In order to circumvent slow and costly land routes, Mediterranean merchants established a new bulk-shipping route in the second quarter of the thirteenth century. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the ivory trade was closely linked to the international markets that supplied dyestuffs to the textile industries of northern Europe. Courtly and ecclesiastical inventories of the period further record the possessions of institutions and individuals, allowing the identification of some specific objects in the pages of the past and providing a fuller picture of the place of ivory carvings among other types of luxury goods, such as textiles, illuminated manuscripts, jewelry, and sumptuous plate for the table. From this we infer that the same carver might work in different media, adapting his skills as required. A specialized ivory-carving guild did not exist in the mid-thirteenth century, but a number of groups were licensed to sculpt images from a variety of materials, including stone, wood, ivory, and bone. The Parisian guild regulations, the Livre des Métiers, written by Étienne Boileau at the behest of King Louis IX in the 1260s, provides vital information about various craftsmen’s trades, including ivory carving in the Gothic period. These natural factors, along with the tapering conical shape of the tusk, limited the possible shapes an artist was able to fashion from a tusk. Artisans aimed to maximize the use of high-quality dentine on the interior while avoiding both the hollow pulp cavity and the drier material on the exterior, called cementum. The ivory used during the Gothic period was primarily from the African Savannah elephant, and not from the smaller Asian elephant from the Indian subcontinent. Ivory tusks are the elongated upper incisors of elephants and are composed of a collagen-infused material called dentine. The golden age of Gothic ivory carving spanned a century and a half, from about 1230 to 1380, at which point the supply of ivory to northern Europe again dwindled. Instead of a revival of earlier forms, however, the Gothic period saw the revival of a new range of ivory object types: statuettes and statuette groups for the church or the private home small paneled objects called diptychs (two panels), triptychs (three panels), and polyptychs (many panels) with scenes in low relief that unfold for private meditation and luxury objects for personal use, such as combs, mirror backs, writing tablets, and caskets. The supply of elephant tusks dwindled in the twelfth century, but when ivory reappeared in northern Europe in the mid-thirteenth century, artists and patrons quickly renewed the art of ivory carving. From the eight to twelfth centuries, during the Carolingian, Ottonian, and Romanesque periods, ivory was used largely in the creation of precious book covers objects used in the service of the church, ranging from holy water buckets to oliphants to reliquaries and ornamental plaques for ecclesiastical furniture. Elephant tusks-exotic, rare, and characterized by a pearly lustrous surface, were prized in medieval Europe for carving into luxurious objects.
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