Jewelpia: The Details Have Details

Inside the detail

An ivory ball rested above a tall, crowded landscape. Through openings in its surface, another carved sphere was visible. Behind that lay further layers.

The nested spheres are carved from a single solid ball of ivory, rather than assembled from separate parts. Each can rotate independently. The museum describes how carvers work through holes in the outside, inserting narrow tools to cut the layers free and carve their patterns. The inner spheres are not simply smooth supports for the outer decoration. They have their own openwork.

The inner patterns were difficult enough just to see. Someone had carved them through those same small holes.

According to the museum, a sphere of more than twenty layers takes either a carver’s whole working life or two generations of one family. Spheres of thirty, forty and fifty layers are on display.

A family project

The ivory scene shown at the beginning of this story gathered gateways, figures, lanterns, branches and curling clouds onto a broad wooden base. Even the roofs carried small creatures along their edges.

From a distance, it formed one pale, intricate mass. Closer in, individual faces, sleeves and tiny railings began to separate from it.

The museum says Goraku Shōhei, the work shown at the beginning of this story, took seventy years and three generations of one family to complete.

The skills were handed down. So was the unfinished work.

A lantern’s pierced shade was only a small feature in the whole scene. Someone still had to finish every opening. The same attention extended to the figures below, where a turned head or a raised hand gave each one something of its own to do.

Not every work packed its details so tightly. An ivory model of the sailing ship Nippon Maru spread them across masts, sails and a web of rigging. The museum says it was carved at 1:36 scale, with a rudder and propeller made to move.

Colour, by the metre

In the stone displays, the scale changed again. Instead of peering through the openings of a ball, there was a long room to look along. Figures and branches filled dark panels on both sides, with their reflections stretching across the floor.

The screen telling the story of Yang Guifei, an imperial consort in Tang-dynasty China, runs to 108 panels and seventy-five metres in total. Its scenes give a courtly story enough room to surround the visitor.

Something more familiar

The same attention to colour had also been applied to dinner.

A large crab occupied the front of an oval platter. Prawns, fish, fruit and vegetables crowded around it, their shells, skins and leaves picked out in differently patterned stone. The display label described the work as entirely uncoloured and gave its weight as 350 kilograms.

This was not the sort of dish to pass around the table.