Rose Cuts

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

A Rose cut diamond has a flat bottom which is usually a cleavage plane. Therefore, by definition, it has no pavilion. The crown is more or less dome-shaped, and covered with triangular facets in a specific design, terminating in a point. It is, in fact, a Point Cut. As a rule, Roses are round, triangular or drop-shaped, but more fancy outlines also exist. Almost all diamond of this cut are foiled in order to improve their light effects. Most modern writers refer to faceted diamonds of the fifteenth, sixteenth and most of the seventeenth centuries as Rose Cuts, regardless of the type of faceting. This over-simplification is probably partly due to Cellini’s Trattato dell’ Oreficeria of 1565, in which he calls the three main types of diamond cut in tavola, a facette and in punta. A facette was erroneously understood to refer to the Rose Cut. Another source of confusion has been the term ‘Rose’, originally used to describe the clusters of small stones now called Rosettes.

Early sources contrasted faceted diamond with Points and Tables but did not go into further detail. For diamonds which are neither square nor rectangular they invented descriptive names such as Kite, Lozenge, Triangle and Shield. Fancy shapes with a flat top instead of the usual point were named Coxcomb, Calf’s Head, etc. These were, in fact, variations of the popular Table Cut, as opposed to the fancy pointed shapes with faceted crown and no pavilion which I have name Gothic Roses. One should really call this cut ‘the Gothic Flat Bottomed Cut’—a term more technically correct but impossibly unromantic! At first, Gothic Rose Cuts were only basically faceted and had no standard design, the cutter following the crystallography of his rough and applying only a small number of facets. He was forced to add further facets only when the rough did not favor simplicity, or in order to obtain a good polish, or to dispose of disturbing flaws and irregularities.

During the transition from the Renaissance period to the Baroque, the Table Cut gradually lost its long-lasting popularity and finally ceded to the Brilliant Cut. Glittering diamonds became the fashion, but there was often a great shortage of rough suitable for this new, pavilion-based cut. So a design of a richly patterned type was introduced, a pattern with six-part symmetry and a stepped crown on a flat base. In other words, the crown had two concentric rows of facets, the lower row to the bottom of the stone and the upper row meeting in a point. This ‘stepping’ or ‘crowning’ was the innovation which produced light effects previously unknown in the Gothic Rose. It looked like a small, half-opened rosebud, and this was no doubt why it got its name. The old Rosettes were by now forgotten, so the name Rose Cut could happily be given to a new cut. This was clearly a commercial follower of the forsaken Double Rosette, inspired by it and the Pointed Star Cut, and hardly, as frequently claimed, by the Mughal Cut.

The legendary collection of religious objects known as La Chapelle de Richelieu became Crown property. Among other marvels, it contained a statue of the Virgin said to have been set with ‘1253 small Rose Cut diamonds’. Another French document also mentioned by Bapst in 1889 refers to ‘une roze ronde taille a facettes de grande etendu and ‘ung autre diamant en roze fort jaulni’ in 1649. Two Dutch documents also mention this cut—the first, in 1640, recording two pairs of pendants set with large and small Rose diamonds. The second, dated 1688, describes a jewel set with ‘een heel groote Roos facet diamant of een crustal’, meaning that it was fashioned from a single crystal.

In 1661 Cardinal Mazarin, successor to Richelieu, bequeathed part of his large collection of jewelry to the Crown and the inventory refers to a large diamond called the Rose d’Angleterre, long thought to be a Rose Cut but now proved to have been something totally different, with an unusually large table. Bernard Morel discovered that the gem was given this name because, during the reign of Charles I and Henrietta Maria, it was set in a jewel decorated with the roses of York and Lancaster. Morel believes that the diamond ‘was fashioned much like a brilliant but with fewer facets round the large table, and multifaceted below the girdle.’

How We Learn From Our Mistakes

Laura Blue writes about how a common gene variant affects some people's ability to respond to, and learn from, the negative repercussions of their actions + other viewpoints @ http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1691924,00.html

Charade

Charade (1963)
Directed by: Stanley Donen
Screenplay: Peter Stone , Marc Behm (story); Peter Stone (screenplay)
Cast: Cary Grant, Audrey Hepburn, Walter Matthau, James Coburn

(via YouTube): Charade Opening Titles
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yjGDjwxRwpI

Charade - Criterion Collection Movie Trailer
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MdM81YPt6FM

A unique thriller-romance-comedy. I enjoyed it.

This Is My Mark ... This Is Man

(via The Guardian) Jonathan Jones writes about a painted cave on a par with Lascaux in France + an underground odyssey - beginning in Wales + other viewpoints @ http://arts.guardian.co.uk/art/visualart/story/0,,2222879,00.html

The New Climate

Robin Cembalest writes about the role that artists, arts institutions play in the revival and reconstruction of downtown New York + other viewpoints @ http://www.artnews.com/issues/article.asp?art_id=1012

The Road To Venice

(via The Outline of Art) William Orpen writes:

5

Justly famous by right of his own paintings, Giovanni is also renowned as the master of some of the greatest painters Venice ever saw, chief among his pupils being Giorgione and Titian. The first was born at Castelfranco in 1470, and was christened Giorgio, but ‘from his stature and the greatness of his mind he was afterwards known as Giorgione,’ that is to say, ‘Great George.’ Though of peasant origin, contemporaries say he was ‘well bred and polished all his life.’ He was of a loving disposition and exceedingly fond of the lute, ‘playing and singing divinely,’ and this love of music became the new note which Giorgione definitely contributed to art, for not only did he frequently introduce music as a subject in his pictures (e.g ‘The Concert’ at Dresden, and the man playing a mandolin in ‘The Golden Age’ at the National Gallery, and the ‘Fete Champetre’ or Musical Party in the Louvre), but all his pictures, as Walter Pater wrote, ‘constantly aspire to the condition of music.’ By this it is meant that everything in a Giorgione is subordinated to beauty, and that his first concern is to create melody of line and harmony of color.

The gentle nature of the artist, who found grace and loveliness in all men and all things, can be traced in every work of his that has survived the storms of time. In his great altar-piece ‘Madonna Enthroned, with St. Liberale and St. Francis,’ for his native hill town of Castelfranco, painted before he was thirty, Giorgione charms us alike by the rhythm and balance of the whole composition and by the lovableness of his types. The sweet simplicity of young womanhood in the Virgin, the naturalness of the Child, the knightliness of the soldier-saint Liberale, the welcoming gesture of the nature-loving Saint who could preach to birds and fishes and call them his brethren—all these things are manifest in the illustration of this beautiful picture.

It is a great misfortune that so many of Giorgione’s paintings have been lost or destroyed in the course of centuries. Barely a score are known for certain to exist today, but among them are some of the most splendid portraits in the world. His ‘Young Man’ in the Berlin Gallery and his ‘Unknown Man’ in the Querini-Stampalia Collection at Venice are examples of his power in portraiture.

Vasari tells us that Giorgione ‘did a picture of Christ bearing the Cross and a Jew dragging him along, which after a time was placed in the Church of St. Rocco, and now works miracles, as we see, through the devotion of the multitudes who visit it.’ We can form some idea of what the exceeding beauty of this painting must have been from the unforgettable head of ‘Christ bearing the Cross,’ which still exists in the private collection of Mrs Gardner, of Boston, USA.

But, alas! not a fragment has survived of the famous picture which Giorgione painted to prove the superiority of painting to sculpture. While Verrocchio was in Venice engaged upon the bronze horse of his splendid Colleone Monument, his admirers argued that sculpture, which presented so many aspects of a figure, was superior to painting. Giorgione maintained that a painting could show at a single glance all the aspects that a man can present, while sculpture can only do so if one walks about it, and thus he proved his contention:

‘He painted a nude figure turning its shoulders; at its feet was a limpid fount of water, the reflection from which showed the front. On one side was a burnished corselet, which had been taken off and gave a side view, because the shining metal reflected everything. On the other side was a mirror showing the other side of the figure.’

The scarcity of Giorgione’s work is partly explained by the fact that he died young. In 1510 he was deeply in love with a Venetian lady, who caught the plague, but ‘Giorgione, being ignorant of this, associated with her as usual, took the infection, and died soon after at the age of thirty four, to the infinite grief of his friends, who loved him for his talents, and to the damage of the world which lost him.’

I Sell Diamonds: Contrast In Methods

Louis Kornitzer's book, Gem Trader, is partly autobiographical and partly woven round the lore of pearls. It's educational + explains the distribution chain of gems, as they pass from hand to hand, from miner to cutter, from merchant to millionaire, from courtesan to receiver of stolen goods, shaping human lives as they go + the unique characters in the industry.

(via Gem Trader) Louis Kornitzer writes:

My friend and associate in Antwerp called me ‘faint heart’, but this time I was right and he was wrong. We had not gone our several ways above eighteen months when his fortune, which at one time may have reached the seven-figure mark in sterling, was swept away. But I consider that Fate did not, after all, deal unkindly with him. No one was the worse by a penny for his misadventure, and he himself was taken off suddenly, before he really felt poverty. His faults, and he had some, were such as the advantages of education might have eliminated, and his good qualities many. An untruth was an abomination to him. He dealt fairly, fave generously, and of him it might be said with justice that ‘loyalty’ was his middle name.

Such was my large scale dealing in diamonds, playing credits against thousands of pounds’ worth of goods over two continents. There are other sides to the game, however, and I have known most of them. One memory I have of a certain Malayan adventure, which I would not have missed for worlds. It was a fine, delicate, leisurely flavor, full of the adventure of Eastern trading. I will see if I can impart it to you.

There are still some parts of an ever-narrowing world left where an itinerant diamond merchant may unload a larger parcel of brilliants on an unsophisticated housewife than on the local goldsmith, usually, of course, at a better profit! Whether the good woman decides to pay in cash or in monthly instalments, the dealer knows his money is safe, for the Chinese ladies of Malaya are scrupulously honest.

I heard of one likely spot—this was during my Singapore days—and I determined to enlarge my circle of private customers, even though it must involve an automobile journey of four hundred miles, by roads none too good, and across narrow, rickety wooden bridges which might at any moment conspire with the fatalistic speed-maniac at the wheel to precipitate me into a crocodile-infested swamp.

When mercifully I arrived at my destination in an unmutilated condition, I did not know a single soul in the district, and had I not taken the precaution of providing myself with a letter of introduction to one Mirzah, I might have come away at once a sadly disappointed man. This introduction had been scribbled in Arabic Malay upon a half-sheet torn from a motor-accessory dealer’s price list. I could not read it, and for all I knew its contents might have proved embarrassing to me. But I was already taking so many risks that one more didn’t matter. If I knew nothing at all of this Mirzah to whose good offices I was commended, at least his friend, my introducer, was a propertied man and had supplied me with two cans of petrol. But all he had been willing to say of Mirzah was that he acted sometimes as a go-between for merchants if he liked their looks. My prospects of enlisting his cooperation, therefore, were of the slenderest.

When I presented myself at Mirzah’s tin-roofed one-roomed shack he was still at his early morning devotions. After he had perused my introduction, he scrutinized me carefully and then declared with an air of deep gratitude, that I had been sent by Heaven itself. It required little intuition on my part to divine that Mirzah’s cupboard was not overstocked, for hollower cheeks than his I had as yet not encountered in all my journeying across the Malay Peninsular.

There is an Oriental saying which I remembered as I faced my broker-to-be. It says that the All-Merciful never sends one of his winged messengers to earth, but chooses quite an ordinary mortal in pursuit of his own selfish ends, for bringing succour to the needy and comfort to the distressed.

In my eagerness to make the most of the few hours I had allotted to the small township, I asked at once whether Mirzah knew of anyone who stood in urgent need of diamonds. Mirzah replied that it was an ill things to discuss such important business on an empty stomach (he was doubtless referring to his own). I at once agreed to postpone my business until he had broken his fast, for after all, it was only seven, a little more than an hour after sunrise. He offered me the loan of his best rattan rocking chair in which to compose my salesman’s ardor, and went on. I suspected that he had gone to get credit for provender on the strength of his prospects with me, for the news of my arrival in town had already reached the ears of even the most sluggard risers. Meanwhile I took a mental inventory of my host’s possessions.

Upon a large square of grass mat stood a solid hardwood table, surrounded by several high-backed chairs, which have evidence of being home-made. Two rocking chairs had apparently seen several generations come and go. A polished brass vase or two and a cheap color print on a wall, depicting their British Majesties, supplied the decorations. One outsize spittoon represented utility. The room itself was portioned off by a drab cotton curtain reaching halfway to the bare rafters, and hung loosely suspended from a thin, tautly stretched wire rope. Occasionally this curtain bulged and I thought I saw an eye applied to a convenient spy hole. Mirzah’s harem was slaking its curiosity.

Presently Mirzah returned with an armful of provisions. After some delay they were passed back to him through the curtain in the semblance of a substantial breakfast. He ate, I smoked. At length he was willing to talk business. He vouchsafed that there was a wealthy Chinese lady who had long waiting for such as me. She might be game for a good five carat stone, at a reasonable price, but he warned me that she knew what was what. There were also others, he told me, who might be tempted, but first call must be made on the old lady in the fine big house on the top of the hill. I would place myself entirely in his hands, I said, adding that I was ready to go. But he insisted that first he must send his serving-man to make sure that our visit was welcome. The man returned immediately to say we could come as soon as we liked, but Mirzah was not yet ready. He owed it to the English merchant, he said, and to the lady of the fine house on the hill, to make the most of himself. This time he disappeared for a long while behind the curtain, and when he came forth he was transformed.

I Sell Diamonds: Contrast In Methods (continued)

La Scala Opens New Season With Wagner's ‘Tristan’

(via Reuters): Milan's La Scala opened its new opera season with Richard Wagner's five-hour-plus spectacle 'Tristan and Isolde'. www.teatroallascala.org

Useful link:
http://www.reuters.com/article/stageNews/idUSL0661609220071206