Baroque Brilliants

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

The earliest commercially fashioned Brilliants developed, very logically, from dodecahedral cuts and crystals, and therefore had rounded outlines. The term Baroque, which derives from the period in which such diamonds were first fashioned, has a wider relevance. Seventeenth-century taste created a sudden admiration of and demand for an entirely new arrangement of facets—numerous small ones round an octagonal table, all sparkling as if they were full of light rays, some white, others in all the colors of the rainbow. Exact symmetry was not important; instead, we find attractive minor irregularities in both the shape and the size of the different facets. Many people, including myself, infinitely prefer this type of cut to the rigidly symmetrical Brilliants produced today. These old cuts may allow some leakage of light, but they have distinct personalities and immese charm. This charm was totally lost in the Brilliants that were mass produced by the large cutting centers of the nineteenth century, when a competitive price was far more important than brilliance and fire.

The term Baroque, therefore, should not be restricted to early cuts, but should apply to any similarly fashioned Brilliant of whatever period, including the Brilliants for which the London cutters were so famous in the eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth centuries, producing such diamonds as the Regent and probably also the Dresden Green.