Bead of rosary, memento mori, in ivory carved in the round. - Lot 251

Lot n° 251
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2000 - 3000 EUR
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Result : 2 800EUR
Bead of rosary, memento mori, in ivory carved in the round. - Lot 251
Bead of rosary, memento mori, in ivory carved in the round. Grain with two halves of the face: one half of the head of a dead man's corpse, with a camouflaged nose with wormwood on the cheek and hair ending in curved curls; the other half is a micranium with an upper jaw with incomplete dentition. Perforated through and through. Paris, workshop of Chicart Bailly ?, circa 1500/1530 Height: 4 cm - Width: 2.4 cm - Depth: 3.3 cm - Weight: 22 g Base Origin: Former Berkeley private collection in Spetchley Park, Worcestershire, England Several details of this rosary bead allow us to link it to the production of Chicart Bailly, ivory sculptor and Parisian merchant active at the turn of the 15th and 16th centuries. The production of this artist and his workshop was possible thanks to the discovery of an inventory after the death of "the honourable man Chicart Bailly, bourgeois of Paris and table merchant" preserved in the National Archives (Minutes of Guillaume Payen, 1533). This inventory sheds light on the activity of this sculptor, mentioned as a master in 1485 and deceased in 1533, who specialized in working with ivory, bone and precious woods. Many objects were inventoried after his death, combs, buckles among others, but above all an impressive number of rosaries and ivory beads of "patricians". The Metropolitan Museum of New York preserves a carved ivory rosary mounted in silver, one of the terminal rosary beads of which can be related to this one (inv. 17.190.306, fig.). This object, donated by Pierpont Morgan in 1917, is listed on the museum's online collections site as German, circa 1500-1520, while the catalogue for the 2017 exhibition at the Bowdoin College Museum mentions it as possibly being French or from the southern Netherlands, from the 1520s to the 1940s. With the treatment of the hair in small curved strands and the emphasis on macabre expressivity, it seems more likely according to the
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