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IVORY has been used for making works of art from Biblical times onwards. The comparative ease with which it can be manipulated and its durable nature has always attracted craftsmen of all nations, and the latter quality has led to the preservation of a surprisingly large number of ancient examples. While the principal pieces made prior to the seventeenth century are now in museums, occasional examples appear on the market and fetch high prices. They are usually pieces with religious significance: leaves of small folding altar-pieces (diptyches) carved finely with scenes from the life of Christ or with the history of a saint. More within the reach of the collector are figures. If European they date mostly from the mid-seventeenth century, but are later when Oriental. German carvers were prolific workers, and their output was rivaled only by that of Flanders where the sculptor Francois Duquesnoy (known as II Fiammingo) influenced many craftsmen. J. C. L. Luck made figures in ivory and also modeled in porcelain for the Meissen and other factories, and a number of porcelain groups and figures owe their origin to him and his fellow craftsmen in ivory. The range of articles made from ivory is very wide: large tankards heavily carved with numerous mythological figures and set off with elaborate silver mounts, snuff-boxes, tobacco-rasps for grating the 'noxious weed' to make snuff, candlesticks, and both religious and secular figures and groups, to name only a few. Both the Chinese and Japanese were skilful carvers of ivory, and the former had two main centers of production: Pekin and Canton. At the latter were made many of the pieces, which have been described as being 'more distinguished for bizarre complexity of pattern than for artistic feeling'. To that category belong the familiar 'concentric balls'; those ingenious collections of balls, loosely one inside the other and all of them painstakingly carved and pierced from a single piece of ivory. The carvings made by the Japanese are well known for their meticulous detail, often carried to extremes. They vary in size from several inches in height to the miniature netsuke. The latter were used ceremonially to hold the inro (or small medicine box) suspended from the girdle of the kimono by a silk cord, and their design is infinitely varied. The finest are the work of men who specialized in making them and an exquisite finish matches the ingenuity of their design. German carvers were prolific workers; Chinese and Japanese were skilful carvers of ivory. Silver mounts, snuffboxes, tobacco-rasps, candlesticks, and both religious and secular figures and groups are some of the articles that were carved out of the ivory.
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