66 IVORY AND THE ELEPHANT 



ardent love for this art he caused two noted carvers to come 

 to his court and remain permanently in his service. These 

 were Egidius Lobenigk of Cologne and Georg Weckhardt, a 

 Bavarian. Of the latter, the Griine Gewolbe Collection 

 possesses fifty works dated between 1581 and 1589, and of 

 the former some forty specimens may be seen there. The 

 sons of Weckhardt worked for Elector Johann Georg I, as 

 did also another noted carver, Jacob Zeller. Hence much of 

 the ivory material in the Griine Gewolbe was, so to speak, 

 produced on the spot, and undoubtedly in many, if not in 

 most, cases, at the direct suggestion of the princely patron. 

 An interesting exhibit here, from a historical point of view, 

 is a small cup said to have been made by an imperial votary 

 of the art of ivory carving. Emperor Leopold I of Germany.* 



The ingenuity of a certain class of ivory carvers is exhib- 

 ited effectively in a work shown in the National Museum 

 of Florence. The carver, Filippo Planzone of Nicosia 

 (flourished in the seventeenth century, until 1636), called II 

 Siciliano, has, by dint of painstaking effort, cut out from a 

 single piece of ivory the figure of a horse enclosed in an 

 outer network. The animal carving had to be done after 

 the execution of the network and through its openings, so 

 that the great difficulty of the task may well excuse any 

 shortcomings in the equine figure, which, however, is better 

 than might be expected. f 



In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the art of 

 ivory carving followed the prevailing tendencies in painting 

 and sculpture. While technical skill showed no falling off, 

 the higher ideals of art were generally lost sight of in a striv- 

 ing after originality and variety of design at the expense of 

 true harmony. The four acknowledged masters of the period 



*Julius and Albert Erbstein, "Das Konigliche Griine Gewolbe zu Dresden," Dresden, 

 1884,pp. 11, 13. 

 tChristian Soberer, "Die Elfenbeinplastik seit der Renaissance," Leipzig [1902], p. 19. 



