I've been thinking about ivories for a while now. Then, a few days ago, I got to touch some. To explain more: I've been working on an article on ivory Virgin and Child statuettes for several years now. Originally, it was an outgrowth of the work on Virgin and Child imagery that I was doing for the book that I've also been working on for a long time now (about 10 years). I was overwhelmed by the sheer number of Virgin and Child statues that I was encountering in museums and so I decided I would limit my work for the book on larger-scale stone and wood versions and then use some of the same contextual and theoretical framework for a separate article on ivories ( for some of that thinking see this previous post ). But I quickly realized that I would also have to take into account in the difference in material and all of the differences that go with it - in size and scale, in ownership and viewership. I started to read up on ivory and got more and more interested in t