The Taille en Seize

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

The most reliable seventeenth-century sources are the pattern books published by master jewelers. Writers of the period, such as de Boot, still praised Table Cuts and paid very little attention to the numerous Fancy Cuts. Not even the new Rose Cut was deemed worthy of consideration. They all appeared to be totally unaware of the new trend towards radiantly sparkling diamond cuts. Writers of the early eighteenth century concentrate on Brilliants and Rose Cuts to the exclusion of the old-fashioned cuts. There is not a word anywhere about the influence of the changes in social life on diamond cutting and only in the nineteenth century did people become aware of this phenomenon. For the most part the works that were published were based on guesswork and imagination. Pseudo-scholars wrote wildly fanciful accounts of the changes wrought on fashions in diamond cuts, but their pronouncements were hardly ever based on serious research.

In previous centuries Table Cuts had occasionally been given additional facets, but during the seventeenth century one pattern gradually came to be accepted as the standard for multi-faceted Table Cut designs. This was the Scissor Cut. Stones cut to this pattern had varying outlines and also varying numbers of facets, but square and rectangular Scissor Cut diamonds, to the exclusion of all other shapes, consistently had sixteen facets. Apart from these, no other sixteen-facet Table Cut diamond can be found in the pattern books nor are any mentioned in contemporary inventories.

However, a large number of pointed diamonds with sixteen crown facets are to be found among the designs for jewelry made in the second half of the seventeenth century. The most famous designer was Gilles Legare, today universally acknowledged to have been the most talented member of an illustrious family of Paris jewelers. In 1663 he was appointed Crown Jeweler. His designs are almost all of diamonds with sixteen facets. This means that they were all based on four part symmetry. By splitting certain facets the number could even be increased to thirty two.

Whoever it was who introduced this design, it was evident that it was based on architectural theory, in this case on the drawings of the famous Andrea Palladio (1518-80). It is amazing that the precise reproduction of this cut, which can only have been derived from the dodecahedron or the Burgundian Point Cut, could, right up to the present day, have been confused with the Rose Cut, which has always been based on a geometry of three.

The pointed, pavilion-based sixteen cut was called the Taille en Seize. To what extent such diamonds were fashioned, and whether straight from rough crystals or as recuts of Burgundian Point Cuts, can only be surmised. Not a single diamond in the 1691 French Crown inventory is described as sixteen-cut or can be interpreted as such. On the other hand, a fair number of both fancy and standard Brilliant Cuts are mentioned in various inventories of the last quarter of the century, and the earliest historical Brilliant, the Wittelsbach, dates from about 1664. In 1678 Alvarez, diamontaire to Louis XIV, is reported to have delivered to the king not only the Hortensia Brilliant but also twelve large and hundreds of small Brilliant Cut diamonds.

The existence of the Taille en Seize has been documented by only two acknowledged experts on jewelry—C.W.King (1867) and Clifford Smith (1908)—and eventually repeated by Evans (1970). King claimed that in the seventeenth century the octagonal diamond ‘was highly in vogue on account of its Pythagorean mystic virtue: and antique gems thus reshaped frequently occur in the signets of the time.’ King was right, except that he believed that the octagonal outline was produced ‘by slicing off the corners of the square’. Smith wrote that between the years 1641 and 1643 ‘a more systematic method of faceting in sixteen facets—the Taille en Seize—began to be employed about that time. This process, thought it left much to be desired, was an immense improvement, and set forth the qualities of the stone in a way that had not been possible by the forms previously in use.’

Even though numerous authors illustrate jewels with the Taille en Seize, they fail to recognize it for what it is and mistakenly call it a Rose Cut. It was only by studying the Pythagorean diagrams in Palladio’s I Quattri Libri dell’ Architettura (1570), and then comparing them with the numerous drawings of jewelry by Gilles Legare, published in 1663, that I finally understood the history of the Taille en Seize.