Plaque from a casket with the story of Susanna: two handmaids with a dog

In the second half of the fourteenth century, in central and northern Italy, bone from animals such as oxen, horses, and pigs was regularly used instead of ivory to make precious artifacts. Individual carved and polished bone segments were placed side by side and fixed onto a wooden support. This process, which made it possible to generate authentically narrative cycles, was first invented by the Workshop of the Nailed Figures, and was later used by a workshop founded in Florence and subsequently extended to Venice by the Florentine merchant Baldassarre Ubriachi or Embriachi. This workshop was headed by the “master of bonework” Giovanni di Jacopo, but it continued production even after his death and at least until the 1530s (Schlosser 1899; Tomasi 2016a; Chiesi 2018). To a late phase of Embriachi production, that is to around the 1520s or 1530s, belongs a series of caskets that, through their stylistic and formal innovation, ushered in a new phase for the workshop (Tomasi 2001, pp. 13–14). A lid with the story of Susanna, now held in London at the British Museum (Dalton 1909, p. 139, no. 404), is representative of this moment and, because of the story’s narrative completeness, is considered a sort of prototype for several later examples(Martini 1993b; Tomasi 2001, p. 13). This new phase inaugurated by the Embriachi workshop became characteristic of the activity of a workshop (or an individual carver) that Elena Merlini has identified as the “first workshop of the Susanna stories” (Merlini 1989, p. 276). This workshop’s production was essentially limited to the making of caskets presenting the popular biblical episode of Susanna being spied on by two elders as she is bathing. The two elders, after blackmailing the chaste woman, were unmasked as slanderers by Daniel and condemned to stoning (in the Catholic Bible, Daniel 13, 1–64). The theme was used for wedding caskets as an exhortation to virtue for the new bride. Formally, plaques with a marked convexity to one or two figures are considered typical of these works; Embriachi examples accommodated up to three figures. Another element that distinguishes these from a strictly embryo-archaic conception is the absence of naturalistic inserts. Here, in fact, the background is completely smooth and the tree-lined mountain backdrops are absent. Even the architectural elements, which were so popular in Baldassarre Ubriachi’s time, are contracted here into what appears to be more of a decorative frame than an urban background. Among the most representative caskets of this stylistic current are the ones preserved in the Galleria Estense in Modena (Merlini 1989, p. 272) and the Pinacoteca Tosio-Martinengo in Brescia (Merlini 1989, p. 273). However, the characteristic style of the works assigned to the “first workshop of the stories of Susanna” remains rather elusive—the stylistic fluctuations of the various pieces that make up the group could be explained in light of the fact that there were different carvers who worked on the same theme at the same time (Merlini 1989, p. 276; Martini 1993a, p. 31). The two female figures carved in the Palazzo Venezia plaque, who are clearly Susanna’s two handmaids because of their long robes with fluted, parallel folds and stiff cowl hoods, are very similar to those of the London casket mentioned above. A chronology around the 1420s or 1430s would explain the specific traits of the Palazzo Venezia fragment when the final Embriachi production phase coincided with the emergence of other workshops that sought to bring the Embriachi style more into line with modern tastes. The rounded lid of the Palazzo Venezia plaque, on the other hand, as has been determined for other similar examples (Davies 2014), could be dated to the nineteenth century.

Giampaolo Distefano

Entry published on 12 February 2025

Good. 

von Schlosser Julius, Die Werkstatt der Embriachi in Venedig, in «Jahrbuch der Kunsthistorischen Sammlungen des Allerhöchsten Kaiserhauses», 20, 1899, pp. 220-282;
Dalton Ormonde Maddock, Catalogue of the Ivory Carvings of the Christian Era with Examples of Mohammedan Art and Carvings in Bone in the Department of British and Mediaeval Antiquities and Ethnography of the British Museum, London 1909;
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 (p. 34);
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;
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Martini Luciana, in Martini Luciana (a cura di), Oggetti in avorio e osso nel Museo Nazionale di Ravenna. Sec. XV-XIX, Ravenna 1993, pp. 95-98, n. 136 (Martini 1993b);
Tomasi Michele, La bottega degli Embriachi, Firenze 2001;
Davies Glynn, in Davies Glynn, Williamson Paul (a cura di), Medieval Ivory Carvings. 1200-1550, II, London 2014, pp. 775-777, n. 257;
Tomasi Michele, in Castronovo Simonetta, Crivello Fabrizio, Tomasi Michele (a cura di), La bottega degli Embriachi e gli oggetti in legno e osso in Italia fra Tre e Quattrocento, in Avori medievali. Collezioni del Museo Civico d’Arte Antica di Torino, Savigliano 2016, pp. 151-153;
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.