. Besides dating the start of that Symmachi odyssey, this procedure freed two ivories from suspicions of recent forgery. Dates of manufacture are usually only accurate to within a decade or two. But there are exceptions. One consists of the diptychs which late Roman consuls commissioned to celebrate their appointments (and generosity: one shows men emptying sacks of money). Other dates can be worked out by coded references to known events. The “Basilewsky situla” (a situla was a holywater bucket) has round its base a Latin dedication to “Augustus Otto” and a reference to King Hezekiah. Since the Bible says that Hezekiah was twenty-five years old when he planned to free Jerusalem from the Assyrians, and we know that the Emperor Otto II was twenty-five in the winter of 980-81, when he set off from Milan to free southern Italy from the Saracens, that gives the date, and probable place, of the situla’s creation.
The question of place is often bound up with that of date. The catalogue’s necessarily clear divisions must not deceive us. One “Byzantine” ivory may have been made in Italy, an “English” one in northern France; and Williamson has to battle valiantly to justify a whalebone plaque of the Adoration of the Magi as his one entry in the “Romanesque: Spanish” section. He cites as evidence the Virgin’s headgear, and the fact (strangely overlooked by rival hypotheses) that whalebone was not a monopoly of the north.
It may not have been, but it was still much cheaper there, just as ivory was more expensive. The Germanic conversion to Christianity coincided with a power shift to Northern Europe, changing the relative values of different kinds of bone. For northerners, affordable materials included the horn of a narwhal (a “unicorn’s horn” in one medieval inventory), walrus tusk and, for cheaper products, bones or antlers from land animals. Elephant ivory was more costly, and therefore more prestigious.
This was a consideration for lay noblemen as well as for churches, as we can see from a huge, 54 cm “oliphant”, or ceremonial hunting horn, probably made in southern Italy in the early eleventh century, under Norman patronage. But church institutions made a better “fridge” for keeping these ivories over the past millennium, which may in part explain why the overwhelming majority of these items are religious. Northern churchmen, like Bercarius, brought classical ivories north to Aix, Rheims, Metz, Cologne and other centres, where they would be re-carved (on the verso, or on the shaved-down recto, or both) with Christian motifs. The recarving could leave ivories dangerously thin. One pair of plaques, re-carved in Rheims in the 860s to show the Transfiguration and Ascension, is full of holes, visible when lit from the back.
Another pointer to an ivory’s origin was its carving method. Some workshops were more skilful than others, and all had special styles. Their basic method was like that of woodcarving, but modified by the ivory’s value, hardness and (usually) small scale. The twelfth-century treatise by Theophilus, De diversis artibus, has a chapter on the carving of “bone”, which includes elephant ivory; and the fact that a late Anglo-Saxon knifehandle in the Museum is constructed on precisely the lines Theophilus lays down suggests that Theophilus recorded methods hallowed by practice. These naturally included sketching, and we find vestiges of preliminary sketching on two of the Museum’s ivories, in parts of the ivory not meant to be seen. Sketching was sometimes inspired by existing pictures, in manuscripts. An early eleventh-century Nativity plaque, made in Cologne just after 1000, strikingly resembles a scene in a liturgical manuscript now in Zagreb, then in Cologne. A small, lozenge-shaped “Christ in Majesty” resembles a “Christ in Majesty” in a manuscript in Trinity College, Cambridge, made in late tenthcentury Winchester or Canterbury, pointing to a similar origin. In ivory and manuscript illumination, the setting, posture and clothing are all the same.
Also the colour. Traces of paint show that the “Christ in Majesty” plaque began with the same colour scheme as the Cambridge manuscript. The painting of ivories was far from universal, however. Traces have been found on a few, but may not always have been original, the common exceptions here being cheap gaming pieces, painted or stained to help identification in a game. Finely carved religious ivories were more frequently finished with oil and polish, and sometimes gilding. Theophilus says nothing of paint, but does mention gold leaf. One tenth-century Rhineland plaque, depicting the Resurrection and Ascension, duly features buildings whose windows can be calculated to have glittered originally with gold foil. The same goes for the background of a small Anglo-Saxon cross, made c.1000. Another embellishment was jewels and beads, denoting eyes.
When all has been said of the making of these religious ivories, what can be said of their imagery? Iconoclasts had condemned the very idea of Christian imagery as impious. Carolingian theologians who took the lead in refuting them observed that if one purpose of God’s coming to earth had been to show human beings what God was like, then it was not only permissible, but highly beneficial, to represent him as doing so. The prominence in this collection of work by Carolingian carvers and their Ottonian successors may reflect an elan imparted to Western churches by this victory of their theologians.
The elan affected all media equally, but each medium struck its own bargain with the artist who worked it, and ivory was no exception. Its value, scale and durability dictated its purpose, and a corresponding level of expertise in its carver. Most of the ivories here were to serve the Mass, the summit of the liturgy, as altar furniture, boxes for hosts, or covers for gospels and other related books. Later incisions made for hinges, locks and hooks on some pieces show an occasional switching between these uses, hardly ever outside them. The size and price of an elephant tusk also dictated scale. One plaque, showing St Peter dictating to St Mark, formed part of a composite ivory throne, obscurely linked to the pre-history of Venice. But that was an exception. A single plaque rarely measures more than 20 cm by 15 cm; which meant that, when there was a lot to fit in, an intricate scene might need to be carved in a square whose sides were no longer than a thumb. One twelfth-century English liturgical comb, 11 cm across, carries no fewer than twelve gospel scenes, all decipherable. For what ivory demanded it also allowed, being hard enough, but workable enough, to hold details such as the lesions on a leper’s skin, a child’s toes, or (this on the ninth-century “Andrews diptych”, depicting wedding guests at Cana) the smile on a face measuring just 4 mm from crown to chin. Among medieval artistic media it was the microchip.
The skill ivory required of its carver, added to the market value of his material, made a product expensive. So it was all the more important to get the imagery right. Even in this one collection we sense the constancy of artists’ efforts to ensure this. Christian imagery called for two kinds of imagination, corresponding to the two natures that theologians attributed to Christ. Christ’s human nature demanded a purely visual imagination. This is nowhere better illustrated than in the Nativity, the traditional ingredients of which could be rearranged and augmented from direct or indirect real-life observation. An eleventh-century Cologne Nativity shows the Virgin’s shoes neatly placed on a stool beside her bed. A twelfth-century panel, possibly from Outremer, has the Christ child being washed in a tub. This kind of imaginative detail could also extend before and after the Nativity itself. An Annunciation panel made in central Italy around 1200 adds a handmaid, peeping from behind a curtain at Mary’s meeting with the angel. One Carolingian plaque shows post-Nativity scenes with particularly arresting vividness: Herod’s soldiers dash babies to the ground like blacksmiths hammering at their anvils, while in the neighbouring panel, a bare-breasted mother flings out her arms as if on Géricault’s “Raft of the Medusa”, in anguish at her child’s death – all this in a frame less than 5 cm across. Occasionally an observed detail suggests an ulterior motive. A panel made in the Alto Adige c.900 shows a Christ child up to his armpits in a stone font. The Gospels say he was baptized in the Jordan. We may suspect that a man in a river made too equivocal an image to impress a milieu where proper church baptism was a live issue.
But difficulties arose for artists because Christ was not just a man, but also God incarnate. Physical miracles were no obstacle.
Any decent artist could raise Lazarus, make a lame man carry his bed, or heal a leper without stepping outside his normal skills. That ninth-century carver of the “Andrews diptych” is typical, and does all three at once. The problems were twofold. The first was not one of imagination but of theology. Men die; God, by definition, does not. So there were dangerous ambiguities in depicting the end of Christ’s life, especially on the cross – since God does not suffer, either. The ambiguities bred a centuries-long unease in art history. Until about 400, Christ is not shown on the cross; when he is so depicted thereafter, his eyes are open and his head upright, as if he is neither dead nor suffering. His eyes close only after about 800, and his head begins to droop between then and 1000. The V&A ivories fit in this larger history while playing only a small role in it: for instance, in the drooping head on a small pectoral crucifix, made perhaps in Gloucester around 1000.
This crucifix evolution could happen only because a prophylactic had been applied for the fatal impression a crucifix might convey: that God was dead. Surviving artefacts (one of the most important happens to be an ivory, and it is in the British Museum) show that if Christ was shown dying he must simultaneously be shown resurrected. That is difficult because the Gospels do not describe the resurrection, so it had to be implied, through episodes which presupposed it, whence the prominence, here (much as elsewhere) of the three “Maries” who bore spices to the tomb, and of Doubting Thomas, who authenticated the resurrection with his finger. By the late Middle Ages, artists had cut this particular apron string, and could depict Christ stepping triumphantly from his tomb with a crosstopped banner in his hand. Among these pre-1200 ivories, this development is only faintly anticipated, by a staff or cross in Christ’s hand in two post-crucifixion scenes from the twelfth century.
One of these depicts Christ’s Ascension. This introduces the knottier of the two problems posed by Christ’s divinity, and one which, unlike the physical miracles, called for a more purely visual imagination. Language has allotted the word “spirit” (“breath”) to denote essences conceived as beyond physical sense. Spirit has no dimensions, so its depiction is harder for artists the more dimensions they work in: harder, that is, in three dimensions than in two, from which plane ivory sculptors happily inherited a repertoire of recognized symbols. Even in solid ivory, the holy have haloes and angels have wings (often haloes too). As to Christ himself, he wears a halo when immersed in human society, but in gospel episodes where his divinity appears at its purest, his supreme rank of spirituality is denoted by the lozenge-shaped super-halo, framing his whole figure, known as the mandorla. These ivories feature sixteen mandorlas, twelve shared equally between the Ascension and Christ in Majesty.
Symbols easily become clichés. The more conscious an artist was of the reality behind the symbol, the more restlessly he would attempt to express it in his own way, each attempt necessarily a failure, but a different one. This originality is detectable in a French Ascension plaque made around 1160-70, a time when sculptors at Chartres were making similar attempts in stone. The Ascension plaque in question drops the mandorla, and also the traditional Ascension image of Christ as rising vertically, as in a lift or a rocket. Instead, Christ climbs through the air as if on a ladder, one leg high above the other, while his Father’s hand (usually just pointing down from a cloud to show he is there) reaches down to grasp his Son by the wrist, to pull him back home to heaven.
Ivory, then, challenged its sculptors’ minds as well as their hands. In the iconographers’ slow, centuries-long colonization of Christian doctrines, ivory sculptors could therefore be cast sometimes as pioneers. An example concerns the Last Judgment, destined to be the subject of every Gothic tympanum. The earliest known Western representation of the Last Judgment is on an ivory plaque in the V&A, made in northern Italy or Germany, c.800. Given the gaps in our knowledge, this may not actually be the first. But it employs motifs and pre-Vulgate biblical quotations found nowhere else. So it may be; and if it is, then it presents one of those paradoxes that are always surprising historians. After all, no concept is more cosmic than that of the Last Judgment, no concept less material (the philosopher Erigena would spend pages insisting on this in the following generation). Yet here, to all appearances, is its first representation, in the smallest, and the hardest, of nonmineral media. This elephant could hardly have guessed that his death would serve so pregnant an evolution, so far above his understanding.
Poor elephant. But then, when it comes to Last Judgments, are we any better placed?
