The Ivories of Salerno

Solomon made a great throne of ivory, inspiring ivory-sheathed imperial thrones, altars, and episcopal pulpits throughout the Middle Ages. In Northern Europe, elephant ivory was hard to find and was often replaced by ersatz substitutes, taken from unicorn horns (the description used by enterprising Vikings to glibly palm off narwhal tusks) or walrus tusks. In southern Italy, however, especially in the maritime cities that traded regularly with Africa, ivory was relatively plentiful. Indeed, it is the purest dentine of the African elephant that serves as the medium for an unrivaled masterpiece of the carver’s art, the so-called Salerno Ivories: some seventy panels illustrating both the Old and New Testaments, from Creation to Pentecost. With a surprising gift for illustration, long-forgotten craftsmen enriched the Sacred Stories with details ranging from the anecdotal to the realistic, showing carpenters hammering together the Ark and, in the section devoted to the New Testament, the crowded Mediterranean cityscapes of their contemporary world, with highly recognizable skylines from the Byzantine or Muslim Levant.