Carved in relief, mounted in a silver pendant.

…; from the dealer S. Sarluis, the Hague, acquired by Victor de Stuers (1843-1916) for the Nederlandsch Museum voor Geschiedenis en Kunst, The Hague, 1876; transferred to the museum, 1885

Object number: BK-NM-3091-A

The present ivory relief shows the Virgin sitting on a low wall, approached by the Three Magi presenting their gifts to the Christ Child seated upright on his mother’s knees. Behind them, Joseph sits crouched beneath the stable’s open-trussed roof.

The object was initially regarded as a French work from the mid-fifteenth century.¹¹A. Pit, Catalogus van de beeldhouwwerken in het Nederlandsch Museum voor geschiedenis en kunst te Amsterdam, coll. cat. Amsterdam 1904, no. 135 and A. Pit, Catalogus van de beeldhouwwerken in het Nederlandsch Museum voor geschiedenis en kunst te Amsterdam, coll. cat. Amsterdam 1915, no. 112. Leeuwenberg, however, believed it was produced in southern Germany at the end of the fifteenth century based on a somewhat similar (though mirror image) scene on a mother-of-pearl medallion in Cologne.²²Cologne, Museum of Applied Arts (MAKK), inv. no. B280, see B. Klesse et al., Die Sammlung Clemens, coll. cat. Cologne (Kunstgewerbemuseum) 1963, no. 402. Stylistically, however, the two objects are significantly different: despite the harder material, the carving of the Cologne relief is more fluidly executed and the figures’ proportions decidedly slenderer. The style of the Amsterdam ivory is in fact more akin to a group of (Northern?) Netherlandish ivories produced circa 1480-1500,³³See F. Scholten, ‘Een Nederlandse ivoren pax uit de Late Middeleeuwen’, Bulletin van het Rijksmuseum 52 (2004), pp. 2-23, esp. figs. 1, 9-14. among them two paxes held in the Rijksmuseum’s collection (BK-NM-630 and BK-2003-6). Characteristic of these ivories is the scenes’ compactness, the rather plump facial and body types, and the wide, angular folds of the robes. Another ivory medallion from the same period, also likely produced in the Low Countries, is preserved in the Louvre.⁴⁴Paris, Musée du Louvre, inv. no. OA136, see P. Malgouyres, Ivoires de la Renaissance et des temps modernes: La collection du musée du Louvre, coll. cat. Paris 2010, no. 50. The silver mount framing the Amsterdam ivory is non-original: based on the decoration with acanthus leaves, it can be dated to the second half of the seventeenth century.⁵⁵My thanks to Dirk-Jan Biemond for sharing this information, RMA. While the medallion’s original function can therefore no longer be determined, hand-held objects of this kind were typically used for private devotion.

Bieke van der Mark, 2025

J. Leeuwenberg with the assistance of W. Halsema-Kubes, Beeldhouwkunst in het Rijksmuseum, coll. cat. Amsterdam 1973, no. 791, with earlier literature

B. van der Mark, 2025, 'anonymous, Medallion with the Adoration of the Magi, Southern Germany, c. 1480 - c. 1500', in F. Scholten and B. van der Mark (eds.), European Sculpture in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: https://data.rijksmuseum.nl/20036198