I you're like me, you've probably spent some time contemplating what King Henry VIII of England must have been doing working his way through six wives and numerous mistresses. I mean, the stress alone. Well, thankfully the Art Gallery of Ontario has offered one explanation in the form of a tiny perfect set of boxwood rosary beads (pictured below) that belonged to Hank and surely helped him ponder his immorality. This is just one of the gems of an exhibition that involved years of preparation, thousands of miles of travel to conduct investigations into the mysteries of boxwood art, NASA, Western University, New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. Small Wonders: Gothic Boxwood Miniatures opens on Nov. 5 and runs until Jan. 22 when it travels to New York.
The exhibition is a look at the incredible artistry that has been pegged to one boxwood artist and his workshop in the 16th century Copenhagen. According to the research conducted by the AGO-led team, there are just 135 known works, 60 of which are on display at the AGO. But through the exhibition, and a corresponding web initiative dubbed the Boxwood Project, the hope is that more of these small, and impossibly complex treasures are uncovered.
On display in three rooms are items of private devotion such as mantel altarpieces, prayer beads and rosaries carved of boxwood in such detail that defies description — as well as an example of the types of wee tools that might be used for such work (pictured above). This is something that needs to be seen. Many of the beads and other works include multiple layers depicting an array of biblical scenes. One of the more complex beads, for example, includes scenes of David beheading Goliath, David kneeling before Samuel, Saul and David carrying the head of Goliath and five other intricately detailed scenes all in one little ball of boxwood that can fit in the palm of a hand.
So complex are the works, that the AGO got NASA to scan one in an attempt to uncover how the artist even managed to put one together. As part of the exhibition, a Toronto woodworker attempted and failed to mimic the construction, instead opting to use a 3D printer to recreate a couple of prayer beads, which are available to handle. So much for modern ingenuity.
The Art Galley of Ontario is home to the largest boxwood collection in North America, much from the Thomson Collection of European Art at the AGO. As a result, the Toronto gallery had the opportunity to lead the international team that conducted four years of research and put the exhibition together under Sasha Suda, the AGO's interim curator of European Art along with Barbara Drake Boehm from the MET and Frits Scholten, senior curator of sculpture at the Rijksmuseum.
Small Wonders also includes a virtual reality component on select dates that allows patrons don a VR mask to basically see the layers and detail in a new way, moving through them, and around them. And there is a massive blow-up of a piece called the Mouth of Hell pasted up on the wall for selfies.
