Prayer Nut with the Nativity and the Adoration of the Magi, in a Box

Entry

Exceptionally, this boxwood prayer nut is contained in a contemporaneous silver housing.¹⁰ The silver case adds significant value to this piece. There are very few examples of prayer nuts in a precious housing like this, and the finely engraved images that make up the secular decoration of the silver is of very high quality.¹¹ Belonging with the prayer nut is an eighteenth-century, gold-embossed, red leather box in which the nut could be kept along with a magnifying glass (now lost) and a brief description written by the then owner in an eighteenth-century hand. It is a painstaking, but partially inaccurate, summary of the scenes and characters carved into the prayer nut (figs. a and b).¹² When the prayer nut is open, two extremely small scenes of figures and motifs largely freely carved in boxwood are revealed: at the top is the Nativity and in the lower register is the Adoration of the Magi, both surrounded by a number of smaller individual scenes.¹³

The iconography of the Nativity follows the vision of St Birgitta of Sweden, popular in the Low Countries, where the Virgin kneels in worship before her child, who lies on the ground in a halo of light. According to the eighteenth-century note, the scene in the background is ‘the Saviour going through the land, preaching and performing miracles’, but this is based on an incorrect interpretation. The images are partly typological prefigurations of Mary’s virginity – in the way they are arranged around the Nativity they are reminiscent of the structure of the Biblia Pauperum or Paupers’ Bible.¹⁴ In the centre at the back, Moses removes his sandals during the apparition of the Angel of God in a burning bush (Exodus 3:1-5). The image may have been inspired by the left-hand side of a Biblia Pauperum woodcut by Jacob Cornelisz van Oostsanen (c. 1460/65-1533) and Lucas van Leyden (1494-1533) which has a Nativity in the centre. The burning bush is regarded as a prefiguration of Jesus’s virgin birth (cf. RP-P-OB-12.453).¹⁵ The same Biblia Pauperum also presents a possible source of inspiration for the scene on the far right, the appearance of the angel to Gideon (Judges 6:36-40); this, since Bernard of Clairvaux, has likewise been a generally adopted prefiguration of the Annunciation to Mary and her virginity (cf. RP-P-BI-6244).¹⁶ The scene in the centre is the vision of Caesar Augustus and the Tiburtine Sybil. The clairvoyant Sybil of Tibur, whom Augustus consulted on the day of Christ’s birth, takes the old emperor by the hand and points upwards. Above them Mary and the Christ Child on a sickle moon appear in a vision, whereupon the Sybil predicts that this child will be a greater ruler than Augustus himself. Admittedly the apparition of Mary and Christ is now missing from the scene, but it was there originally: minuscule remnants of the attachment of this group can still be seen on the upper edge of the prayer nut between the two angels. The man behind the emperor is a servant carrying the imperial crown.¹⁷ A number of the elements in this half of the prayer nut – the Nativity, Moses, Gideon – are found in a similar form in a prayer nut in the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection (fig. c).¹⁸ A comparison of the two works shows how effectively the carver varied standard motifs to create an entirely new composition. The stable in the Nativity scene has the same wall in both works, but in the Thyssen nut it also has a small roof. Augustus’s place in the Amsterdam nut is more or less literally occupied by Moses in the other prayer nut; he is virtually identical to his Amsterdam counterpart. The meeting of the shepherds to the right of the stable in the Thyssen nut is on the left in the Amsterdam scene; the two shepherds leaning on a wall or fence have likewise switched sides, as has the shepherd with the bagpipes. The carving of the two nuts is also very similar in style and technique.

The lower register of the Amsterdam prayer nut shows the adoration of the infant Christ by the three wise men from the east and their retinue. Their meeting is shown in the background. A shepherd with three sheep sits on a rock above the stable. The composition of the adoration scene in the foreground – a balding old king kneeling in worship before the Virgin and Child, who has placed his gift, a chalice, at Mary’s feet, behind him a standing Oriental king in a turban, holding his gift in his hand, and the third king, who is being handed his gift by a page – follows a traditional Netherlandish scheme. The scene of the encounter in the background is a confusion of tiny figures and horses, who face towards one another. In sum, all these individual scenes can be described as epiphanies, apparitions or manifestations of God. This is true in the case of the Magi (‘Epiphany’), and in the upper register of the vision of St Birgitta, the vision of the Emperor Augustus and the appearance of angels to Moses, Gideon and the shepherds at the stable.¹⁹

Seemingly undaunted by the minute scale, the carver let himself go in all sorts of millimetric details, like the spur on the boot of the kneeling king, the gossamer fine lances carried by the foot-soldiers and pages, the tiny sheep scratching behind its ears with one back hoof, and the rosary hanging on a peg in the little wall above the kneeling king (fig. d). This, of course, is a self-referential motif, referring directly as it does to the use of the prayer nut as part of a rosary or paternoster. In the right-hand wall of the stable in the Nativity scene there is a minuscule hole and a tiny, broken piece of wood. This is the remnant of a ring on the wall roughly one and a half millimetres in diameter that originally hung free from the wall and could actually move. We find a similar astounding detail in other micro-carvings, including a prayer nut in private hands,²⁰ and two miniature altars.²¹ It is a playful demonstration of the maker’s virtuosity and ingenuity.

The silver shell of the prayer nut follows the size and design of the standard prayer nuts made entirely in wood fairly precisely. There are gold rosettes at the top and bottom, and a twisted gold cable border around the middle; in this border there are a hinge and a fastening that can be closed with a silver pin on a chain. Between them there is exceptionally fine gothic engraving: on one side six animals among flowers and foliage: a dog, a monkey with a collar, a heron-like bird, an owl, a small bird with outstretched wings and a calling bird (fig. e). Populating the other half are five people – a nude woman surrounded by four men engaged in different occupations: a man thrusting a spade into the ground, a man poking the fire, a fisherman standing in the water and a falconer (fig. f). The animals stem from the tradition of marginalia, the border decorations in illuminated manuscripts, where they frame the sacred prayers and religious images as secular, often scabrous and obscene commentaries.²² This, in a sense, is what the animals on the prayer nut do too, but at the same time, in conjunction with the design on the other half of the piece, they seem to present a compact image of the world. With the monkey and the owl as symbols of lust and sin, the animals symbolize savage, sensual and untamed nature.²³ The four men on the other half of the little sphere stand for the four Aristotelian elements: earth, fire, water and air. Each of them is engaged in taming, shaping or using nature. The woman, an alter Eve, gestures towards her genitals and breasts. It is a pose reminiscent of a classical Venus pudica and found in some fifteenth-century boxwood and ivory statuettes, particularly an ivory figurine in Kassel.²⁴ Here, however, she must not be regarded as pudica, but rather as the unchaste human counterpart of the monkey, who sits directly opposite her.²⁵

Stamped on the smooth edge of the half with the Nativity are two unknown maker’s marks or assay marks.²⁶ On the banderols around the figures in gothic minuscule we read: SOKET · VAER · GHI · VILT · HIER · VINDET · IN · D ARDE · IN · VUER · · IN · VATER INDEN · LUCHT (seek where ye will, ye find it here, in the earth, in fire, in water, in the air), a confirmation of the identification of the figures with the four elements. It is an expansion on the biblical aphorism ‘Seek and ye shall find’, which occurs in several variants in the Old and New Testaments.²⁷ The inscription and the engraved representation were probably inspired by the seventh and eighth chapters in the Old Testament Book of Proverbs, where the personification of Wisdom offers the reader a parable about the wiles of a harlot (Proverbs 7) and calls upon those who love Wisdom to search for her everywhere (Proverbs 8:17): ‘I love them that love me; and those that seek me early shall find me’.²⁸ But whereas in the Bible this text always relates to God, Wisdom and faith, a connection is made here with untamed nature and the elements. The user of the prayer nut, who is commanded on the outside to seek God everywhere, (but to guard against the lust and impurity of nature and his own fleshly desires), is witness on the inside to a number of specific revelations of Christ. He or she could identify with the three wise men who were witnesses to the first appearance of God’s son on earth, imagine himself or herself an alter St Bridget of Sweden (c. 1302-1373) with her vision of Jesus’s birth. Both themes offered a channel to meditation and prayer and could lead to one’s own ‘epiphanic experience’ of ‘enlightenment’.

The personifications of the four elements, the literal opposition of nature and culture, and the spherical shape mark this prayer nut out as a microcosm, an elemental imagining of the world in pocket size, which a few decades later would become the core of the Kunst- und Wunderkammern.²⁹ Romanelli dated Netherlandish micro-carving to a period of more than fifty years, between 1475 and 1530. The documented pieces found so far, however, suggest a much shorter time span – the first quarter of the sixteenth century, reaching a peak of popularity between 1510 and 1525.³⁰ Jacob Cornelisz van Oostsanen’s portrait of the Alkmaar burgomaster Jan Gerritz van Egmond in the Rijksmuseum (SK-A-3838) provides confirmation for dating this prayer nut in this period. The sitter holds a silver prayer nut in his hand, attached by a chain to a ring on his finger. The shape of this devotional trinket is virtually identical to that of the real prayer nut. The portrait is dated to around c. 1518 and must in any event have been made before 1523, the year Van Egmond died.

On the grounds of the style of the micro-carving, the prayer nut can be attributed to the otherwise unknown Adam Theodrici (‘Adam Dircksz’), whom Leeuwenberg identified in 1968 as the maker of a whole group of micro-carvings on the basis of a prayer nut in Copenhagen signed by him.³¹ His studio was probably in one of the towns in the Northern Netherlands, where it must have been active for roughly a generation.³² It was responsible in this period for a steady stream of dozens of prayer nuts and other miniature carvings for the elite of the Netherlands and a few foreign clients.

Frits Scholten, 2024