Art Museum Journal

The Thomson Collection of Medieval Ivories at the Art Gallery of Ontario
By STAN PARCHIN
February 6, 2011

 
Toronto's Art Gallery of Ontario houses the Thomson Collection of Medieval Ivories, an impeccable array of European religious and secular objects, many carved from imported African elephant tusk. Forty-five of the precious works were the subject of a special exhibition at London's Courtauld Gallery from January 10 to March 8, 2008 during the AGO’s extensive renovation and expansion by Pritzker Prize-winning American architect Frank Gehry (b. 1929).
 
Lord Kenneth Thomson, Patron of the AGO
Canadian billionaire Kenneth Thomson, Lord of Fleet and Northbridge (1923-2006), owned media conglomerate Thomson Corporation. He began collecting art in 1953 while on a trip to Bournemouth, England. In 2002, Thomson donated 2,000 works to the Art Gallery of Ontario, now installed brilliantly in three sets of galleries. He also pledged $60 million to the museum's rebuilding campaign.
 
Medieval Ivories from the Thomson Collection
The late Lord Thomson's collection abounds in spectacular high-quality ivories produced during the European Middle Ages. Noteworthy among them are:

• large statuettes of the Virgin and Child from chapel altars;
•  
  smaller versions of the same subject intended for private devotion;
• diptychs (two-panel compositions) illustrating episodes from Jesus Christ's life; and
• objects for domestic use and personal adornment (e.g., writing tablets, boxes, dining utensils, mirrors, prayer beads and combs).

Religious Works of Art
Last displayed in 1913 before its appearance at the Courtauld Gallery, the Dormeuil Diptych (ca. 1360-80) illustrates the Passion of Christ. This largest known example of the New Testament episode in two-panel format (24.7 x 31.4 cm when open) was most likely produced in the Workshop of the Passion Diptychs, a 14th-century Parisian atelier famous for its exquisitely carved works of ivory. It was acquired at Sotheby's Paris for the philanthropist’s collection on November 19, 2007 at the record-breaking price of $6.6 million.
 
Most controversial among Lord Thomson’s holdings is the Gothic Diptych with the Nativity and Last Judgment (14th Century). Its second panel features intricately rendered deceased souls resurrecting from their graves beneath a majestically seated Christ flanked by two beatific angels. The anonymous artisan's astonishing craftsmanship deceived modern experts, having caused them to dismiss the work as a 19th-century neo-Gothic forgery. Recent carbon-14 testing in British and French laboratories has since validated the ivory's age.
 
Medieval Mirth and Mortality
The story of daily life in the Late Middle Ages is set against the backdrop of three major phenomena: the Hundred Years' War (1337-1453) between England and France; the Black Death's plagues that began to ravage Western Europe in 1347; and a spiritual malaise and administrative crisis within the Catholic Church that culminated in the 16th-century Protestant Reformation. The effects of these chaotic circumstances resonate profoundly in many of the Thomson Collection's late-medieval works of art.
 
A Parisian Mirror Case (14th Century) with a silver interior features four monsters mounted along its circular ivory rim. Each faces the direction in which the object's cover has to be twisted to free its bayonet mount for opening. Medieval society's order is inverted on the mirror's carved reverse side. Its lower scene depicts three fashionable ladies uncommonly astride stallions while hunting with falcons. Scholars interpret the men in the vignette's upper region as the women's servants or subtle representations of their prey.
 
Most disturbing is a South Netherlandish two-faced Bead (ca. 1500-25). Behind the pensive female’s visage is the benign subject's frightening worm-eaten skull. Encircling the diminutive sculpture's brow is a foreboding French inscription: AINSI SERONS NOUS WI OU DEMAIN (So shall we be, today or tomorrow). The work’s ominous imagery was strongly influenced by the Black Death's decimation of the European populace. This graphically gruesome memento mori was a stark reminder of life's transience during a time of the pestilence's unpredictable outbreaks.
 
Above all else, the Thomson Collection's ivories demonstrate that in the relatively pious Middle Ages, mundane considerations affected the spiritual realm as seen in objects produced during Europe's medieval millennium.
 
Sources
Huizinga, Johan. The Waning of the Middle Ages. New York: Dover Publications, 1998.
 
Husband, Timothy B., et al. The Secular Spirit: Life and Art at the End of the Middle Ages (exh. cat.). New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1975.