Small Diamonds In Gothic Jewels

(via Diamond Cuts in Historic Jewelry:1381-1910) Herbert Tillander writes:

During the first half of the 15th century, jewels of one particular style were very popular among collectors and for offering gifts. These were small, attractive pieces, often with mixed religious and secular ornamentation. Brooches in particular, but also clasps, pendants and rings, were cast and chased in gold with every conceivable motif, enamelled in bright colors and decorated with one, sometimes two, gems. It was in this type of jewelry that diamonds were introduced on a really large scale, though small rubies, sapphires, emeralds and pearls were also frequently used. The diamonds were small or medium-sized natural points fashioned into pyramidal cuts or fancy shapes, and in natural (but symmetrized) or imitated crystal forms.

There is one inventory, dating from 1439, which has so far been published only as part of a collection of inventories connected with Frederick IV, Duke of Austria and the Tyrol. Frederick, at one time nicknamed ‘the Hapsburg with empty pockets’, was so successful in exploiting rich silver mines in the Tyrol that he ended up being the wealthiest member of his dynasty. When he died he left over a thousand pieces of jewelry, including more than four hundred small, attractive pieces. There are over forty different motifs in the inventory, and often several examples of each motif, including twenty-two portrait medallions, ten falcons and four deer, as well as other animal jewels featuring horses, lions, camels, dogs, birds, etc. There are also a number of St Georges, Apostles, flowers, chessboards and so on. There are over five hundred diamonds mentioned in the inventory, mostly without any description other than the occasional michel or gross, which indicates that they were fairly large of pyramidal shape. Diamonds of any other shape were always described.

Two other well-known jewels are the brooch from the Treasury of the House of Burgundy (now in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna) which shows a pair of fashionably dressed lovers standing in a ‘love garden’ of wreaths and branches; and the Founder’s Jewel which in 1404 William of Wykeham left to New College, Oxford, where it has remained to this day.

Gothic jewels were known for the high intrinsic value of their individual stones and were therefore often eventually broken up and their settings melted down. No illustrations of Frederick’s rich collection exist, but similar brooches were ‘dedicated in the Cathedral of Essen.’