Hearts

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

Gems which would today be classified as ‘triangular with rounded corners’ or ‘drops’, were at one time described as being heart-shaped. This is clear from many descriptions in French inventories dating from the middle of the seventeenth to far into the eighteenth century. It is quite possible that the term had a long tradition behind it. Another old French term for Heart was chapeau, meaning a tricorne hat.

Gradually, the conventional representation of the human heart became the standard outline. The earliest diamond of this shape that I have come across is in a portrait, A Gonzaga Princess, painted around 1605 by Frans Pourbus the Younger. The large piece of jewelry on the princess’s left sleeve contains a great variety of different cuts. The small Table Cuts and Hogbacks were especially shaped to fit very exactly into the scrolls. The pearly appearance of the small gems at the top of the jewel is puzzling. They may be pearls, but they could equally well be diamonds, like the half-moons in the brooch close to the neckline of the Princess’s dress. If they are diamonds, they are unique in having no facets at all; they must all have been bruted and polished by hand! Of course, they may well be cabochon-cut opaque gems of some other kind.

In August 1968, I analyzed the historical diamonds in a number of collections in Vienna. One of the stones, originally described as a Heart, was a tiny, flat-bottomed, multi-faceted pendeloque set in an oval mount on the Burgundian Court Goblet. Multi-faceted diamonds were not fashionable before the early seventeenth century. It is this fact that has, up to now, led people to believe that it was the final mastering of extensive fashioning that actually created the fashion for Rose Cuts and Brilliants.

E B Tiffany of Henry Birks, the Toronto jewelers, once sent me a photograph of a Heart which is in the Iranian Bank in Tehran. This diamond, said to weigh 22.93 ct, looks very like a Brilliant Cut. It is engraved on the flat end with a text in Persian, which indicates that it was fashioned in 1591 or 1592. It cannot, at that early date, have been an actual brilliant; perhaps it could best be described as a multi-faceted Table Cut.

Tavernier wrote that in 1665, among the treasures of the Mughal Emperor Aurung-Zeb, he saw a ‘trinket’ with a heart-shaped Rose Cut diamond (probably a regular Mughal Cut) weighing 35 ct. The French Blue diamond, when it had been recut in 1673, was also described as heart-shaped. The Blue Heart (31 ct) in the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, is another example of a Heart, and there are another two in a shoulder-knot by Diessbach in about 1673 and now in the Grünes Gewölbe, Dresden.