Plaque from a casket set with story of Susanna: two men sitting

Carvings using the bones of animals such as oxen, horses, and pigs as a substitute for the rarer elephant tusk was practiced in central and northern Italy in the second half of the fourteenth century in a number of workshops whose precise location remains unknown at present. Individual polished, carved bone segments were placed side by side and fixed onto a wooden support. This process, which made it possible to obtain figurative cycles, was first deployed by the so-called Workshop of the Nailed Figures, which later sprang up in Florence and then in Venice thanks to the Florentine merchant Baldassarre Ubriachi or Embriachi. This workshop was headed by the “master of bonework” Giovanni di Jacopo but continued production even after his death, at least up until the 1530s (Schlosser 1899; Tomasi 2016a; Chiesi 2018). At the same time, other workshops were founded that, while using the same technique, introduced stylistic and iconographic innovations. The bone plaque presented here fully illustrates the extent of these changes. It was undertaken in the context of what studies indicate as the “second workshop of the Susanna stories,” a workshop named after the famous biblical theme it replicated on various caskets (Merlini 1989, pp. 276–277). Compared to the so-called first workshop of the Susanna stories—whose works were characterized by bone carvings with one or at most two characters, a broad spatial scope, and a lack of naturalistic references—this workshop was distinguished by idiosyncratic peculiarities. Technically, it made use of broad, convex bones, articulated base moldings, while stylistically specializing in carving characters with strong physical features such as large eyes and pronounced jaws, a marked robustness of body, hands, and feet, and drapery with stiff, graphic folds. These specific details, initially classified as technical limits (Merlini 1989, p. 276), were later “rehabilitated” by Luciana Martini, who saw them as the artist’s stylistic “modernization” in the light of Mantegna culture (Martini 1993a, p. 33). This important reflection also has significant repercussions on the chronology and location of this workshop, whose activity would therefore be concentrated in the third quarter of the fifteenth century in the Padua area (Martini 1993a, p. 33). The Palazzo Venezia artifact was originally part of a casket depicting the biblical story of Susanna; the two old men in the Roman fragment must have represented the two old men intent on spying on the chaste bride while she is bathing, as seen in a casket depicting the same subject in the Museo Nazionale in Ravenna (Martini 1993b). There are other similarities with the Roman fragment. The same facial types are can be seen in a casket from the Diocesan Museum in Cologne (Martini 1993a, p. 32) and a fragment reused on a casket from the Museo di Palazzo Venezia (inv. W 972 bis), while the same way of rendering the hands and drapery can be seen in a bone carving from the Museo Nazionale di Ravenna (Martini 1993c). In this plate, moreover, as in the Roman plate, there is a characteristic way of depicting background vegetation with “v” incisions. The second workshop of the Susanna stories was not limited to making caskets illustrating the biblical tale from which it takes its name—in a fragment of a mirror frame in the Museo Civico d’Arte Antica in Turin with the God of Love, the hand of the same carver can be identified (Tomasi 2016b) so it, too, is clearly related to the plaque discussed here.

Giampaolo Distefano

Good.

von Schlosser Julius, Die Werkstatt der Embriachi in Venedig, in «Jahrbuch der Kunsthistorischen Sammlungen des Allerhöchsten Kaiserhauses», 20, 1899, pp. 220-282;
Bernardini Giorgio, Il nuovo Museo di Palazzo Venezia. Arte Bizantina - Oggetti in osso e in avorio, in «Rassegna d’arte», XVII, 1917, pp. 25-44;
Merlini Elena, La “Bottega degli Embriachi” e i cofanetti eburnei fra Trecento e Quattrocento: una proposta di classificazione, in «Arte cristiana», 76, 1989, pp. 267-282;
Martini Luciana, Alcune osservazioni sulla produzione di cofanetti "embriacheschi" e sulla loro storiografia, in Martini Luciana (a cura di), Oggetti in avorio e osso nel Museo Nazionale di Ravenna. Sec. XV-XIX, Ravenna 1993, pp. 20-34 (Martini 1993a);
Martini Luciana, in Martini Luciana (a cura di), Oggetti in avorio e osso nel Museo Nazionale di Ravenna. Sec. XV-XIX, Ravenna 1993, pp. 98-100n. 140, (Martini 1993b);
Martini Luciana, in Martini Luciana (a cura di), Oggetti in avorio e osso nel Museo Nazionale di Ravenna. Sec. XV-XIX, Ravenna 1993, pp. 100-101, n. 143 (Martini 1993c);
Tomasi Michele, La bottega degli Embriachi e gli oggetti in legno e osso in Italia fra Tre e Quattrocento, in Castronovo Simonetta, Crivello Fabrizio, Tomasi Michele (a cura di), Avori medievali. Collezioni del Museo Civico d’Arte Antica di Torino, Savigliano 2016, pp. 151-153, (Tomasi 2016a);
Tomasi Michele, in Castronovo Simonetta, Crivello Fabrizio, Tomasi Michele (a cura di), Avori medievali. Collezioni del Museo Civico d’Arte Antica di Torino, Savigliano 2016, n. 52, pp. 206-207, (Tomasi 2016b);
Chiesi Benedetta, Gli Embriachi e le botteghe dell’Italia settentrionale fra Tre e Quattrocento, in Ciseri Ilaria (a cura di), Gli avori del Museo Nazionale del Bargello, Milano 2018, pp. 334-335.