Capsule history of jewelry. - Review - book review

Magazine Antiques, July, 2000 by Alfred Mayor

The New York Times humorist Russell Baker once concluded a spoof of the computer: "Since it is easier to revise and edit with a computer than with a typewriter or pencil, this amazing machine makes it very hard to stop editing and revising long enough to write a readable sentence, much less an entire newspaper column."

So you can imagine the consternation of a modern author obliged to write a history of five centuries of Western jewelry--materials, styles, manufacturing, and distribution--in 160 printed pages. Most sub-topics are limited to two pages, which are shared with large and educational illustrations. Clare Phillips of the department of metalwork, silver, and jewelry at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London has managed this horse race with aplomb, drawing entirely on the museum's very fine collection and what is clearly an encyclopedic knowledge of her subject.

The gallop through gold takes us from the third millennium B.C. to the late twentieth-century invention by Mitsubishi Materials of gold dust blended into a putty. This is shaped and fired, burning off the putty and leaving the shape in pure gold. The illustrations are just right: gold bullion from a Spanish galleon sunk in 1656, the lid of an eighteenth-century box made from several colors of gold (Diderot, in the Encyclop[acute{e}]die, named five, we learn), an Etruscan rosette incorporating the granulated gold that defied reproduction until the twentieth century, and a gorget made in Ireland about the seventh century B.C.

There are sprints through silver and platinum (two pages for both), base metals, diamonds, colored gemstones, pearls, glass and enamel (both in two pages),and "Other Organic Materials," The latter consists almost entirely of captions to examples of carved ivory, Irish bog oak (stamped, not carved, after 1852), tortoiseshell (boiled in salted water before being molded in heated dies), coral (which was imitated in plastic, stained ivory, and colored alabaster), a bracelet of braided human hair with a shell cameo clasp (quicker and cheaper to carve than hardstone), celluloid (looking like amber), and a brooch made in 1982 of ostrich-egg inlay on wood.

The central section of the book, "Chronology of Style," is divided with an equally refreshing eclecticism. The Middle Ages are summed up in a single spread. However, the Renaissance is allowed more breathing room. The "Renaissance Pendant" notes that Queen Elizabeth I's fondness for animal jewels was rewarded with New Year's gifts of a white hind, a greyhound, a scorpion, a turtledove, a nightingale, and a dolphin. A section entitled "Gloriana" highlights the cult that developed around Queen Elizabeth in the latter years of her reign "distracting attention from problems such as the great cost of the Spanish war, rebellion in Ireland and a series of poor harvests, and giving an air of omnipotence and a 'Mask of Youth' to the visibly ageing ruler." Wearing the queen's portrait became the fashion if not quite a duty, with Nicholas Hilliard (1547-1619) the miniaturist of choice. The jeweled settings for these portraits called for all the artifice of goldsmiths, enamelers, and jewelers.

The last homage to the Virgin Queen takes up her necklaces and their effect on fashion. As low necklines gave way to ruffs of starched lace, enameled gold and jeweled necklaces hung to the waist and below on men and women alike. One of the illustrations in this section is a trio of the most delicate necklaces imaginable from what is known as the Cheapside Hoard. This miraculous survival of more than thirty different enameled gold chains was discovered beneath floorboards in 1912 during demolition of a seventeenth-century London structure. Since the necklaces are in perfect condition, it is assumed that they represent the unsold stock of a goldsmith.

"Eighteenth-Century Paste" begins with the authority of a classical symphony: "Improved domestic lighting and the development of the brilliant cut, which sparkles so magically by candlelight, ensured the primacy of faceted gemstones in eighteenth-century jewellery. Diamonds were particularly prized, and new sources discovered in Brazil allowed the creation of heavily encrusted diamond ornaments. These factors also combined to create a greater demand for paste jewellery, designed in the same styles but made of imitation stones ofglass....All the familiar precious stones could be copied plausibly in glass, even opals, whose iridescent glow was imitated by placing a pink foil underneath a milky-blue glass." It is hard to imagine a more economical explanation.

Cut and polished steel jewelry became fashionable first in England and then on the Continent beginning in the late eighteenth century. One of the illustrations in this section is a French caricature of 1777 in which a lady with a huge wig staggers backward, blinded by the reflection from the faceted-steel buttons worn by an approaching man. In the end steel jewelry became so fashionable that it was imitated in silver.