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A rare North German table casket of amber and ivory, Danzig circa 1680
Description
- height 7cm, width 21.5cm, depth 16cm
Literature
Related Literature:
Otto Pelka, Bernstein, Berlin, 1920, pp. 87 – 91, for table cabinets, there dated late 17th and early 18th century
Georg Laue ed., Amber, Treasures for European Kunstkammern, Munich, 2006, cat. no. 30, a box in the form of a travelling chest, Danzig, circa 1680; cat. no. 40, a court mirror, described as Danzig, circa 1650
Catalogue Note
The present table casket, unusual in its form, relates most closely to table cabinets made in Danzig during the second half of the 17th century and the beginning of the 18th century. The combination of translucent and opaque, so-called “osseous” amber is characteristic, as is the inclusion of small ivory plaquettes, carved and pierced, usually placed on silver foil. Particularly fine is the carving of flowers on the inside of the translucent amber plaques, arranged around the hexagonal ivory plaquette. The subject, Eurydice and Orpheus does suggest that this casket may have been intended as a present of love, a “Minnekaestchen”.
Amber, a form of tree resin, has been utilized by mankind since pre-historic times to carve beads, charms and religious objects, often imbued with symbolic power. The Greeks knew amber as “elektron” and imported this precious substance from the Baltic region. By the 14th century amber guilds had been established along that coast, the 16th to 18th centuries saw the height of this particular art. The amber room, offered in 1716 as a gift by Friedrich Wilhelm I, King of Prussia to Czar Peter the Great, certainly is the most well-known work of art. Countless plaquettes of amber formed a mosaic applied to twenty-two panels that were installed in 1755 in Ekatarininsky palace outside St. Petersburg.