Anatomy Lessons & Elephant Tusks

In today's overcrowded art market, the museum director in search of new acquisitions finds himself in much the same position as a stockbroker in a runaway bull market. If he buys the current favorites, he will get popular pictures--at an inflated price. The cheaper but far riskier alternative is to buy undervalued art of a period or artist not yet discovered or out of fashion. This is the course chosen by Director Sherman Lee of Cleveland's Museum of Art, who invested the museum's $1,731,557 purchase fund for 1967 in 132 different works.

All now on display, they range from a turquoise pre-Columbian mask from the Mixtec culture of Mexico (A.D. 1220) to a bargain Rembrandt, An Old Man Praying. The Rembrandt was picked up for an estimated $500,000 because other buyers were distracted by the painting's murky appearance (Cleveland has since removed the layers of umber-tinted varnish, bringing the Rembrandt back to mint condition, and dumbfounding Dutch experts who had seen it before and after cleaning). Even choicer to the connoisseur's eye are Cleveland's two ivories and, rarest of all, an engraving by Antonio Pollaiuolo (see color opposite).

Skinned Cadavers. The tusk of the full-grown elephant, which can grow up to six feet long and weigh as much as 50 Ibs., was valued on a par with jade and gold by the early Chinese, who carved it into intricate designs and tiny plaques. Cleveland's finely chiseled plaque of Christ with the twelve Apostles, probably intended for a book cover and executed in Germany around A.D. 970, shortly after Otto the Great founded the Holy Roman Empire, is an unusual example that shows how Otto-nian workshops combined early Christian design with Saxon severity. Seven centuries later, Adam Lenckhardt used a single tusk of ivory to create a 17-in.-tall Descent from the Cross. Commissioned by the 17th century Prince Eusebius von Liechtenstein, the piece is unsurpassed among baroque ivory groups, accordingly to Director Lee. It is notable for its dulcet softness, subtlety and exquisite craftsmanship.

Lenckhardt's realistic anatomy owes much to pioneering Renaissance draftsmen like the 15th century Florentine Pollaiuolo (1432-98). The painter, sculptor and jeweler daringly studied and depicted muscles and organs of skinned cadavers in an era when the church still frowned on dissection. His Battle of Naked Men is essentially a swashbuckling anatomy lesson, with its mythological figures ingeniously posed to show off the male body in as many positions as possible. There is no question that Pollaiuolo, one of the earliest artists to try his hand at engraving, considered the finished work extraordinary. It was the first print to which he signed his full name, and scholars have called it the first great Italian engraving. And making its copy all the more valuable, Cleveland now possesses the only un-reworked first-state impression known to have survived. Though the museum is reliably reported to have paid no more than $50,000 for its Pollaiuolo, rival graphics curators enviously estimate that it could very possibly bring up to $100,000 at auction--which would be an alltime record for a print.

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