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Despite its diminutive size, this ivory sculpture has a monumental quality. Johann Christoph Ludwig Lücke created it in a second bid to become August the Third’s court sculptor – in vain. In 1736, the king bought the piece for eighty ducats and placed it in the Green Vault, but denied poor Lücke the goal of his ambitions.

The subject of the work is serious. Cronos – the Greek god of time – is seen raising a personification of lifeless Art. Time is portrayed in the traditional way as an old man, with a bald head and a fluttering beard.  Art is an unconscious woman, lightly draped with a cloth and seated on a globe. An interesting detail is the weeping child at her feet. He points to various arts – painting, sculpture, architecture and literature.

Allegorical works referring back to art itself had been common since the Renaissance. The idea of time reawakening art, which had fallen into a slumber, was popular with sculptors. It is a confident affirmation that a new age of art is dawning.

Lücke has signed the statue on the robe, at the back. He was a versatile sculptor and a colourful personality, and led the life of a roaming artist – perhaps for that reason he was very productive. His domiciles included Hamburg, London, Dresden, Vienna, Schwerin, Copenhagen and Danzig, present-day Gdansk. In 1728, he found employment at the porcelain manufactory in Meissen, but the work didn’t satisfy him, and he soon left again. At the porcelain manufactory in Vienna he also spent little more than a year. From time to time, he returned to his home-town, Dresden. There are many of his ivory carvings in the Green Vault. His statuettes show that Lücke was a versatile and talented artist.