Byzantine Culture

History · Guide

Byzantine Ivory Carving

Byzantine ivories are the finest small-scale sculpture of the Middle Ages. Consular diptychs, the Romanos group, the Veroli casket and the workshops that carved them.

Byzantine ivories are the most consistently excellent body of work the empire produced. Monumental sculpture largely disappeared after the sixth century; mosaic and fresco survive unevenly and often in ruins; but several hundred carved ivory panels have come down more or less intact, because they are small, hard, valuable enough to be kept and too awkward to melt down.

They are also, for the art historian, the best-dated material available. Consular diptychs carry the name of the consul and therefore a year. Imperial panels name the emperor. That gives a fixed chronological scaffolding that mosaics and icons lack, and much of the dating of Byzantine art in other media is pegged to it.

The Material

Elephant ivory came from East Africa and India through Egyptian and Red Sea trade routes. The supply was never secure and appears to have been interrupted badly by the Arab conquests of the seventh century — there is a conspicuous gap in ivory production between roughly 650 and 850 that almost certainly reflects trade disruption rather than a change in taste.

Ivory is worked with saws, files, drills and chisels. It is dense, takes a fine polish, and permits undercutting to a degree impossible in wood; it is also limited in size by the tusk, which is why large ivory compositions are assembled from multiple plaques.

Most Byzantine ivories were originally painted and gilded, at least in part: traces of pigment survive in the recesses of many pieces, and blue or red backgrounds with gilded details were normal. The uniform creamy white that museum display has accustomed us to is a condition, not a style.

Bone was used as a cheaper substitute, worked in small plaques glued onto wooden cores — the standard construction of the “rosette caskets” discussed below.

The Consular Diptychs

The earliest group is late Roman rather than Byzantine in feeling. A man appointed consul announced his year in office by distributing a two-leaf ivory writing tablet carved with his portrait, his name and titles, and often scenes of the games he funded.

About forty survive, running from 406 to 541, when Justinian abolished the ordinary consulship. They are datable to the year and give a precise sequence for the development of late antique style: the early ones are naturalistic and spatially convincing, the later ones frontal, flattened and hierarchical, with the consul larger than the attendants and staring straight out.

The Barberini ivory in the Louvre, a five-part panel showing a triumphant emperor on horseback — probably Anastasius or Justinian — is the masterpiece of the group and the best surviving image of what late Roman imperial art looked like at full stretch.

Christian diptychs followed the same format, and the practice of writing the names of the living and dead to be commemorated on the inner wax surfaces gave the liturgy the word “diptychs” for the list of names read at the eucharist — which is why a modern Orthodox service still refers to an object that has not existed for fifteen centuries.

The Middle Byzantine Revival

Ivory carving resumed on a substantial scale in the tenth century, under the Macedonian dynasty, and the century between about 950 and 1050 produced nearly everything now considered a masterpiece of the medium.

Scholars have conventionally sorted these into workshop groups by style, following a classification made in the 1930s by Adolph Goldschmidt and Kurt Weitzmann:

  • The Romanos group. The finest and most classical: deeply carved, quiet, with figures of considerable physical presence. Named after the panel in Paris showing Christ crowning an emperor Romanos and an empress Eudokia — which Romanos is still disputed, and the dating swings by seventy years depending on the answer.
  • The Nikephoros group. Slightly flatter, more linear, with elongated proportions.
  • The Painterly group. Crowded narrative scenes with landscape and architectural settings, closely related to manuscript illumination.

These groupings are useful and should not be taken too literally; they are style clusters, not documented workshops, and the boundaries have been argued over ever since.

Triptychs

The characteristic middle Byzantine devotional object is the small folding triptych: a central panel with the Crucifixion or a Deësis, and two hinged wings with saints, closing to protect the image. They were portable, private, and made for the aristocracy and the court.

The Harbaville Triptych in the Louvre, from the second half of the tenth century, is the standard example and deserves its reputation. The central panel shows Christ enthroned between the Virgin and John the Baptist, with apostles below; the wings carry ranks of military and monastic saints. The carving is unhurried, the figures stand with weight on one leg in a way that would not embarrass a classical sculptor, and the whole thing is about twenty-four centimetres high.

Secular Ivories: The Rosette Caskets

A large class of surviving boxes — perhaps two hundred — is decorated with mythological and hunting scenes framed in bands of carved rosettes, made in bone plaques over a wooden core. They were made in Constantinople between the tenth and twelfth centuries, presumably for the domestic use of the wealthy, and they carry secular subject matter almost exclusively: Herakles, Bellerophon, Dionysiac figures, warriors, nudes, centaurs.

The Veroli Casket in the Victoria and Albert Museum is the finest of them, with scenes of the rape of Europa and the sacrifice of Iphigenia among a riot of putti and mythological figures.

Their existence corrects a common misconception about Byzantine culture. Educated Byzantines were entirely comfortable with classical mythology as ornament and literary reference, and a tenth-century aristocrat could keep his wife’s jewellery in a box carved with Greek gods without any sense of contradiction. What they did not do was worship them, and that distinction was sufficient. The classical inheritance and its handling are traced in the transmission of classical learning.

Ivories and Manuscripts

Book covers were an important use of the material: a carved ivory plaque set into a metalwork binding over a gospel book was the standard luxury treatment, and several survive still attached to their manuscripts. The relationship between ivory carvers and manuscript illuminators was close enough that compositions transfer between the two, and the “painterly group” ivories appear to derive their crowded narrative scenes directly from illuminated models of the kind described in Byzantine manuscripts.

The Later Period

Ivory carving declined after the eleventh century. The reasons are probably economic — the supply of ivory and the wealth of the patrons both contracted — and the late Byzantine luxury object of choice became instead the miniature mosaic icon, or steatite, a soft grey-green soapstone that could be carved with comparable delicacy from local sources. Steatite icons survive in large numbers from the eleventh to fourteenth centuries and are the poor relation of ivory in reputation and the equal of it in workmanship.

Where They Are

Byzantine ivories are scattered, because they were portable and were carried west as gifts, loot and purchases from the eleventh century onward. Significant collections are in the Louvre, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the British Museum, the Bode Museum in Berlin, the Metropolitan Museum, Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, and the cathedral treasuries of Italy, Germany and France.

Very few remain in Greece or Turkey. That dispersal is itself a historical document: it maps the routes by which Byzantine objects and Byzantine taste reached the medieval west, and the Ottonian and Carolingian ivories of the Latin world are in continuous dialogue with the Byzantine pieces their makers had seen.

Dating the Middle Byzantine Groups

The Goldschmidt–Weitzmann classification has held for ninety years while the dating attached to it has moved considerably, and the reasons are instructive about how art history works without documents.

The fixed point everyone wants is the Romanos ivory in Paris, which shows Christ crowning an emperor Romanos and an empress Eudokia. Two identifications are possible: Romanos II and Bertha-Eudokia, which dates it to 944–949, or Romanos IV Diogenes and Eudokia Makrembolitissa, which dates it to 1068–1071.

A century and a quarter separates them, and the whole chronology of the “Romanos group” — and with it a substantial part of middle Byzantine art history — shifts accordingly. The tenth-century identification has generally been preferred on stylistic grounds; the eleventh-century one has been argued seriously and is not dead.

The wider point is that Byzantine ivories are dated by internal comparison within a corpus whose own anchor is contested. Chronologies built on them, including for manuscripts and metalwork, inherit that uncertainty.

What Survives and What Does Not

The surviving corpus is a skewed sample, and knowing how skewed is useful.

Ivory is durable, valuable and portable, which means it was kept — but it was kept in the west. Byzantine ivories travelled as diplomatic gifts, as merchandise, as crusader plunder after 1204, and as purchases by collectors from the seventeenth century onward.

The result is that a Byzantine art form survives almost entirely in French, German, British, Italian and American collections, and hardly at all in Greece or Turkey. The largest single holdings are in the Louvre, the Bode Museum in Berlin, the Victoria and Albert, the Metropolitan Museum and Dumbarton Oaks.

What did not survive is the cheap end. Bone plaques on wooden caskets survive in quantity precisely because they were too worthless to melt or recut, but the middle range — the ordinary devotional ivories that must have existed — is largely gone, and reworking is part of the reason: an old panel could be cut down for a new mount or a new frame.

The Question of Forgeries

The nineteenth-century market for medieval ivories was large and the supply limited, with a predictable result.

A number of celebrated pieces have been questioned, and one group in particular — carvings associated with the Russian collector Alexander Basilewsky and with several dealers of the 1860s–1880s — has been the subject of sustained doubt. Some ivories now in major museums were carved in the nineteenth century; some are medieval pieces heavily recut to make them more saleable; and some accusations have themselves been withdrawn.

Modern examination helps but does not settle it. Ivory cannot be usefully radiocarbon dated for this period without destroying material, and a forger working from a genuine medieval blank defeats the test anyway. Attribution therefore still rests on style, tool marks, wear patterns and provenance — which is why the literature contains a number of long-running and unresolved disputes over individual objects.

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