A Flat-Bottomed Variety Of The Pointed Star Cut

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

In 1896 Bauer described a flat-bottomed, eightfold variant of the Pointed Star Cut, which he introduced as a ‘Cross Rose’. However, his drawings are not even of a diamond but of a cinnamon stone, a type of garnet. In fact, no such diamond has ever been documented, so Bauer’s ‘Cross Rose’ has no place in diamond history.

However, my attention was caught by a casual remark by Alfred Eppler and a line drawing of a cut similar to Bauer’s, although crowned, which he inconsistently called a Rose. Later I came across a reproduction of an engraving by Wenceslas Hollar, which showed some half a dozen examples of type drawn by Eppler. Hollar’s engraving suggests a jeweled badge of an Order of the Garter, for which the diamonds, including the flat-bottomed Star Cuts, must still have been available even though they were by the obsolete. In 1523 Henry VIII had given express permission for those on whom he had conferred the Order of the Garter to decorate their insignias ‘at their pleasure.’ The drawing by Hollar is clearly a design for one such order. Although both Bauer and Eppler were wrong in calling their stones ‘Roses’ of any sort, Hollar must have had a number of such stones—at least, those depicted by Eppler—at his disposal in order to include so many in his design.

In appears that in the sixteenth century flat-bottomed Pointed Star Cuts of the type found in the Order of the Garter were occasionally fashioned from discarded Indian Tablet Cuts (flat Table Cuts with table and culet facets of approximately the same size). Strangely enough, these may even be forerunners of the Standard Full Rose Cut (also known as the Dutch, or Holland, Rose), a design with six-fold symmetry which was first introduced around 1600 when, at the large cutting centers of the Netherlands, cleaving became a separate, specialized profession.