The function and status of carved ivory in Carolingian culture.

Abstract

This study is an investigation into the semiotics of carved ivory objects in the Frankish Empire of the ninth and early tenth centuries. It argues that a number of distinctive social practices involving ivory emerged in this period that made carved ivory a newly desirable category of art object, with culturally specific connotations. It attempts to uncover some of the codes of signification that are critical for understanding what medieval viewers (including ivory sculptors) brought to bear in their appraisal of ivory objects, and it offers a series of models for reading Carolingian ivories and for examining Carolingian texts that mention ivories. The first chapter examines inventories, preserved in estate-surveys, legal records of gifts, and narrative histories, that mention ivory, Cumulatively, these documents provide a clear indication of the qualities of ivory that Carolingians deemed defining and admirable, as well as information about ivories' place in an economy of gift-giving and exchange. The second chapter examines the ninth-century practice of re-using and re-carving ancient ivory plaques. It claims that, during this period, ivory was considered---and indeed valued as---a protean material, subject to mutations in its appearance and context. The third chapter explores the distinctive contributions of Carolingian ivory-carvers to the depiction of gospel narratives. Ivories served as the principal field for complex visual narration at this time; this chapter, through a discussion of specific narrative techniques, assesses the ways in which properties peculiar to the material of ivory interacted with the exigencies of story-telling. The final chapter serves as an historiographical epilogue to the previous three. It explores the moment in the nineteenth century when the category of ivory could be said to have been invented as an art-historical category. In so doing, it highlights the distinction between Carolingian notions of ivory and those assigned to ivory by modern art historians. This study also includes a list of inventories from the Carolingian period, a catalog of ivories recarved and reused in the Carolingian period, as well an <italic>excursus</italic> that explores what middle eastern sources from the ninth and tenth centuries tell us about the international ivory trade.