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. 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. 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, 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. 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. 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
