(via Diamond Cuts in Historic Jewelry:1381-1910) Herbert Tillander writes:
The Taille en Seize can be seen in early seventeenth-century drawings of jewels by Arnold Lulls, Thomas Cletscher and occasionally others. Designers were still using it a hundred years later, but only in a restricted form—that is, as far as one can ascertain, with never more than sixteen facets, whereas Legare, with his special liking for this design, often used thirty-two.
It seems that the Taille en Seize and the Rose Cut had an influence on each other. Drop-shaped, flat-bottomed diamonds are clearly hybrids. Two such cuts can still be seen in the Imperial Austrian Sceptre, and three in the shoulder knot commissioned by Augustus the Strong. Jeffries depicts this as a standard for Rose Cut Pendeloques. Only a few of them are known actually to have carried—most of the illustrations represent ‘patterns’ of the kind widely distributed among jewelers all over Europe. All they indicate now is the period during which this particular cut was available. The drawings are so numerous that it seems incredible that no actual diamonds of this kind should have survived. All we know is that it was extremely simple to refashion a large Taille en Seize into a Brilliant Cut, and that it involved even less labor to transform a small one into a sixteen-facet cut with a square table facet. Was the Taille en Seize perhaps a premature cut which fascinated the professional but not the consumer?
Ecce Homo
This medallion contains thirty four variously faceted diamonds: ten of them are Tailles en Seize, and the remaining twenty-four are normal Rose Cuts.
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