Leaf from a Diptych with Scenes from the Life of Christ

This is the left side of a pair of hinged panels that fold like a booklet to protect the carved scenes within, a type of private devotional image called a diptych. The current panel represents two scenes from the narrative leading up to the death of Jesus on the cross. Above, Jesus rides into Jerusalem on a donkey to the acclaim of crowds, and below he prays in the garden of Gethsemane. The interior of the diptych is heavily painted. Paint highlights the vegetation, ground, and the lips, eyes, and hair of the figures, while adding pattern to the flat backdrop and the molded architectural elements that frame the action. Medieval ivories were frequently painted in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, but the heavy layer currently visible dates to the nineteenth century, when an interest in medieval polychromy led to a fad for retouching medieval sculptures. The exterior of the diptych is plain and smooth, with rounded edges and remnants of a hinge on the side where it connects to its facing panel, also in the Museum’s collection (acc. no. 17.190.291).

The framing motif of barbed quatrefoils demonstrates the thorough integration of contemporary stylistic trends into the repertoire of ivory carvers during the fourteenth century. Across Europe artists working in an array of materials settled on rows and columns of quatrefoils as a way to organize multi-part narratives into discreet, bracketed scenes, and the quatrefoil became embedded in Gothic style as a way to isolate scenes within complex narratives. Barbed quatrefoils divide figural reliefs on the west façade of Amiens Cathedral, the North Portal of Rouen Cathedral, and the choir stalls of Cologne Cathedral. In the 1330’s, Nicola Pisano used this motif to subdivide the Passion Cycle that adorned the baptistry doors of the Baptistry of Saint John in Florence. The motif was also popular in painting. Jean le Noir deployed it to organize the illuminations on the pages of The Hours of Jean le Noir, and later in the century the Limbourg Brothers would use it in their Little Hours of Jean de Berry and The Historiated Bible of Jean de Berry. Although ivory carvers more frequently used registers of gothic arcades to subdivide the actions on diptychs and boxes, the current panel is not the only example in which they used the barbed quatrefoil to nod to contemporary trends in deluxe sculpture, painting, and metalwork. Examples of ivory carvings divided by the motif may be seen in the collection (acc. no. 17.190.177), The Louvre (inv. nos. OA 4089; OA 10012), The British Museum (inv. no. 1856,0623.107), the Maximilianmuseum of Augsburg (inv. no. 1783), The Skulpturensammlung und Museum für Byzantinische Kunst in Berlin (inv. no. 681), and the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge (inv. no. M.21-1917), The Museum Mayer van den Bergh (inv. no. MMB.0446), and the Musée du Cinquantenaire, Brussels (Inv. no. 3140).

Further Reading:

Paul Williamson, "Symbiosis Across Scale: Gothic Ivories and Sculpture in Stone and Wood in the Thirteenth Century," in Images in Ivory: Precious Objects from the Gothic Age (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997): pp. 38-45.

Danielle Gaborit-Chopin, "Diptych with Scenes from the Passion of Christ and the Life of the Virgin, in Images in Ivory: Precious Objects from the Gothic Age (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997): pp. 170-173.


Catalogue Entry by Scott Miller, Andrew W. Mellon Curatorial and Research Collections Specialist, Department of Medieval Art and The Cloisters, 2020–2022

J. Pierpont Morgan (American), London and New York (until 1917)