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Turned-Ivory Piece with Star in Polyhedron
ca. 1600
German, probably Dresden
These bizarre objects perfectly encapsulate the intricate aesthetic favored by seventeenth-century connoisseurs of turned ivory. The larger, turned by the famed artisan Lorenz Zick, has a hollow sphere containing paintings of Saint Francis and the Virgin Mary, visible through the opening when the cords are pulled. The smaller, with its delicate tilted disks, star, and dodecahedrons, incorporates several forms that marked mastery over the lathe. |