70 IVORY AND THE ELEPHANT 



subject is the Fall of the Angels. This ivory carving was 

 donated to Augustus III, King of Poland, by his daughter 

 Maria Amalia, wife of the King of Naples. A similar work, 

 with fewer figures, however, is in the Bavarian National 

 Museum at Munich.* The Dresden "Green Vaults" Col- 

 lection comprises an exceptionally rich selection of carved 

 and turned ivories, nearly five hundred in number, offering 

 to the visitor a great variety of forms and illustrating the 

 manifold formally artistic possibilities of this material, 

 although the standard of true artistic excellence is not always 

 of the highest in these productions of the seventeenth and 

 eighteenth centuries. f 



One of the "Trinity Rings" made by Stephen Zick, of 

 Nuremberg, in the seventeenth century, is among those com- 

 prised in the Franks' bequest to the British Museum. It 

 consists of three interlacing hoops turned from a single piece 

 of ivory. Stephen Zick is said to have made but three of 

 these rings. t 



In the church of St. James, Spanish Place, London, may 

 be seen a very striking ivory crucifix, presumably the work 

 of a Spanish carver, and offering a singularly realistic treat- 

 ment of the subject. The most painful details are here 

 mercilessly accentuated, so as to arouse in the highest degree 

 the pity of the beholder for the Divine Sufferer. Not only 

 the wounds inflicted during the crucifixion itself, but the 

 marks of the scourging which preceded it, are rendered with 

 fearful realism. A singular detail in the execution is that 

 the blood streams from the wounds are formed of minute 

 rubies set close together.** 



*Christian Scherer, "Die Elfenbeinplastik seit der Renaissance," Leipsic [1902], p. 13 

 (Fig. 7). 



tSee "Guide to the Royal Green Vaults at Dresden," Dresden, 1889, pp. 14-22. 



%C. M. Dalton, Catalogue of the Finger Rings bequeathed to Sir Augustus Wollaston 

 Franks', London, 1912 (No. 1727). 



**Maskell, "Ivories," The Connoisseur's Library, London, 1905, p. 264. 



