Exterior: chessboard; dog fighting a dragon; dog pursuing a boar; dog running and hunter holding a spear; two hunters blowing horns; foxes (?) running into their burrows; trees.
Interior: backgammon board (nearly identical border).
Crosshatched background.
Randall 1993: French (Alsace) or German (Black Forest), 1440-1470.
Detroit 1997: probably German (Upper Rhine), ca. 1440-1470.
Nuttall 2010: Southern Netherlands, c. 1470-1500.
Attribution
Unknown
Reverse
Label: Silberman, Seilenstätte 5, Vienna, no. 832.
Provenance
Collection of the Count Wilczek of Kreuzenstein (?) [according to the dealer]. Silberman Galleries, Seilenstätte 5, Vienna, no. 832 (tag on the back): purchased from E. and A. Silberman Galleries, Inc., New York in 1941 with funds from Mrs. William Clay.
Bibliography
Illustrated in Bulletin of the Detroit Institute of Arts 24, no. 2 (1944), p. 24.
E. Bassani and W. B. Fagg, Africa and the Renaissance: Art in Ivory, exhibition catalogue, New York, The Center for African Art, 1988, p. 104.
R. H. Randall, The Golden Age of Ivory: Gothic Ivory Carvings in North American Collections (New York, 1993), no. 198.
Images in Ivory. Precious Objects of the Gothic Age, ed. by Peter Barnet, exhibition catalogue, Detroit, The Detroit Institute of Arts, and Baltimore, The Walters Art Gallery, 1997, no. 75.
P. Nuttall, 'Dancing, love, and the 'beautiful game': a new interpretation of a group of fifteenth-century 'gaming' boxes', in Renaissance Studies 24, no. 1 (2010), pp. 131-133.
P. Nuttall, 'The Bargello gamesboard: a north-south hybrid', in The Burlington Magazine, vol. CLII, no. 1292 (November 2010), pp. 716-722 (p. 722, fig. 18).
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