64 IVORY AND THE ELEPHANT 



The great treasure of the Luneburg Collection is the drink- 

 ing-horn made of a fine elephant tusk in 1486. It has a rich 

 setting and adornment of beautifully chased silver, and rests 

 upon two supports figuring elephants bearing Gothic towers 

 of relatively prodigious height upon their backs. The elab- 

 orately engraved cover of this drinking-horn is detachable 

 and could be screwed on the point of the horn to prevent 

 it from injury while the vessel was in use.* 



The high prices now commanded by medieval ivories, and 

 the very rapid increase in values within recent years, were 

 strikingly illustrated at the sale of the J. E. Taylor Collection 

 at Christie's in London in July, 1912. For example, a cele- 

 brated Milanese diptych of the fourteenth century, measur- 

 ing 15 in. in height by 12 in. in width and carved with 

 representations of scenes from the life of Christ, was sold for 

 3,500 guineas ($17,500), although less than twenty years 

 before, in 1893, it had only brought 380 guineas ($1,900), 

 thus showing an increase of over 900 per cent, in the interval. 

 On this same day a small bit of French medieval work, also 

 belonging to the fourteenth century, the ivory volute of a 

 crozier, only 5| by 4j in. with the Virgin and Child carved 

 on one side and the Crucifixion on the Other, realized 1,150 

 guineas ($5,750). 



The fact that old ivories are valued at very high figures 

 has naturally led to the perpetration of many forgeries, some 

 of which are in themselves works of art, and indicate that 

 the makers might honestly have earned a suflScient remuner- 

 ation for their work. The following case serves as an illus- 

 tration of this. A well-known Scotch connoisseur, while in 

 Italy in 1904, was induced to purchase for £400 a beautiful 

 ivory shield, which he was assured had been given to an 

 ancestor of the Duke of Parma by one of the English Royal 



*Handbucher der Koniglichen Miiseen zu Berlin, Kunstgewerbe-Museum, Gold und 

 Silber, by Julius Lessing, Berlin, 1892, p. 51, figured on p. 50. 



