This ivory bead is from a chaplet or rosary and is considered to be either French or South Netherlandish from about 1520-1530.

On one side is the bust of a man wearing a flat hat and an open jacket and on the other the bust of a woman whose headdress is fastened under her chin by a linen band passing over the top.

A rosary, in the Metropolitan Museum, New York (Pierpont Morgan Collection), has six beads similar in style, one almost identical; they are each mounted in a metal frame. Other examples are in the Collection Cottreau, the Louvre, the Musée de Cluny, and elsewhere. A very similar example is in the Wernher Collection, Luton Hoo (Inv. No. 860).

In the Late Middle Ages the chaplet was a vital and commonplace aid to keeping count of the repetition of prayers for both rich and poor. Often hung from the belt by a ring, it usually consisted of ten ‘ave’ (Hail Mary) beads with a larger ‘paternoster’ (Our Father) bead at the beginning or end and a terminal Crucifix. Chaplet beads were made in many materials, from humble plain wood to precious metals and ivory. The popularity of the rosary – the fullest form of repeated prayers – gave rise to the establishment of confraternities devoted to its use in the late fifteenth century, so that by the sixteenth century the production of intricate and costly chaplets was widespread.
Chaplets often ended not with a cross but with a terminal pendant, and it is these larger beads which are usually the grandest. Most of them are connected with the notion of the memento mori, a constant reflection that human life is transient. The most common type of memento mori bead is that with conjoined heads: the skull, representing Death, is always present, and is either backed with a single bust or a pair of heads, male and female. The depiction of the skull often allowed the carver’s imagination full rein, with toads, worms and lizards crawling in and out of the mouth and eye sockets.