Scenes from the parable of the Prodigal Son

This shoe horn made of ivory engraved with scenes from the Parable of the Prodigal Son is made in the Netherlands in 1596 by Gerardus Jansen. The piece was probably always a decorative item, and never functioned as a shoe-horn, a term which may indeed be a later, even mistaken discription.
Amsterdam was the principal European port, and much ivory arrived there from Africa from the sixteenth century onwards. Many devotional ivories, whose authorship was unrecorded, were produced in the Netherlands during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, particularly crucifix figures and statuettes of the Christ Child. Nothing is known about the artist.