Ivories may be adapted and reproduced as other ivory versions by the original author, or by contemporary or later sculptors. Repeated compositions in ivory, both secular and religious, were evidently in demand during the baroque period, although the circumstances of their production are not always known in any detail. The article has two sections: the first examines some of the ivories produced in the Netherlands, Germany and Italy by Balthasar Permoser (1651–1732) and Francis van Bossuit (1635–1692) respectively, while the second discusses the repetitions of Christian subjects in ivories carved by anonymous local artists working in the Philippines and Goa exported to Central America, and then often onwards to Europe in the seventeenth century. These different but related groups of ivories can suggest the contexts and functions of sculpture in this material. The essay explores why and how such reproductions were made, and why they can be considered »the same but different«.

In the last years replicated objects have gained an increasingly central position in the discourse about ancient, medieval and early modern art. ›Multiples‹, we are often told, lack uniqueness, invention, autonomy, and sometimes even authorship. Indeed, ›multiples‹ can be powerful multipliers – in that they enhance the ›aura of the originals‹ that they replicate – but they remain secondary indexes pointing to an ›original‹ imbued with significance. Yet, what happens if ›multiples‹ do not refer to other artifacts at all, or if they are associated with other ›multiples‹ rather than with a first version in the mind of their owners? What happened when serially-made ›multiples‹ were not quite identical to each other, as was the rule with pre-modern artifacts? What shaped their identity and the perception of them as identical?
This collection of essays explores different forms of interaction between the making of artifacts in more than one specimen and their reception before the nineteenth century. It addresses media such as metal, wax, plaster, terracotta, textiles, marble, ivory, porcelain, canvases and tables in an attempt to re-assess the current identification of the mediality of prints with that of pre-modern ›multiples‹ in general.