Jewelers Of Renaissance

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

5. The Jewel Age

Henry VIII had delighted to embellish his ample person with many glittering jewels, still Henry himself was able to dominate his ornaments and carry them without effort. But by the time his daughter, Elizabeth, came to the throne the family characteristic, love of finery, had developed into a consuming passion. With the devotion of a martyr, Elizabeth labored under a mass of precious minerals whose dead weight must have banished all thought of bodily comfort. Courage was an outstanding trait in that gallant lady. She must have been a Spartan to bear that load of stones and metal added to her voluminous robes of heavy material. Her wardrobe at one time included two thousand dresses, each of them probably stiff with jewels fastened to the cloth wherever there was foothold, and about as pleasant to wear as a suit of armor. Many artists of the day were employed to paint, with meticulous detail, canvases depicting these gloriously bejeweled costumes, together with the miscellaneous array of crowns, necklaces, bracelets, brooches, rings and earrings which were their accessories. Somewhere out of the midst emerged a face and hands. These pictures are called ‘portraits’ of Queen Elizabeth.

The grave and reverend anthropologist divides the progress of mankind into periods distinguished as the Stone Age, the Bronze Age, etc. With some degree of propriety one might venture to name the rich period of the Renaissance the ‘Jewel Age’. So manifold were the jewels and so exuberantly did the goldsmith lavish skill, imagination and painstaking labor on their fashioning, that one’s response to the glittering output of the times is likely to be dulled by reason of its very quantity. Therefore we will confine our attention within limits.

If it can be said that any one form of jewelry outshone all others during the Renaissance, that jewel was the pendant. The multiplicity of forms, uses and significances that a pendant could embody, the infinite variety of materials that could be used, and the extravagant expenditure of the goldsmith’s ingenuity—all these things appealed both to the craftsman and his customer.

The peculiar advantage of the pendant is that the slightest motion, even taking a breath, will set it vibrating and sparkling. In times past a pendant, more often than not, represented something other than abstract ornament. It was illustrative. A design in its simpler form might represent merely a bird or a flower, but frequently it went further than that and pictured some scriptural incident or some pagan myth that required groups of people. The point is that the design expressed a definite mental concept, not an abstraction. Sometimes the idea was carried out simply by a flat picture in enamels surrounded by a frame of gold and gemstones; sometimes the figures were wrought in bold relief; but not infrequently they were tiny group statuettes all worked out in gold and gems with the utmost elaboration of ornament. In fact the intricacy of ornament was so profuse in Renaissance jewels that it seems more related to design for thread-lace than for metals and gems. Examples of favorite subjects were Noah’s Ark; St George and the Dragon; and Faith, Hope and Fortitude. The Annunciation was one of the most popular of scriptural subjects.

Jewelers Of Renaissance (continued)