Abstract
The ivory casket in the Palazzo Venezia, Rome, depicting an emperor and empress blessed by Christ and a selection of scenes from the life of David, is one of the few surviving major works from the period immediately after a centuries-long hiatus in Constantinopolitan ivory-carving. It has been given a wide variety of dates and places of origin, but it is identified here as a work made for the emperor Leo VI and assigned to 898 or 900, a little more than a decade after the “scepter tip” in Berlin, also supposedly made for the emperor. The circumstances under which the casket’s inscriptions and figures were partially recarved have contributed not a little to misunderstanding of the original state of the object. This reworking, it is suggested, was undertaken in Rome, in the circle of the Jesuit savant, Athanasius Kircher.
Original language | English (US) |
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Pages (from-to) | 77-87 |
Number of pages | 11 |
Journal | The Art Bulletin |
Volume | 70 |
Issue number | 1 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Mar 1 1988 |
All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes
- Visual Arts and Performing Arts
- History