Jewelers Of Italy

(via 5000 Years of Gems and Jewelry) Frances Rogers and Alice Beard writes:

1. Etruscan Craftsmen

The early history of the jewelry-makers of Italy is not unlike the early history of the goldsmiths of Greece.

Something less than three thousand years ago there lived in Italy, north of the Tiber, an olive-skinned people known as Etruscans. They were sea-roving race with a keen taste for plunder-pirates rather than merchants. Raiding, however, was a dangerous method of acquiring goods and not always profitable; so the Phoenician traders with their colorful jewelry and other products of the Orient were welcomed by the Etruscans, who had raw materials and metals to exchange for manufactured articles. One may suppose that if a merchant ship of the East was booked to market her wares at Etruria she carried an extra large stock of bright beads, scarabs, precious stones and metal ornaments, for the people of Etruria seem to have had a very passion for glittering jewelry.

Etruria, like other foreign markets touched by Oriental influence, did in time learn the craft of the goldsmith for herself; and although she always continued to borrow designs, first from the East and then from Greece, she nevertheless carried their execution to a point ‘never since’, says one authority, ‘equaled in the jeweler’s art.’ Cellini, in his Memoirs, tells of an Etruscan necklace of exquisite workmanship which had just been unearthed. Said he, ‘Alas, it is better not to imitate these Etruscans, for we should be nothing but their humble servants. Let us rather strike out a new path which will, at least, have the merit of originality.’

Both men and women of Etruria wore quantities of rings. Many of these rings were set with copies of the little sacred beetle of the Nile elaborately mounted on swivels. Dull red carnelian from their won river beds was the stone most commonly used for the scarabs, but they were also expertly carved with amazing realism in fine sard, sardonyx and even such precious stones as the emerald, imported from Egypt.

The women wore elaborate head ornaments, fillets and diadems, or wreaths of leaves, all made of gold, with long gold hairpins topped with acorns or balls. They loved amber, which was set in silver, gold, or that moonlight-tinted gold called ‘electrum,’ an alloy of gold and silver.

The wearing of amulets was universal, and a conspicuous part of the Etruscan necklace was the hollow pendant in which the magic token was carried. The pendant, or bulla, was often made of two or more gold plates thin enough to take on a pattern when pressed against a stone mold into which the pattern had been cut. Sometimes several pieces of the molded gold were soldered together to form tiny vases, little heads of gods or goddesses, or small apes, or lions.

The Phoenicians method of decorating the surface of gold ornaments with fine grains was developed by the Etruscans to a point never equaled even by the Greeks. The tiny globules of gold were soldered, grain by grain, onto the metal surface, thus producing a rich and intricate design built with individual dots almost too small to distinguish with the naked eye. It is for this marvelous granular work, so frost-like in appearance, that the jewelry of Etruria is particularly famous. But in the course of the next few centuries her craftsmen, no longer conspicuously skillful, were producing work that was both coarse and poor.

Jewelers Of Italy (continued)