IVORY CA,RVINGS 97 



birth. It was magnificently housed in Paris, and had glad- 

 dened the eyes of thousands of invited guests long before 

 the general public was admitted in the days preceding the 

 sale. Much regret was felt that the collection could not 

 be disposed of as an entirety, since the objects had been so 

 carefully grouped, all useless or unworthy material being 

 weeded out, that it was better balanced and better illus- 

 trative of the history and development of art than almost 

 any other private collection of its time. 



The ivories comprised 175 choice examples, covering the 

 various periods of ivory carving, from the consular dip- 

 tych down to modern work. The finest specimens, as was 

 but natural, were those due to the skill of the great French 

 carvers of the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth cen- 

 turies. In his description of the ivories in the first volume 

 of the magnificent catalogue of this collection, M. Alfred 

 Darcel relates that Abbe Didier of Monte Cassini, later 

 Pope Victor III, brought from Constantinople to his mon- 

 astery skilled workers in gold, silver, glass, and ivory, 

 thus founding there in the eleventh century a school of 

 Byzantine art that long exerted a powerful influence upon 

 Italian ivory carvers.* Many of the fine ivories from the 

 Spitzer Collection have found their way into the great art 

 museums of the world. 



The splendid collection of art objects belonging to the 

 late Charles T. Yerkes, which was disposed of at auction 

 in New York City, April 11-13, 1910, besides its wonderful 

 wealth of rare and beautiful tapestries and its many exam- 

 ples of rich antique furniture, as well as a number of fine 

 statues, contained some most excellent specimens of ivory 

 carving. Of these perhaps the most attractive was an early 

 example of the revived taste for combining ivory with a 

 precious metal. This is a German work of the eighteenth 



*0p. cit., p. 22. 



