Embriachi workshop
[6] He was presumably not a carver himself, but supplied the capital, and no doubt was involved with negotiating the larger sales to courts and nobles north of the Alps; some documentary records of this survive.
[9] One scholar, Michele Tomasi, argues that the style of painted, rather than carved, elements of altarpieces suggests that production ceased around 1416.
[12] Caskets and other objects normally have a framework of wood, and the areas not fitted with bone or ivory carving are decorated with certosina work, small geometrical inlays of various materials in contrasting colours.
[13] Though the workshop was patronized by the richest and most style-conscious princes, much of its output of smaller objects was aimed at a much wider group of clients in the merchant and tradesman classes.
[14] These were generally decorated with secular subjects, often designed with female tastes in mind, as most were probably given as presents to women, especially as part of the donora of gifts to a bride-to-be.
[26] The "workshop" probably operated at several locations, with the essentially separate skills of carving the bone plaques, making the wooden framework and certosina elements, and assembling the final casket very likely done at different places.
[27] Most carved panels, even in the largest prestige commissions, are of bone, apparently mostly from horses and cows, with horns and hoofs also used,[28] but some are "ivory", which is mostly from the teeth of the hippopotamus.
Other similar large religious pieces for the courts of France and Burgundy are confidently attributed to the same workshop on stylistic grounds.
It no longer has this form; after extensive rearrangements in the 18th and 19th centuries there are now two groups of carved bone panels set in a framework for display, which are now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, donated by John Pierpont Morgan, whose collections also included several Embriachi caskets.
The subjects are secular, stories from various romances, including Il Pecorone (The Golden Eagle) and classical mythology.
[37] Baldassare Ubriachi was originally a Florentine, though he traced his descent to the Embriaco family of Genoa, who were distinguished military and political leaders in the Crusader Kingdoms from around 1100 to the late 13th century.
[40] In 1379 Charles' successor Wenceslaus IV of Bohemia had an Embriachi-type marriage casket containing relics walled-up in the Sigismund Chapel of St. Vitus Cathedral in Prague, where it was recovered in 1918.
[41] Baldassare Ubriachi moved to Venice "soon after 1390",[42] where another branch of the family was already settled, having been exiled from Florence in the political upheavals of the late 13th century.
