On the colorful, elaborate chart of the East African coast published in Frederick de Wit’s Zee Atlas of 1675, ships with billowing sails ply the waters of the Arabian Sea between the Horn of Africa and India’s Malabar coast. They had been doing so for a millennium or more, drawn by what the map’s decorative cartouche, with its cornucopia of animal and vegetable life and sumptuously garbed figures, symbolizes: the fabled riches of Africa, especially its seemingly endless supply of ivory.
In the story of ivory’s global spread, common themes in its use and trade emerge again and again. But none is more constant than the ongoing impact of that trade on Africa and its once numberless herds of elephants.
FROM ANCIENT TIMES coastal commerce around the Indian Ocean had linked the East African coast to Arabia and the Persian Gulf and beyond. Arab traders in search of ivory and other goods took advantage of the seasonally alternating monsoon winds to sail to the coast south of the Horn of Africa. Arriving in ports in their lateen-sailed dhows, they bartered trinkets for tusks with the “people of Zanj” (the local inhabitants) and traded for slaves. The ivory supply, however, was limited to what local hunters could obtain from elephant herds near the coast. In the tenth century, the Arab geographer al-Masudi wrote:
It is from this [Zanj] country that come tusks weighing fifty pounds and more. They usually go to Oman, and from there are sent to China and India. This is the chief trade route, and if it were not so, ivory would be common in Muslim lands.
Why would African ivory find a market in countries that had their own indigenous supply? India’s sources of ivory were limited. Both male and female African elephants carry tusks, but only male Asian elephants normally have them, and these are usually smaller than those of their African cousins. And in Africa, elephants were hunted, but the peoples of India chose to domesticate many of theirs. As a result, elephants and their ivory were controlled largely by the wealthy and powerful for their own princely purposes. Yet there was a steady demand for tusks to provide the usual dagger and sword hilts, boxes, and handicrafts, and also to make the traditional and indispensable ivory marriage bangles worn by virtually all Hindu women. “In the days of sati,” writes Abdul Sheriff, “the widow followed her dead husband into the funeral pyre bedecked with her bridal ornaments. After the abolition of sati, the bangles were nevertheless broken as a demonstration of her grief. If the wife happened to predecease her husband, she was of course cremated together with her bridal ornaments.” This created an enduring market for imported African ivory, which was larger in diameter and provided more bangles per tusk and was often less brittle to work than Indian ivory.
In China, al-Masudi assured his readers, “the kings and their military officers use carrying-chairs of ivory; no official or person of rank would dare visit the king in an iron chair, and ivory alone is used for this purpose.” Such uses were nothing new. There is evidence that Chinese officials in the Tang Dynasty (618–907) used ivory tablets as emblems of their office. By al-Masudi’s time China’s ever-shrinking elephant population had long since been inadequate to supply the empire’s need for this status-symbolizing substance. But far-flung trade routes made African ivory available.
After the Prophet Muhammad’s death in 632, the new religion of Islam spread rapidly east and west from Arabia. Propelled by the hereditary caliphates and later by religious reform, Islamic states stretched from what is now Pakistan to the Atlantic, taking in the Middle East, all of North Africa, Sicily, and much of Spain by 850. Muslim Arab conquests across North Africa established powerful kingdoms and trade routes across the Sahara in search of gold and ivory. Camel caravans linked Marrakesh and Fez with Timbuktu and other entrepôts where Africans exchanged elephant tusks for salt and swords and pots and pans. These new sources of ivory helped take up the slack in supply caused by the Roman extirpation of North African herds, although tusks were still being shipped east and west from the Horn of Africa. In 991 a Berber prince was able to send the caliph of Córdoba “eight thousand pounds of the most pure ivory.”
Islamic Spain, like every other major court in the medieval Mediterranean region, commissioned ivory objects. Córdoba, the capital of the Umayyad caliphate, became the most sophisticated city of Europe and a center for the production of luxury goods, including ivory vases, chess sets, and caskets to hold perfumes. Fussily detailed, deeply carved reliefs of humans, animals, and birds, looping knots, and elaborate borders typically fill the ivory panels of these portable expressions of power. Many carry informative inscriptions; from these, scholars know that the ivories were largely commissioned by members of the ruling family. A pyxis (cylindrical container) made for Ziyad ibn Aflah, the caliph’s prefect of police, is replete with images of authority. It shows a seated figure (probably Ziyad himself) riding on an elephant among a riot of other animals and attendants. But such objects were put to poetic as well as propagandistic purposes. The shape of a pyxis topped with a domed cover lent itself to use in Arab poetry as a metaphor for a beloved’s breast. One such lovely rounded ivory pyxis covered in vegetal designs from the workshops of Madinat alZahra carries its own interpretation in an inscription on the lid.
The sight I offer is the fairest, the firm breast of a delicate girl.
Beauty has invested me with splendid raiment,
which makes a display of jewels.
I am a receptacle for musk, camphor, and ambergris.
When elephant ivory was scarce, thin panels were used to maximize the material; they were decorated with painted scrolling arabesques in lieu of carving. When ivory was abundant, it could be used to create “oliphants,” elaborately carved hunting horns made from elephants’ tusks; their sheer weight makes it unlikely these were ever used for anything other than ostentatious display.
SHIPMENTS OF IVORY to Byzantium were disrupted by its war with Persia in 540. Thirty years later, after the Persian conquest of southern Arabia closed off Red Sea trade routes to Constantinople for ivory from both Africa and India, they largely halted. Ivory carving in Byzantium didn’t resume on a large scale until the late ninth century, about the same time as the first extant ivories from Islamic Spain. Ivory was then coming to Constantinople on Arab vessels, as it was to Spain. But the material would never be as abundant in Byzantium as it once was, and its scarcity increased its preciousness.
Ivory became a vehicle for Christian religious art, which turned to new styles of expression. Classicism, with its fidelity to nature, fluidity of form, and delicacy of expression, lingered on in the secular art of luxury objects for centuries after the adoption of Christianity as the official religion of the Roman empire. In religious art a derived naturalism was still being used—there’s the splendid sixth-century carving representing the Archangel Michael in the British Museum—but even that style would fade, spurned as if inappropriate for the sacred subject matter. Figuration became less gracile and began to wear its symbolism heavily, as if artists were uncomfortable depicting the body. Doubtless it had something to do with the eighth- and ninth-century doctrinal struggles with iconoclasm—the rejection of religious image making—that preoccupied the empire and finally ended in a cultural stance that rejected the religious images of others as idols but regarded Christian images as icons worthy of veneration.
Yet despite the shifting depictions, the ivory carver’s exacting, time-consuming craft remained the same. How best to utilize the structure of the tusk had been known even in prehistory. There was no way to predict what subtle interior grain patterns might show up in the final piece, but they were more prominent toward the exterior of the tusk and almost un-noticeable in the milkier center surrounding the nerve canal. Small plaques could be cut with their backs to the pulp cavity, but large slabs had to be cut vertically from the thick section of tusk above that. To ensure matching color and similar grain pattern, slabs for diptychs had to be cut from the same tusk.
None of this was easy before the ancient world added metal tools—saws, burins, scrapers, chisels—to the carver’s kit, which made it possible to extract the largest-size slab from a tusk, cut pyxides, and execute precise patterns and minute details.
Some carving was surely done freehand, but elaborate pieces were planned with care, the design for reliefs drawn on and then lightly scored. A groove was carefully incised around a face or the bordering frame as a precaution when undercutting the surrounding ivory with an inshave. Although it was possible to disguise a minor scratch or draw the eye away from an imperfectly proportioned foot, slicing through the ear of an emperor or nicking the halo of a saint with a slip of a sharp tool would ruin months of work. The carver’s guidelines were always smoothed away with a bit of abrasive fishskin before polishing with emery, but these are sometimes still noticeable as ghostly marks in angled sunlight.
I picture these artisans at their benches, working with infinite patience over their commissions in a demanding craft whose traditions and skills were centuries old. As time went on, however, fewer got to practice it. Although ivory remained available (in ever-smaller quantities) in the workshops of Constantinople through the eleventh century, as Cutler notes, “it all but disappeared thereafter.” The only known ivory pyxis from the later Byzantine empire is a diminutive version created for the imperial court, a mere inch and half in diameter.
AFTER THE FALL of Rome in 476, elephant ivory was scarce in Europe for centuries, and even the detailed knowledge of the animal that the ancient world possessed was largely lost. Instead, many objects were carved from the poor man’s ivory: bone. Bone is always available, wherever animals are slaughtered, and although it can be worked with some effectiveness its variable, sometimes spongy structure, flecked through with minute telltale channels that once held nerves and blood, make it of interest primarily as a cheap carving material. To be fair, the compact outer area (as opposed to the inner, cancellous part) of, say, the leg bones of cattle or horses is hard, dense, smooth, and workable and was widely utilized from the fourth century on for utilitarian items such as knife handles, buttons, spoons, pins, and boxes. The carvable part of bone is thinner and more brittle than ivory, but as it can be polished and waxed to give it a shine it was often used in combination with ivory—for example, to provide passable inlays and minor marquetry when there wasn’t enough costlier ivory available to completely cover a small casket.
However, there was another dentin available in Europe: walrus tusk. The walrus (“whale horse”), also called “morse,” did for the medieval world what the hippopotamus had done for the early eastern Mediterranean—provide an alternative source of ivory. The ponderous Atlantic walrus, Odobenus rosmarus rosmarus, moves its substantial oneton bulk clumsily on land but gracefully in the water, diving to depths of three hundred feet in search of mussels, snails, crabs, and fish on the sea bottom. Native to the polar north from the Canadian to the Russian Arctic, it inhabits coastal pack ice, migrating with the seasons and heaving its wrinkled, bulbous body onto land in herds that can number in the thousands. Its most striking feature is great spikelike tusks, which both bulls and cows have. These large canines are bigger in the bulls, reaching two feet or more in length and up to twelve pounds in weight.
Viking traders were probably the first to introduce walrus ivory into Europe. Following settlement by Iceland in the late tenth century, Norse society in Greenland traded polar bear skins, gyrfalcons, and walrus ivory for iron, wood, silk, and silver. The king of Norway, who later received walrus ivory in tax payment, distributed it as gifts to other rulers. Volga Bulgars even brought walrus ivory to central Asia, where it reached the Muslim world as “fish-teeth” and was prized for the crafting of sword hilts and dagger handles. The availability of the material was helped by the fact that walruses ranged much farther south during the Middle Ages than they do now, reaching Scotland and the North Sea. In fact, walrus tusks provided the material for nearly all the ivory carving done in northern Europe in the eleventh and twelfth centuries and remained an important source. Not surprisingly, walruses were ruthlessly hunted to meet the demand, and their numbers declined drastically as a result.
The primary limitation of walrus ivory, like that of hippo ivory, is its relatively small size, which restricts its use to plaques that fit in the palm of the hand and modest sculpture in the round. In addition, the tusks are oval in cross section with a cementum covering over an outer layer of primary dentin (which shows virtually no grain) and a secondary or inner dentin, marbled in appearance, which can sometimes be noticed on the backs of relief carvings. But these material restraints were hardly drawbacks for northern European artisans of the period. This was the age when monastic foundations were principal centers of artistic production, and where scribes, hunched over copies of the Gospels in their scriptoria (workshops), created jewel-like worlds within the confines of a capital letter. The effort it took for a monk to wheedle and worry a recalcitrant bit of dentin into a lustrous relief that glowed with religious feeling was inseparable from his vocation and devotion. The arts of manuscript illumination and ivory carving were closely allied, and the fact that many small ivories share imagery with these manuscripts—and were often painted similarly—makes it likely that they were produced side by side in workshops.
Ivory sculpture, especially reliefs of sacred book covers and diptychs, which functioned as small shrines, achieved great importance in Europe in the ninth and tenth centuries. The pair of tenth- or eleventh-century carved ivory plaques of David dictating Psalms and the Judgment of Solomon now in the Louvre are indicative of the genre. Each is crowded with figures—the latter squeezes in King Solomon with four soldiers, two pleading women, and another pair of soldiers about to cleave in half the disputed baby, held upside down by his feet—and still makes room for borders of acanthus leaves, all on plaques little bigger than index cards. The inward-looking and spiritually intense vision here is squirming for room in these reliefs; the exactitude of medieval art is all about the exquisite delineation of meanings for which the visual is often simply a shorthand of significations.
It is true that most ivory carvings of the period—altar crosses, bishops’ croziers, reliquaries, book covers—were religious in nature but secular impulses were also expressed in dentin. In the lower Rhine, walrus ivory gaming pieces were being made and exported across Europe. The Lewis chessmen, a group of small twelfth-century walrus ivory carvings that form parts of several chess sets and were probably made in Norway, were found on the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides in 1831. Stolid, simple, and blocky, the figures feature lidless stares and a monumentality all out of proportion to their size.
Many of these early ivories have disappeared. Over time, most fell victim to fires and pillage, Viking raids, later revolutions and robberies, or sheer neglect—the usual winnowing of history. What we have left, however, is of great interest and makes up for the paucity of monumental sculpture that remains from 500 to 1050. “By turning to the art of the ivory carver,” writes historian Paul Williamson, “it is possible to reconstruct, almost without a break, the stylistic and iconographic changes that occurred in the Middle Ages.”
THE CRUSADES REINTRODUCED elephant ivory to Europe. Christian forces conquered Jerusalem on the First Crusade in 1095, and remained in the Middle East until 1291. Soldiers, pilgrims, and merchants came into contact with a refined Eastern culture and its luxury goods: silks, inlaid metalwork, painted glassware, ceramics, and ivory. European interest in elephant ivory stimulated shipments of tusks from East Africa along the Red Sea to Alexandria and from trans-Saharan routes to Tunis and other ports and then on across the Mediterranean to Venice, Genoa, and Marseille. After being largely unobtainable in northern Europe for several hundred years, by the middle of the thirteenth century elephant ivory was supplying a massive, religiously based carving industry in Paris.
“In liturgical prayers ivory was a synonym for the chastity of the Virgin,” as one researcher observes, “and the luminous quality of its surface, particularly desirable from the latter half of the thirteenth century, naturally affected viewers’ perceptions of space and mood.” Ivory’s qualities no longer embodied the kind of luxurious decadence the Romans exulted in—its voluptuousness had been appropriated to worship, prayerful reflection, and praise of the divine, and not necessarily in the context of a church. Williamson notes:
It is significant that when ivory was used again in vast quantities, patronage had changed. In the late thirteenth century the ivory carving industry in the Ile-de-France was totally geared towards producing large numbers of object for private devotion, such as small diptychs and triptychs with scenes from the Passion of Christ, and ivory statuettes of the Virgin and Child. The richer the patron, the grander the object.
Some ivory sculptures pushed the limits of the size and shape of the tusk. The Sainte Chapelle Virgin (ca. 1250), now in the Louvre, is more than sixteen inches tall; a demure Mary puts her weight on one leg while supporting the Christ child on the same hip, a very natural stance and one that takes advantage of the typical curve of the tusk. These leaning Virgin and Child poses adopt a kind of Gothic contrapposto that was originally ivory-driven but proved so popular they were replicated in materials that didn’t require it, such as wood and stone, and even show up in manuscript illumination of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.
Yet Gothic ivory carving was never entirely in thrall to the church. Commerce and courtly love were among the increasingly secular concerns incorporated into ivory products in the 1300s. Medieval merchants used small hand scales to confirm the weight of coins, a sensible precaution in an age that commonly clipped them. These balances and weights were kept in boxes. Fancy ones were made of ivory, with fitted compartments and religious subjects on their covers, perhaps as a way for traders to increase customers’ confidence by means of a modest display of piety during their worldly transactions.
Luxury materials like ivory were appreciated openly, albeit often in the context of religiosity. An ivory casket decorated with carved panels addressing the biblical tale of the prodigal son allowed the artist to dwell on the subtheme of lust by remaining ostensibly within the moralizing narrative framework of the traditional parable. This visual cat-and-mouse game also allowed the imagination and eye of the casket’s owner to linger on the earthly aspects of the story and the sublimated sensuality of the softly carved figures, confident the tale closed with a moral lesson as neatly as the lid on the box itself.
IN MEDIEVAL TIMES any number of fanciful ideas were taken as gospel. One of them was belief in the existence of the unicorn. Today it’s pictured as a white horse with a pointed spiral horn sprouting from its forehead, but the mythic creature of the Middle Ages was smaller, shown with a goatlike beard, a lion’s tail, and cloven hooves. It was also swathed in lore; it was immortal, only the pure heart of a virgin could tame it, and so forth. No matter—the important thing for credulous kings was that the unicorn had protective powers: its horn could counteract poison. The availability of a trickle of narwhal teeth through Arctic trade created an opportunity for middlemen to sell these hitherto unsuspected, scarce tusks for far more than their weight in gold, not just as evidence of the unicorn’s existence but as magical objects in their own right.
The narwhal (Monodon monoceros) is an fifteen-foot-long cetacean that looks like a mottled blubbery torpedo tipped with a long straight, spiraling spear. Related to the beluga whale, it inhabits icy channels of the Arctic in large pods, pursuing cod, squid, shrimp, and similar prey and disporting itself at the surface, often waving its single tusk in the air. Males (and occasionally females) grow one of these spectacular teeth from the left side of the upper jaw. Six to nine feet long, and tightly twisted counterclockwise (if viewed from the proximal end), the tusk is a great curiosity of nature. Narwhal ivory is as hard as that of the hippo and in cross section it exhibits concentric, wavy bands. On the other hand, its long pulp cavity renders much of it hollow and offers small working space for the carver. Cut into pieces, it looks barely suitable to make napkin rings, gaming pieces, or saltshakers, but short sections made handsome sword hilts and longer ones impressive scepters for likes of the doges of Venice and the Hapsburg emperors.
The twelfth to the sixteenth centuries in Europe were the heyday of this vast collaborative fiction. It was possible, of course, only because the narwhal was virtually unknown in Europe. Informed Scandinavian merchants wisely kept any details of the animal’s tusk a trade secret. They understood perfectly that the narwhal was insignificant as a source of ivory, but its extremely limited supply was nicely in step with what was coveted and known to be rare: unicorn horns. They found a way to supply them. Such “horns” found ready acceptance in ecclesiastical contexts. Their spiraling forms were associated with divine potency and became magnets for sacred attributes. What more impressive processional staff could there be than that made from a unicorn’s singular spike?
But it was emperors and kings, those who feared poisoning and could afford this wildly expensive antidote, who most craved unicorn horns and had them made into cups to foil assassins and ward off illness. The last reigning duke of Burgundy, Charles the Bold (1433–77), had a number of them and was careful to use a piece of one to test the dishes he was served. When the wealthy Renaissance art patron and collector Isabella d’Este died in 1539, an inventory of her possessions listed a “unicorn horn” and a “fish’s tooth ‘three palms long’”—clearly narwhal and walrus tusks. By Elizabeth I’s time a narwhal tusk that had been presented to her was added to the crown jewels as the Horn of Windsor and valued at £10,000—the cost of a castle.
In 1646 Sir Thomas Browne wrote, “Great account and much profit is made of Unicorns horn, at least of that which beareth the name thereof; wherein notwithstanding, many I perceive suspect an Imposture.” Actually, a Danish naturalist, Ole Wurm, had unmasked these mythenshrouded “horns” as narwhal teeth eight years before, but belief in their medicinal powers lingered for over a century more.
UNBURDENED BY ANY precise knowledge of the elephant, the medieval world was free to imagine rather strange things about the creature. In any case, the artists of the bestiaries of the period were more concerned with depicting the supposed character of the beast, which presumed traits of restrained strength, constancy, and levelheadedness. It took several more centuries before exposure to accurate accounts or direct experience of the animal began to influence the artistic imagination.
Here and there, live elephants showed up in Europe, mostly as diplomatic gifts. The caliph of Baghdad gave one to Charlemagne in 802. It created a sensation whenever the Frankish king brought it with him on his travels. In 1254, Louis IX, king of France, sent to Henry III, king of England, an African elephant, which he kept in his royal menagerie at the Tower of London and allowed to slurp wine. Matthew Paris, a Benedictine monk and historian, made a naively charming but well-observed pen-and-wash illustration of it. But even in the 1500s illustrations of elephants in books could be highly creative. Conrad Gesner’s Historia animalium, published in Zurich in the mid-sixteenth century, shows a pachyderm with puddling pylons for legs, a segmented trunk like a vacuum hose, and ears that unfolded like a lady’s fan.
These notions about the elephant evolved in tandem with the development of science and changing European views toward the animal world. But something else was afoot. Attitudes toward the elephant were developing separately from how ivory was regarded; it was as if the animal product and its source species occupied different worlds.
In many ways they did. Ivory was being removed, transported, and reshaped far from its “original ecological context,” allowing the elephant to become conceptually distanced, even uncoupled, from its own teeth. Ivory’s increasing availability did not bring familiarity with the elephant along with it. As a rare material obtained from distant lands, ivory lacked the kind of immediate association with its origins that was made, say, between fine wood and forests. To Europeans the elephant was an exotic creature that inhabited faraway realms. Before it was ever seen, it was as fabled as a unicorn and just as unknown, and even after it made an appearance it still seemed a walking marvel. How ivory was obtained for trade remained mysterious and largely stayed that way, far into the future. By then the elephant would be clothed in a whole new set of meanings, valued in ways that in effect gave it a new identity. Eventually, when the connection between ivory and where it came from was made inescapable, this altered regard for the elephant would change everything about ivory—or perhaps just painfully sharpen the issue.
THE SECULAR USE of ivory in Europe proliferated after 1400. It was not only employed for the expected—inlays and panels in furniture, mirror backs and buttons, hilts and handles, knobs and nit combs—but, increasingly, incorporated into new forms of weaponry and musical and scientific instruments. Given ivory’s long history of use in the decoration of spears, bows, knives, and swords, it would inevitably be worked into newer weaponry, such as the lavishly produced matchlocks and similar newly invented firearms for rulers such as the emperor Charles V (1500–58), who doted on them. Years of collaborative effort on the part of metalsmiths, engravers, and carvers might be needed to join ivory, rare woods, steel, and gold to make the sets of pistols and bird guns used by monarchs of the day, who had a taste for eye-catching scrollwork and nymph-laden inlays of hunting scenes drawn from classical mythology.
Ivory was used in flutes, lutes, guitars, and harpsichords. In the hands of a seventeenth-century master craftsman such as Matteo Sellas, the back of a guitar could be enveloped in a dizzying geometric pattern of ebony and ivory zigzags. Ivory would be used for complicated folding compasses, rulers, and sundials not simply because of the decorative possibilities it afforded, but because its surface could be scored precisely, leaving tiny markings that could be filled with ink to create a compass rose, detailed graduations for measurement, or indeed any kind of dial desired for the scientific instruments then being invented. Sundials were widely used to set the unreliable timekeeping devices of the period. Nuremberg in particular became famous between 1500 and 1700 for its ivory sundials—pocket-sized, folding diptychs, some of which could be used in different latitudes. Other uses for ivory aided personal hygiene. Ornate ivory flea traps became an aristocratic fashion accessory in the eighteenth century; these hollow, perforated cylinders, baited inside with blood or honey, were worn around the neck as a pendant.
By contrast, the artistic use of ivory became less inspired after 1400 and more standardized in spite of growing refinement. The production of small sculpture and reliefs that reworked a small set of familiar subjects gradually ceased, although workshops continued to turn out derivative altarpieces and formulaic marriage caskets. It’s curious that Renaissance artists showed comparatively little interest in ivory, although any number of factors might have been at play. Perhaps it was that ivory carving seemed by then a minor art more suited to the hermetic expression of religious feeling than the expansive ideas of the new humanism. For some, the material might have been too restrictive in size, but the kind of monumentality in miniature in which Benvenuto Cellini, using gold, so brilliantly excelled would surely have been possible in the right hands. In the end, the lack of interest might have been largely a matter of fashion. But by then the idea of ivory had embedded itself in the European imagination, along with its inevitable associations. Ginevra de’ Benci, the famous young beauty whose portrait was painted by Leonardo da Vinci in the 1470s, was described by her contemporaries as having “fingers white as ivory.” It was only a matter of time before ivory would make its artistic comeback.
IN OCTOBER OF 1582, an expeditionary band of well-armed Cossacks led by the Volga River pirate Yermak Timofeyevich defeated the army of the Tartar khanate in western Siberia after a three-day battle. Yermak had been hired by the Stroganovs, a powerful merchant family, to protect their trade in the Urals against attacks by the Tartars. The khanate’s forces revolted three years later, wounding Yermak, who tried to escape by swimming a river but, dragged under by the weight of his chain mail, drowned. But the counterattack was ineffectual; Siberia was retaken, colonized, and eventually annexed into the Russian empire. One bit of lore attached to Yermak is the claim that he saw a large hairy creature while exploring the wind-swept taiga. Later speculation had it that he had seen a mammoth. This is pure legend; that mammoth ivory began to be shipped to Moscow after the time of his conquest is not. It even reached London by 1616. Cossacks, hunters, explorers, soldiers of fortune had set out to explore the vastness of Siberia after the Russian conquest, and when the fur trade waned they discovered yet more riches in the shape of tusks.
Mammoth ivory—mamontova kost in Russian—had been unearthed in Siberia since ancient times. Indigenous peoples there would come across tusks emerging from the banks of rivers during spring thaws and would pull them out and barter them in village outposts. But they feared digging further, unsure as to what kinds of creatures the great bones and parts of frozen carcasses belonged to and the forces that might be disturbed. The Yakuts thought they might be the remains of giant rodents that made the earth shake as they tunneled underground with their immense horns; other peoples imagined the beasts were aquatic. Still, Siberians had made use of this fossil ivory, carving pendants and other figurines, and they knew others found the tusks valuable. Since the ninth century, Arab and Asian merchants had sought it.
The tusks had also made their way to China, where they provided an additional source of ivory to supplement what could be obtained locally and by land and sea from Africa. Emperor Kangxi, who was fond of expounding his learning, addressed his ministers in the last year of his reign, 1722, on the subject of the “great animal of the rat kind” found “in the northern regions, under the ice layers.” He reminded his audience that the Russians who had recently presented themselves at court had confirmed the presence of year-round ice, and went on:
Now, in Russia, near the shores of the Northern Ocean, there is a shu [rat or rodent] resembling the elephant, which makes its way under ground, and which dies the moment it is exposed to light or air. Its bones resemble ivory, and they are used by the natives in manufacturing cups, platters, combs, and pins. These we have ourselves seen, and we have been led thereby to believe in the truth of the story.
The idea that the tusks were the fossilized remains of a long-extinct ancestor of the elephant is a modern one. At first, many Europeans thought that the various fossils that had been dug up by then were “figured stones” or “sports of nature” or, of course, evidence of unicorns. The Dutch traveler Nicolaas Witsen used the word “mammoth” for the first time in Europe in his North and East Tartary (1692); he heard the term spoken by Russian settlers in Siberia, who used it to describe the kind of giant bones and teeth he was shown.
Its puzzling origins did nothing to discourage Europeans from making serious use of mammoth ivory by the early eighteenth century, although it was typically more brittle and yellowed than that of elephants. In the mid-nineteenth century one naturalist estimated that two hundred tons of it had been sold during the previous two centuries; this amount would have required that the tusks of a hundred mammoths be recovered annually. That would not have been difficult, considering that Siberians, sparked by greed for the tusks, had long had centers specializing in the trade in tusks from the tundra.
The mammoth had reentered history—preceded by its ivory.
AS THE APPETITE for ivory spread across the whole of Eurasia, merchants from Europe to the Far East turned to Africa to obtain more tusks through trade. Whenever that proved insufficient to meet the demand, elephant-rich regions were often simply plundered, typically as part of a larger scheme of colonization.
Both coasts of Africa were affected. India and China had been the major markets for the East African trade since the tenth century and remained so into the nineteenth. For the Africans, it was an economy based on the exchange of their raw materials—ivory—for manufactured goods and luxuries: bolts of cloth, brass wire, bright beads. By the fifteenth century elephants were disappearing from the Indian Ocean coast and had to be sought hundreds of miles inland. There is abundant evidence of ivory trading and ivory-working centers deep in the interior, such as those on the north bank of the Zambezi (in today’s Zambia) and in the Limpopo Valley (modern South Africa). A similar push inland occurred in Abyssinia (Ethiopia), bringing new ivory-producing lands into existing trade networks. The Indian Ocean ivory trade became increasingly international, taking ivory to Europe as well to as the East.
The ivory riches on the other side of the continent were sought as well. The trade vastly increased following Portugal’s pioneering voyages of exploration in the mid-fifteenth century. The Portuguese were not seeking ivory when they traveled down Africa’s Atlantic coast, but they were quick to recognize its value, along with gold, peppercorns, and slaves. Dutch, English, Spanish, French, Swedish, Danish, and German traders soon followed, naming chunks of the coastline after the products they found: the Grain Coast (modern Liberia), the Gold Coast (Ghana), the Slave Coast (Togo, Benin, and western Nigeria), and the Ivory Coast. (Curiously, the last is the only one of the names that has stuck, an impressive geographic reminder of ivory’s potency in the history of world trade.)
These riches—gold, ivory, and slaves—traded places in importance. The slave trade grew in the sixteenth century as the Portuguese and Spanish developed overseas plantations. It came to dominate the transatlantic trade after the Dutch elbowed the Portuguese aside in the seventeenth century and, along with the British and the French, developed slave plantations in the Caribbean and, later, America. In general, the ivory trade as a whole never approached the value of the slave trade and was less important than gold from the Gold Coast. But in areas such as the Ivory Coast, where the slave trade was not as developed, the export of tusks was the key to obtaining prized European imports. Among the desirable goods were firearms; in the mid-eighteenth century, the city of Birmingham in England was producing a hundred thousand muskets annually for the West African trade. What did the Europeans get? From the evidence in Dutch and English shipping records, at least 2,500 tons of ivory—over a quarter of a million tusks—left West Africa in just the twenty-six-year period between 1699 and 1725.
The European-driven ivory trade piggybacked on the modest trade in elephants’ teeth that local rulers had controlled. As the system of exports cranked up, traders dealing through African middlemen were able to exploit herds close to the coast. The trade in tusks was so heavy, and the competition so keen between the English and the Dutch along the Upper Guinea coast, that in 1663 a Portuguese missionary was astonished to see an English ship loaded with what looked like thousands of tusks, some weighing as much as four arrobas (128 pounds). “Every year, a ship comes to take a similar cargo,” wrote André de Faro, adding,
This does not take account of the ivory that is purchased in the other rivers of Guinea, where there are similar factories, which dispatch other ships; and the Dutch are also buyers in the ports of these rivers. There are, therefore, more elephants in Guinea than there are cattle in the whole of Europe.
At first the supply of ivory seemed to be endless. The elephant-hunting Vili people of the coastal kingdom of Loango above the mouth of the Congo River had been trading ivory with the Europeans as far back as the 1570s. In 1608 they were selling twenty-three tons a year to the Dutch alone from the tusks they could obtain on their forays into the equatorial forest. Eventually, the impact of the trade on elephant populations began to be felt. By the 1660s Vili hunters had to undertake journeys of three months’ duration in the middle Congo before they could return with the ivory needed.
AND WHAT OF the Africans?
Many of the peoples on the continent had been hunting the elephant from prehistoric times. The animal was an immense prize: meat from a single beast could feed an entire village, its hide could be made into shields, its tail hair made into fly whisks, and its great incisors carved into any number of handicrafts, jewelry, ceremonial objects, horns, prestige items, totems, and masks.
It’s often claimed that ivory use on the part of African peoples never threatened elephant populations, but that may be due to less advanced technology more than to anything else. “It is an urban, and even subtly racist myth,” writes John Van Couvering, “to credit indigenous peoples with an intuitive dedication to ecological balance,” adding,
The observed equilibrium is not always to the liking of the people who must participate in it, as witness the alacrity with which they abandon their wholesome way of life as soon as they can obtain more certain and effective methods of dominating the environment.
Before European colonization there were countless herds of elephants left in Africa, despite centuries of pursuit by Egyptians, Romans, and others seeking ivory. One obvious reason was that Africans found elephants hard to kill with primitive weapons. Hunting them was exceedingly dangerous and required great skill and planning, and of course the protection only careful rituals could provide. It was not undertaken lightly, and almost always was done by large groups. Some faced elephants armed solely with spears; needless to say, success was difficult to attain and conferred great status. Sometimes traps—pitfalls and deadfalls—were used as well as poisoned arrows or lances. Or hunters perched motionlessly in trees over elephant paths and plunged heavy harpoons into passing animals from above. Sneaking up behind an elephant to sever the hamstring tendon of a rear leg with a light ax could instantly anchor the beast to the spot, but at such close quarters an attacker risked a nasty demise. Whatever the technique, wounded animals that escaped had to be tracked, found, and dispatched if they hadn’t already expired.
When an export market developed for ivory, indigenous peoples with elephant-hunting traditions like the Vili gained new economic incentives to pursue elephants specifically for their teeth. Skilled hunters were recruited on both coasts. As elephant herds thinned, hunting parties had to go ever farther afield, pushing into new regions and penetrating deep into the central forest. Elephants had to be located, pursued, and brought down and their tusks cut out and carried long distances to central collecting points before being transported in quantity to the coast for trading.
To improve their odds, muskets obtained in trade were added to African hunters’ arsenals by the 1700s. The late-eighteenth-century Scottish explorer Mungo Park described how Bamana hunters of Mali would track a herd for days, following until one animal strayed from the rest and could be cautiously approached.
They then discharge all their pieces at once and throw themselves on their faces among the grass. The wounded elephant immediately applies his trunk to the different wounds, but being unable to extract the balls, and seeing nobody near him, becomes quite furious, and runs about amongst the bushes, until by fatigue and loss of blood he has exhausted himself, and affords the hunters an opportunity of firing a second time at him, by which he is generally brought to ground.
These ivory-gathering expeditions constituted a considerable step up from what had formerly been traditional and self-contained practices. Elephants and their ivory were of great importance in a number of African societies. In the Edo kingdom of Benin, which flourished from the fourteenth to the nineteenth centuries in what is today southern Nigeria, for example, ivory was a royal monopoly of the oba, a ruler at the head of a system of titled chiefs who claimed divine origins and demonstrated it through his art-laden ceremonies. It was the custom that the oba had to be awarded one tusk from every elephant killed in his realm, making ivory a kind of currency. In 1522 a female slave at the desirable age of seventeen or eighteen was worth precisely two tusks. Huge stocks of ivory were amassed, particularly after hunters gained access to European firearms, which precipitated the widespread slaughter of Nigerian herds.
The oba supported craftsmen’s guilds, including one responsible for the inspired carvings of the court; these artisans were so skilled that they worked directly on the raw ivory, disdaining preliminary sketches. Among the most striking pieces of Benin ivory sculpture were huge ancestral altar tusks, each one covered with elaborate surface carving and curving backward out of a stolid head of cast brass. The evident skill and complex visual language in these pieces give them a timeless quality, but Benin art was never static; it evolved in contact with neighboring peoples, such as the Yoruba and, notably, the Portuguese, after the initial contact with them in 1485.
Among the African products that the Portuguese took back to Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were impressively carved ivories, including oliphants, from the West African coast, the Sapi area of Sierra Leone, and Benin, as well as the Kongo kingdom in Central Africa. These treasures eventually made their way into the collections of the Medici of Florence, Albrecht Dürer, and the elector of Saxony in Dresden, among others. Some of these ivories reflected African artists’ efforts to incorporate portrayals of Europeans into their art and iconography, and included carvings made specifically for export that reflected European requests for particular functions (spoons, saltcellars, pyxides) as well as imagery. Afro-Portuguese ivories, as these cross-cultural carvings are called, show a mix of European and African motifs, in which the long-haired, sharp-nosed, jut-jawed Portuguese stand out to non-African eyes.
What is less obvious is the African frame of reference through which these Europeans were reconfigured. For Africans, the arrival of Europeans was akin to having visitors return from the land of the dead: the sickly pallor of their skin, their strange ships and language and superior technology, their homes across the sea—they seemed to have reversed the journey the departed took westward toward the ancestors. The use of ivory adds another layer of meaning to these Afro-Portuguese carvings, particularly those from Benin. There its chalky color was linked to ritual purity, making it appropriate for offerings to Olokun, the god of wealth and the sea, as well as communication with the dead.
These themes mingle poignantly in the beautifully modeled pendant ivory mask in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (and its nearly identical counterpart in the British Museum in London), believed to be a sixteenth-century portrait of the then oba’s mother. The face, dignified and haunting, with scarification marks on the forehead, is surrounded by a tiara and a virtual choke collar composed of the bearded faces of Europeans who brought wealth from overseas—and took so much of it away in ivory and slaves.
FROM THE SIXTEENTH century on, the extraction of ivory from elephant-populous lands developed a new pattern that would often be overlaid on the basic trade in tusks. A portion of the ivory was handed back to local artisans to be carved to order for a ready market in the home countries of the colonial powers. The earliest examples of these hybrid art forms, when artisans wrestled with new uses and images, fitting them into their own craft, have the vitality of a visual struggle between different traditions. Later, when locals understood better what was wanted, artistic acquiescence resulted in increasingly formulaic production.
Anglo-Indian furniture is a particularly apt example. The British East India Company based in Calcutta (Kolkatta) in West Bengal soon put the extraordinarily rich ivory-carving tradition in the subcontinent to use. At the beginning of the eighteenth century the company sent skilled workers from Britain with “great quantities of English patterns to teach the Indians how to manufacture goods to make them vendible in England and the rest of the European markets.” The effort was so successful that English joiners petitioned against it, fearing the ruin of their trade. Many eventually gave in and signed up with the East India Company, then stayed on to open similar businesses in India, drawing on the carpenter caste for labor. These vadrangis copied the “muster” (model) sent from England “with the most exact and servile fidelity.” At the low end of this imitative production were things like small workboxes carved out of ivory in the shape of English thatch-roofed cottages; at the top end, artful East-West fusions, such as the elegant and exquisitely carved solid ivory chair given to the first governor-general of India.
The ivory trade was now far more than commerce in raw material; it was a trade in ivory objects as well, sometimes highly specialized. The Portuguese used their outposts in India and Sri Lanka to put local ivory carvers to work producing Christian religious images for use in Portugal and Brazil. The Spanish took this trend even further, making the Philippines the leading producer of Christian art in ivory from the sixteenth century into the nineteenth. Carvers there made an entire array of somewhat Gothic devotional objects for the Catholic church in Spain, Mexico, and Latin America as well as in other Asian countries.
THE CHINESE HAD gone directly to Africa too, and they returned with ivory. That was merely one of many feats accomplished by Admiral Zheng He, the eunuch commander of the seven extraordinary armadas sent out by the Yongle emperor from 1405 on “to make manifest the wealth and power” of Ming China in foreign lands. That it must have done: there were two hundred ships in each armada and about a third of them were 385 to 440 feet long. Quite unlike the bellicose explorations of the Portuguese and other Europeans, these voyages around Southeast Asia and across the Indian Ocean to the African East Coast founded no colonies, cornered no trade, toppled no rulers, and enslaved no one, despite the fact that there were twenty-seven thousand soldiers in the fleet (although the pirates encountered were crushed). The point was to impress any potentates along the way and draw them into the Chinese tribute system, in which whatever goods offered the emperor as gifts would be outdone by what he would bestow in return, a very grand and roundabout way to initiate trade contacts. Zheng He brought his largest ships back filled with ivory, gold, spices, and lots of exotic animals to amuse the Ming court—lions, leopards, ostriches, even giraffes.
These extravagant voyages came to an abrupt end, perhaps because of intrigues at court; in 1436 even building deep-sea vessels was banned. In any case they had been an aberration. China’s traditional foreign policy was always most concerned with its territorial borders, and the empire turned inward for another six centuries. But goods went out—large quantities of Chinese porcelains were exported to the Middle East and the African East coast—and ivory came in.
China needed it, whether it was fresh tusks from Africa or mammoth tusks from Russia. In the late Ming Dynasty (1644) elephants were still found in Yunnan, Guangdong, Guangxi, and Hunan provinces, but their numbers were on the wane, pressed by the growing human population and the spread of agriculture that came with it. Unlike India and the countries of Southeast Asia, where elephants played an important role in religion and culture, in China they were widely regarded as crop-ravaging nuisances. But their tusks were highly desirable; ivory carving flourished during the Ming Dynasty, aided by increased availability from a variety of sources and widespread patronage for decorative arts. During the late Ming, the city of Zhangzhou in Fujian Province on the eastern coast enjoyed relative freedom from government trade constraints imposed on other centers. It had close ties with the Philippines, and some think that Chinese craftsmen there were also encouraged by the Spanish to provide Christian icons for the European market. That may have been the impetus for the ivory figure carving tradition of the late Ming and early Qing dynasties (1644–1911), which focused primarily on divinities associated with Buddhism and Taoism but also on other auspicious deities and legendary heroes.
During the Qing, ivory artisans turned out functional objects as well—table screens, wrist rests, intricately embellished brush holders, and other accoutrements needed for a scholar’s desk. No material other than ivory permitted the minutely detailed and precise carving undertaken to satisfy the Chinese fascination for miniature worlds inspired by Taoist notions of paradise and the Buddhist ideal of “seeing the world in a seed.”
Ivory retained its long-standing aura as a material fit for royal delectation. The twelve-leaf silk album The Pursuit of Pleasure in the Course of the Seasons, made for Emperor Qianlong (1736–95) by Chen Mei, one of his court painters, addressed the emperor’s dual passions: his garden and his women. The coy depictions of court beauties promenading in the imperial gardens so touched the emperor that he commissioned a more permanent duplicate on twelve facing ivory leaves inlaid with jade and gold by five famous artists; the ivory ground, naturally, needed no coloration to depict flesh. (Qianlong apparently also ordered up a more graphic version as a personal pillow book—sex manual—for the instruction of his consorts.) With these kinds of distractions, it’s no wonder that when Lord Macartney’s delegation arrived at the Qing court in 1792 to discuss a commercial treaty with Britain they were told to go away.
Chinese ivory carving proceeded on its own track, reaching even greater technical refinement with the famous “devil’s-work balls,” intricate carvings of concentric balls within balls, a specialty of Guangzhou (Canton). These puzzle pieces captivated European viewers, who wondered how such surfaces could be carved, one inside the other. It was, of course, a matter of infinite patience. Conical holes had to be bored into a sphere of ivory, and then tiny, sharp, angled cutting tools were painstakingly worked in the holes to free up the inner sphere and then each successive sphere; finally, they were all incised with patterns in a similarly probing, maniacally obsessive fashion. European fascination with these objects helped inspire entirely new methods of working in ivory.
LACKING INDIGENOUS ELEPHANTS, the Japanese were late to ivory. They may have first become familiar with it in the form of carvings imported from China in the sixth century. By the seventh and eighth centuries ivory had been adopted by the elite as a precious material for sword scabbards, official emblems, name seals, Go pieces, lids of tea caddies, and plectra to play the samisen. By the sixteenth century a steady, if small, supply of raw, unworked ivory was being brought into Japan (most likely from China), although shipments must have been affected after 1639 when trade was restricted, ports were closed to most foreigners, and the Japanese themselves were forbidden to travel under pain of death.
Not surprisingly, the ivory carving of the period was centered on domestic objects, primarily for the wealthy. There were the expected combs, fans, boxes, and the like, but ivory was also a favored material for functional accessories of kimono dress. In the Edo (or Tokugawa period, 1603–1867) kimonos were common. Women carried small items in their sleeves; men overcame the lack of pockets by tying personal items to cords tucked up under the kimono sash and kept from slipping down by means of a toggle. Among the paraphernalia that might be attached were medicine and writing kits, tobacco pouches, money purses, pipe cases, flints, fans, and knives. The complete ensemble consisted of the sagemono (suspended object), ojime (cord fastener), and netsuke (the toggle).
The making of netsuke—miniature sculptures with holes that allowed them to be threaded on cords—became an art form in itself, stimulated by exacting sumptuary laws then in effect that set out strict dress codes for each social class, from aristocrats on down. Merchants, who were constrained in the ways they were permitted to flaunt their wealth, turned to netsuke, which were considered an acceptable form of display. Ivory, like the rare woods and horn also used, was ideal for this purpose—luxurious, but not on the level of the gems and jewelry forbidden to the nonaristocratic rich. Netsuke makers were pushed to test their skills by carving ever more complex items from a single piece of ivory. The range of subjects was vast: demigods, urban scenes, bugs and slugs, fishes and foxes, mythological monsters with wiggling tongues, grotesque hermits and elaborate erotic couplings, a skull with a snake crawling through the eye socket. Netsuke were appreciated for their auspicious references, beauty, and humor, and above all the sheer technical skill of various master carvers.
The Japanese were captivated by the possibilities of the material; a few centuries later they would become the biggest consumers of ivory in the world.
CERTAIN USES OF ivory—combs, thrones, figurines—crop up in every culture and period. Conceptually, the way ivory entrenches itself in the imagination of various cultures follows its own well-worn set of tracks: its color makes it both a religious and a secular symbol of purity and perfection; its rarity and expense make it a marker of luxury and wealth. In European and Asian contexts, the literary counterpart to the sculptor’s interest in its fleshy sensuality has long been ivory’s use as a metaphor for pale, flawless skin. Shakespeare reached for the comparison in The Rape of Lucrece (“her breasts, like ivory globes circled with blue”). By the eighteenth century in Europe it had turned into a corporeal commonplace, routinely applied to faces, fingers, shoulders, thighs, and finally other body parts as well. In John Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1749), the heroine gushes over the “maypole” her lover brings to the coital fray (“such a length, such a breadth of animated ivory!”).
In Europe, ivory’s cluster of associations firmly fixed the importance of the material in its own social and conceptual sphere. Ideas about the elephant were also developing, but in an almost completely separate realm of discourse in which ivory figured little. In his Historie of Foure-Footed Beastes (London, 1607), English parson and naturalist Edward Topsell says of elephants:
There is no creature among al the Beasts of the world which hath so great and ample demonstration of the power and wisdome of almighty God as the Elephant: both for proportion of body and disposition of spirit; and it is admirable to behold, the industry of our auncient forefathers, and noble desire to benefit us their posterity, by serching into the qualities of every Beast, to discover what benefits or harmes may come by them to mankind: having never beene afraid either of the Wildest, but they tamed them; the fiercest, but they ruled them; and the greatest, but they also set upon them. Witnesse for this part the Elephant, being like a living Mountain in quantity & outward appearance, yet by them so handled, as no little dog became more serviceable and tractable.
The Asian and African elephants that were brought to Europe in the seventeenth century drew huge audiences and reinforced these admiring views. One was taken to Italy and was drawn by Bernini; another was displayed in the menagerie at Versailles (where it dipped bread into buckets of soup) and still more (from Samarkand) were shown at the court of the czars in Russia. By 1850 some fifty pachyderms had gone on view before transfixed crowds in Europe.
AFTER A PERIOD in which ivory carving in Europe seemed wedded to slavish imitation of other art forms, it came to life again in the baroque and reached dizzying levels of virtuosity. Various centers in Germany and Dieppe in France were the engines behind the revitalization of the craft in the early 1600s. A series of inspired carvers combined the refinement of Renaissance modeling with the emotional engagement and grandiose passions of the painting of the period (think Rubens) in a judicious choice of forms: small statuary, medallions, lavish furniture. They even began to sign some of their creations. The soft, satiny surface of ivory was put to striking use in portrait busts and relief medallions by artists such as David Le Marchand (1674–1726), an expatriate Huguenot who fled France for Edinburgh and then London. He developed a well-deserved reputation for creating a sense of monumentality in his small ivories, and Queen Anne, George I, Isaac Newton, Christopher Wren, and Samuel Pepys all sat for him.
Ignaz Elhafen (1658–1715), who worked primarily in Germany, was only one of many ivory-carving masters. His The Death of Cleopatra relief (ca. 1700) in the Victoria and Albert is a dazzling masterwork: picture looking at a large cylindrical section of tusk cut in half lengthwise and oriented to form a panorama of the last of the Ptolemies in her final agonies, all carved in deep relief within the tusk’s concave inner form. Cleopatra—who had once filled a tomb with ivory—is shown nearly nude and collapsing; tiny asps twine about her breasts, while no fewer than seven attending maids in equal states of undress prostrate themselves or writhe in despair. (All this, mind you, plus drapery, pottery, and foliage, in a piece seven and a half by four inches.) The material’s own monochrome milkiness softens a scene that would have been garish in full color while bringing to mind the timeless whiteness of ancient marble friezes.
Some of Elhafen’s other ivories, like those of his compatriot carvers, explore opposite extremes. At one pole is the marmoreal and rather chilly perfection of his Venus, and at the other the visual excess of his The Rape of the Sabines, a fat tankard encircled by a conglomeration of mythical figures that dissolves into a rather confectionary composition once you look past the superb technique.
In the late eighteenth century, Europe’s last major artistic efflorescence in ivory ends. From then on the sculptural use of it will lapse back into a decidedly minor role. Ivory itself took on a different kind of importance.
PETER THE GREAT had been given Chinese silk hangings as an imperial gift from the Kangxi emperor (the mammoth-curious one) after settling a treaty. The designs were apparently not to his taste, but the czar found a use for them: in 1711 he bestowed seven pieces on Cosimo III de’ Medici, in return for an ivory turning machine he wanted. He’d had one since 1698, and even ordered up two more six years later. Eventually he had dozens of these lathes, housed in an imperial workshop—the czar’s Cabinet of Mechanical Equipment—manned by journeymen and master craftsmen, including the innovative machine builder Andrei K. Nartov.
Why? Peter the Great was a ruler with a passion for putting on a workman’s apron, picking up a chisel, and spinning a piece of tusk on a mandrel, sometimes far into the night. Following Nartov’s designs, the czar turned out “goblets, candlesticks, measuring instruments and sundials, openwork pyramids with polygonal stars inside, scepters, columns, engraved snuffboxes and polygons, all made of ivory.” He wasn’t unique in his passion. For some two hundred years, as historian Klaus Maurice has detailed, the crowned heads of Europe—in Austria, Bavaria, Saxony, Italy, France, Denmark—spent untold hours at their lathes turning ivory.
The lathe was not a new invention in Peter’s time. Its basic form had been around as long as the bow drill and the potter’s wheel, to name two other complex tools known to the ancient world. It was common in Rome and used in medieval times. Cutting a piece of wood, for example, into the desired shape by rotating it while applying a cutting tool was far more efficient than simply carving it. The later addition of the flywheel, which allowed whatever was being worked on to whirl continuously in one direction, was a huge advance. By the seventeenth century lathes had evolved into complicated marvels of metal and wood, full of intricate gearing and articulated parts. Lathes became “rose engines”—ones that had attachments for producing tricky circular and elliptical patterns. The development of adjustable cams that allowed the workpiece to be set at an angle or shuttle back and forth while being worked meant that all kinds of difficult shapes could be tackled.
It might seem surprising that these inventions didn’t immediately jump-start the industrial revolution. At the time they were built, however, what they could do for the production of goods wasn’t appreciated. They were regarded as useful for the amusement and elucidation of princes. Part of what the aristocracy was then taught (riding, fencing, dancing) went back to feudal times, and part of it (religion, study of the classics) was thought essential mental furniture for rulers. Increasingly, some practical grasp of art and science and manufacturing was deemed a useful addition to court education. Happily for them, the nobility could dabble in activities others worked at for a living. In fact, it was a marker of their class that they could acquire knowledge without the need for financial gain. Turning was an ideal way for fickle princes, beset by numerous distractions, to gain a sense of accomplishment, thanks to the assistance of a machine. And, given its rarity, costliness, and uniformity, what more princely material to play with than ivory? It seemed predestined for the lathe.
The courts of Europe embraced turning and filled their private “wonder cabinets” with hundreds of their own signed creations. Princes first tried simple receptacles that looked like the finials of fat bedposts, then progressed to ever more whirled and twirled ivory fantasies. “Art ennobles the ivory and the originator, Maximilian, Duke of Bavaria, ennobles the art, in the year 1608” reads the inscription on the bottom of his elaborate ivory candlestick. Everything about turning appealed to the nobility. Even the way the lathes could be set up to follow a predetermined course that would lead to an inexorable result seemed to replicate the apparatus of a well-ordered state under absolute monarchy.
As a prescribed noble activity it backfired somewhat: it was too successful. By the mid-eighteenth century advisers at courts began to consider turning a pastime just as idle as the traditional ones. “One must be patient if documents requiring signature remain unsigned for months because of a mistress, a foreign painter, or even a lathe, but is it laudable?” lamented a diplomat.
As might be expected there were always master artisans connected to these court workshops who were available to help the nobility spin their creations. Marcus Heiden, who served under several Saxon dukes and did turning of his own, wrote of his dizzily towering ivory chef d’ouevre—a drinking vessel balanced on an elephant and topped with a ship under full sail—which he began in 1637 and finished two years later. According to Maurice, “Heiden never mentions or describes technical difficulties in his book, other than that the ivory tusk was unusually large and heavy and had been selected in Amsterdam from 300,000 tusks!” The figure is surely an exaggeration, but no doubt an enormous amount of ivory was brought into Europe for the pleasure of princes.
In the end, ivory turning was no more than a courtly rehearsal for the nineteenth-century transformation of ivory carving from an individual undertaking to mass production. Two Frenchmen in particular helped that process along.
WHEN NICHOLAS GROLLIER de Servière (1596–1689), a military engineer who designed movable bridges and similar machinery and served in Flanders, Germany, Italy, and Constantinople, retired to his estate in Lyon he busied himself with the construction of models and machines. These included a “reading wheel” that consisted of a circular drum of shelves, each of which held an open book, a perspective machine for artists, floating bridges, water pumps, and regulator clocks. De Servière was also among the leading turners of his time, creating astonishingly unlikely forms on lathes of his own design.
These pièces excentriques, as he called them, “tended to be tall and precariously thin, like the circular steps that are attached to each other by tiny stems, looking like a pile of coins held together by bits of toothpicks, but all turned from a single tusk.” They included a series of illusionistic carved ivory balls within balls, far beyond what the Chinese had ever attempted with their handcraft, some with needle-sharp points and fleursde-lis that baffle the imagination as to how they were carved. But de Servière’s interest in turning was not centered on the creation of ivory fripperies. For him his pièces were important demonstrations of what could be accomplished through mechanical design, which inevitably focused attention on the lathes that made these fantastic forms possible.
Charles Plumier, a young friar from Marseille, was among those who came to goggle at de Servière’s ivory figures and particularly the machines that made them. In his youth Plumier had been “hypnotized” by the lathe. He wrote a classic and influential work on the subject of turning, L’Art de Tourner en Perfection (1701), which revealed the construction of every lathe he could examine, some of whose blueprints were closely guarded secrets. Plumier’s treatise managed to sum up the known technology of turning, thereby laying the groundwork for machine-assisted manufacturing. By the middle of the eighteenth century, interest had shifted from the ornamental products of the lathe—which had always been confined to singular individual objects—to the development of the machines themselves.
Once lathes capable of cutting metal had been harnessed to the production of parts that could be assembled, the possibility of the modern factory was born. The lathe, in all its variants, became one of the vital machines of the industrial revolution, which was shortly to transform the world—and, ironically, the manufacture of ivory products.