GRAIN OF CHAPELET, memento mori, in bone carved... Lot 38

GRAIN OF CHAPELET, memento mori, in bone carved in the round. Grain with two halves of face: one, half head of a male corpse with emaciated features with camouflaged nose, expression wrinkles, half-opened mouth showing the teeth, the end of a worm escaping from the corner; hair ending in curved curls, two of which at the top of the skull; the other, half realistic death's head with sutures and jaws with missing teeth. Pierced through and through. Paris, workshop of Chicart Bailly ? around 1500/1530 Height: 4,4 cm - Width: 2,9 cm - Depth: 3,5 cm This is a rare example of memento mori in carved bone and not in ivory. The artist who made it shows great skill, knowing that bone is a more difficult material to work with because it is much harder than ivory. Its quality of execution is similar to the rosary beads attributed to Chicart Bailly, an ivory sculptor and Parisian merchant active at the turn of the 15th and 16th centuries. The production of his workshop was made possible thanks to the discovery of an inventory after the death of "the honourable man Chicart Bailly, bourgeois of Paris and table merchant" kept at the National Archives (Minutes of Guillaume Payen, 1533). This inventory sheds light on the activity of this sculptor, mentioned as a master in 1485 and deceased in 1533, who specialized in working with ivory, precious woods and bone. A number of objects were inventoried after his death, combs, buckles among others, but above all an impressive number of rosaries and ivory beads of "patrenostres". The Metropolitan Museum of New York preserves a rosary in carved ivory mounted in silver, one of the terminal rosary beads of which is very comparable to this one (inv. 17.190.306, fig.a). This object, donated by Pierpont Morgan in 1917, is indicated on the museum's online collections site as German, circa 1500-1520, while the catalogue for the 2017 exhibition at the Bowdoin College Museum mentions it as possibly being French or from the souther