Early Baguettes, Also Termed Batons

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

The term Baguette is often misunderstood because it has been used both widely and loosely. In the context of diamonds it takes its meaning from the French bague, ring. Nowadays this is used only to denote for any type of jewel. The diminutive form, baguette, consequently meant a small jewel, a ‘petit bijou sans valeur’. However, the cut which we now call a Baguette was developed from the Hogback into a design which is similar to a normal Table Cut.

To begin with, Baguettes and Hogbacks were considered unimportant and were mainly used in small jewels of little value. Since the early sixteenth century they were frequently ‘tailored’ for use in letters, initials and monograms, and joined together to give an impression of unbroken length. ‘Tailoring’ involved, for instance, the omission of one or both of the shortened facets. Two types were developed, one with quite narrow table facets and one with large table facets. The pavilions in both types were shaped as for full and mirror cut Table diamonds and noted as almost invisible reflectors. Unfortunately, with the increasing accumulation of dirt in the closed box setting, the impression of unbroken unity was gradually lost. This no doubt accounts for the short life of this cut.

Small Baguettes were frequently replaced by similar but flat-bottomed diamonds. In portraits and drawings the difference cannot always be detected. Our modern Baguettes, found so extensively in jewelry nowadays, are obtained by fashioning fragments in precisely the same way as the old Hogback which has, in fact, survived all through the history of diamond fashioning, though now renamed and with minor modifications.

Two types of rough Hogback can be obtained simply by cleaving. The number can be increased, depending on which cleavage face is eventually to be exposed to the viewer. These rough Hogbacks are then fashioned. One or both ends may be pointed and the ridges replaced by narrow facets. Finished gems are often multifaceted. Extensive transformation often makes it difficult to recognize the original cleavage.

With the growing demand for Hogbacks, cutters began to imitate them. They found that by limiting the fashioning to the crown and omitting the pavilion altogether, they could make use of the plentiful supply of thin diamond slices. The crown could be shaped and faceted in the same way as the pavilion-based Hogbacks. There was, certainly, a reduction in light effects, but brilliance and fire were not yet in demand and these small flat-bottomed Hogbacks proved to be perfectly acceptable. Nowadays, if a Hogback is in a closed setting, and especially if the foiling is stained, it is very difficult to tell whether the stone has a pavilion at all.

There are a great many portraits of sitters wearing large crosses of Hogbacks fashioned and combined in imitation of staurolite. This is a dark-colored mineral whose crystals are often found as ‘penetration twins’ in the form of a cross (from the Greek stauros, cross).

The Double Eagle pendant (catalogue number 49 in the Schatzkammer der Residenz, Munich) is one of the pieces which Archduke Albrecht of Bavaria and his wife, Maria Anna of Hapsburg, decided to add to the collection of the treasures of their House. It was most probably a wedding present to the Princess by her father, Emperor Ferdinand I. It is one of the few jewels containing a large number of Hogbacks to have survived from the sixteenth century.