IVORY also is one of the most valuable materials for the artist. It is easily cut and polished; the tone imparted to it by time is warm and mellow, while its grain enhances the beauty of the workmanship. Hence the ancients had fully recognised its claims, employing it not only for their valuable furniture, but also for sculpture on a larger scale, as shown by the chryselephantine Minerva that the Duc de Luynes has essayed to restore.

Egypt could scarcely have overlooked such a beautiful material, and we now know to what good account she turned it. Asia Minor also employed ivory in its objects of luxury, such as the hilts of its arms; and the collections in the Louvre have enabled us to admire the spirit breathed into their roaring lions by the statuaries of Nineveh and Khorsabad.

Amongst both the Romans and Greeks, ivory was used to make the elegant caskets (pyxis) in which the ladies kept their ornaments and various articles of the toilet. Of ivory were also the handles of the mirrors in which they studied the effect of their costume, or of the flabellum, or fan, with which they cooled the atmosphere around them. Some of these ancient works, still surviving in collections, show the advancement of the art, and account for the preservation in history of the names of the renowned "eborarii," P. Clodius Bromius, Q. Considius Eumolpus, P. Matrinius Eutyches and L. Plotinus Sabinus.

To a pyx, doubtless, belonged the charming carved bas-relief of two cupids, now in the cabinet of Baron Charles Davillier. The "applied" statuettes in the Cabinet of Medals were mostly intended for similar purposes or served as handles for various utensils.

Classic art, properly so called, such as still reflected the pure taste of the Greeks, had already been impaired in its transition to the Roman Empire. But a still more thorough transformation was brought about after the establishment of the Empire of the East. We have, so to say, a witness to the state of ivory carving at the time of the transition in the curious figure of the third or fourth century now in the Musee de Cluny. It still manifests a certain grandeur, and we thereby see that the spirit of the old style had not yet quite died out. Byzantine monuments, in which profuse ornamentation eclipses the correctness of design, are very numerous, the most interesting from the historic point of view being the Consular diptychs. These have the great advantage of bearing fixed dates, and of thus showing the state of the art at a precise moment. The Cabinet of Medals in the National Library possesses the oldest specimens of the kind. These leaves of carved ivory were offered by the new consul to his electors, that is, to the members of the Senate, or Conscript Fathers, who had conferred the office upon him. The consul was here most usually represented seated upon a throne supported by two lions, in one hand holding the map of the Circus (mappa circensis), in the other a sceptre surmounted by the busts of the reigning emperors. On these tablets were also carved the public games celebrated at his expense, as well as the presents distributed to the people, typified, for instance, by slaves emptying bags of money into various measures.

The oldest diptych in the Library bears the date of the year 428. It represents the Consul Flavius Felix standing in the tribunal at the games, the partly-drawn curtains being raised on either side. On the border of this tribunal are engraved his names and some of his titles, the remainder of these having been completed on the second tablet now lost, but known to Mabillon, Banduri and Gori. This legend ran: - "Of Flavius Felix, most illustrious citizen, Count and Master of the two militias, a patrician and consul." This monument of a consul of the Western Empire had long been preserved in the Abbey of St. Junien at Limoges. The remaining tablet was procured for the Cabinet of Medals in 1808.

The second fragment, from Autun, bears no image, but has also reference to a Consul of the West, Flavius Petrus Sabbatus Justinianus, elected in 516. Complete copies, elsewhere preserved, have served to restore the distich on the ivory tablet in the Library, beginning with the words: "MUNERA PARVA QUIDEM PRETIO SED HONORIB. ALMA. I, Consul, offer to the Fathers these gifts, of slight value, indeed, but highly honourable".

We may here also quote for the year 525, and for the empire of the East, the diptych of Flavius Theodorus Philoxenus Sotericus Philoxenus. His bust alone appears on a medallion, above which is another, occupied by an elegantly dressed female figure, presumed to be the personification of Constantinople. The Greek legend runs: "I, Philoxenus, created consul, offer this gift to the all-wise Senate." This perfect diptych had been given by Charles the Bald to the Abbey of St. Corneille, near Compiegne. It reached the Cabinet of Medals, still enclosed in the silver-plated wooden frame made by the Benedictine monks at the time it was deposited among their treasures, a circumstance rendering it doubly interesting.

The latest known diptych, is that preserved in Florence, dating from the year 545, and bearing the name of the Consul Anicius Basilius.

To the sixth century also belong the boxes intended to contain the "eulogia" or food sent to be blessed, and representing subjects borrowed from the Christian sarcophagi, such as the healing of the paralytic, and of the man blind from his birth, the woman of Samaria, the Resurrection of Lazarus, the disciples of Emmaus, and the four Evangelists.

The following century is illustrated at Cluny, by the beautiful plaque showing a woman standing by an altar, and holding in her hands two inverted flaming tocrhes. This plaque, found at the bottom of a well at Montier-en-Der, had formed one of the doors of a large shrine (chasse) brought from Rome by St. Bercharius to enrich the church of the monastery he had here founded in the reign of Childeric. The antique style of the carving might lead to the belief that the piece brought from Palestine by the devout monk belongs to an epoch anterior to its application to the reliquary.