The Cornish town of Bodmin is not renowned for its collection of Islamic art. But inside the parish church of St Petroc, a remarkable object has lain quietly for almost a thousand years. It is an ivory casket delicately painted with birds and plants, made by craftsmen working within a Muslim tradition probably in Sicily. How did it get to Cornwall in the twelfth century? Where was it made and for what purpose? This is one of the subjects explored in the selection of papers originally presented at a conference in Berlin on the large group of painted ivory containers and their decorative schemes, now brought together in this beautifully edited and fully illustrated publication.
The ivory caskets and boxes are neither clearly Islamic nor Christian in their iconography. Haloed saints and priests are painted onto some of the boxes, while others are decorated with Arabic inscriptions and images of the ruler that are familiar to students of Fatimid art from nearby Egypt. Their ambiguous decoration carries through into the manufacture and use of the boxes – technically they seem to belong to an Islamic tradition, yet they survive largely in Christian church treasuries as containers for relics. This kind of object of material culture can easily fall between the gaps in academic scholarship because it fails to slot neatly into traditional art-historical classifications.
This publication is further evidence of a growing interest in such “hybrid” objects and in ivories in particular. Luxury ivories produced in the medieval Mediterranean have been the subject of several major studies in recent years. A fantastic two-volume edition of the Journal of the David Collection in Copenhagen was dedicated to the carved ivories of al-Andalus, arguably the high point of carved ivory production. The Gothic Ivories Online project at the Courtauld Institute offers a comprehensive and exemplary approach to the study of these objects – although sadly it does not include ivories from Islamic Spain or Sicily within its scope. The Salerno Ivories project at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence brings together a group of scholars from different backgrounds and perspectives to study a group of carved ivories combining Islamic, Byzantine and Latin features. A conference organized by SOAS at the Warburg Institute in June 2013 focused thoughts on the trade in ivory and how it may have influenced the production of luxury ivory goods in the early medieval period.
The key issues addressed here are those of patronage, place of production, consumption and original function, as well as the iconographic and technical relationship to the arts of everywhere from Byzantium to Egypt, Spain to Sicily and southern Italy. The volume of fifteen papers is divided into three sections – on manufacture, iconography and parallel currents in Islamic art – with an appendix of a catalogue of the ivories exhibited at the Museum für Islamische Kunst in Berlin in 2007.
The value of technical analysis is made clear in Anthony Cutler's meticulous study of how the objects were made and decorated. Despite the presence of typically Christian motifs on many of the caskets, he suggests that we should not infer the faith of the craftsmen from the decoration. Indeed he questions whether many of the images that have been interpreted as Christian saints (standing figures with haloes for example) should instead be understood as more generic figures. The statistic that only 3 per cent of the surviving caskets (that is five in total) carry specifically Christian iconography, is remarkable given the disproportionate attention this group receives in the literature.
Avinoam Shalem focuses on the decoration of the caskets and the aesthetic experience of the person examining the object. He looks at hidden decoration, on the undersides and insides of the caskets, suggesting that the artist treated these areas differently from the more visible panels. These hidden parts were spaces for the artist to experiment and explore fantastical ideas and motifs without constriction.
Mariam Rosser-Owen and Antony Eastmond explore new ways of looking at these caskets in their papers on a casket at the V&A and on the St Petroc casket respectively. They avoid traditional stylistic and iconographical comparisons which tend to lead to a discussion about Christian versus Muslim motifs, in favour of detailed studies of how the objects were made and how they might have been sold and dispersed.
Indeed the analysis of the production and consumption of the ivories in this volume indicates that the caskets were made in workshops that were independent of the twelfth-century royal Norman court of Roger II in Sicily. They seem to have been made for a speculative market in which they would have been constructed and even painted to order, before being sold on by individual merchants.
Objects move, and in the medieval Mediterranean world, they moved a lot. Textiles, ceramics, rock crystal and ivories were all traded and exchanged, greatly influencing decorative styles in the various production centres. The notion of a shared artistic language within a wider region and the movement of objects is well illustrated in Finbarr Barry Flood's contribution on Ghaznavid figural imagery and the circulation westward of manuscripts.
The volume's editor David Knipp rightly points out in his introduction that the term “Siculo Arabic ivories” is a misleading one. It suggests that this is a straightforward group of painted and gilded ivory containers made in Sicily by Muslim craftsmen. The papers in this volume reveal a much more complicated story, in which the identify of the craftsmen as Muslims is far from certain – in fact I would suggest that their religious faith is not particularly relevant. Perhaps a new term needs to be found to describe these objects, one which focuses on their Mediterranean origins rather than prioritizes the supposed faith or ethnic identity of their makers. Cutler argues convincingly that the term only distracts from the more interesting and productive questions about how, why and for whom the containers were made – questions which are comprehensively addressed in this impressive volume.
