Ivory
Carvings and objects made from elephant tusks and other animal teeth, a material now largely protected by trade bans.
155 works · 9 related artists
About
Ivory is dense, creamy and fine-grained, so it can be carved in minute detail and polished to a soft glow. Most historical ivory comes from elephant tusks, though walrus, hippopotamus and narwhal teeth were also used. One of the oldest known figurative sculptures, the Lion Man from Hohlenstein-Stadel in Germany, roughly 40,000 years old, is carved from mammoth ivory.
Late Roman and Byzantine artists made ivory diptychs and caskets, and Gothic workshops in Paris carved devotional figures that follow the curve of the tusk. Sapi carvers in present-day Sierra Leone made elaborate saltcellars for Portuguese patrons around 1500, and the Kingdom of Benin produced carved tusks and pendant masks. In the Art Deco period Demétre Chiparus and Ferdinand Preiss combined ivory with bronze in small figures. International trade in new elephant ivory has been banned since 1990. Look for the cross-hatched Schreger lines visible on cut ends of elephant ivory.
