The Past Life Of Creating Jewelry

The Past Life Of Creating Jewelry

by

Victor Epand

The Duke of Buckingham could afford to have his favorite gems tacked on so loosely that when he chose he could shake a gem onto the ground. This helped him to obtain all the fame he desired from the pickers-up, who were generally the ladies of de la Cour.

In early times the jeweler was a trained artist. In Italy, where the art especially flourished, many of the great masters developed themselves out of training that began in the goldsmiths’ workshops. Francia of Bologna was a goldsmith, the very name he used was not his own, but that of his beloved master, to whom he felt he owed the success of his later years. As a result, he delighted in signing his pictures, Francia the Goldsmith.

Botticelli also used the name of the goldsmith with whom he studied. Ghirlandajo was a goldsmith and the master of Michelangelo, Verrocchio, and Leonardo da Vinci. Ghiberti was the stepson of a goldsmith and it was his training in his fathers’ workshop, that enabled him not only to design, but also to cast, the famous gates of the Baptistery at Florence, which Michelangelo said were worthy to be the gates of Paradise.

That is not necessarily how it is nowadays, because under the present system of division of labor, the jeweler should be a skilled artistic workman. He should also be able to produce the work to which he stands in the useful, though much abused, position of the middleman. It is essential that he should have the taste and training of an artist to be able to, with quick and sympathetic eye, see what is good and what is bad in the art that he fosters. When the public have learned to recognize jewelery as an art, then this will definitely change.

It is certain that there shall never be artistic jewelery, while we continue to think only of the material of which it is composed and not at all of the workmanship. It is because of the creativity of the human mind that the jeweler is able to turn raw, uninteresting material into a thing of worth and beauty. It is only when we see that bit of bronze or iron wrought into a beautiful and suggestive form by the cunning of man’s hand, then only will we sense the beauty in his heart.

Another way that beautiful jewelery may be produced from comparatively meagre material is by good design and skillful workmanship, which may be seen in a necklace of modern German work in South Kensington Museum. It is formed of small blackened iron medallions that are cast from the antique and framed in gold and are then connected by a double row of finely-woven iron links.

In the best of Greek art, you can find that the intrinsic worth of the material that was used in their jewelery is very slight and altogether subordinate compared to the beauty of the workmanship and design. Even the famous Milo necklace in the British Museum is a marvelous specimen of skilled workmanship, plus its value comes from the labor that went into it rather than the material.

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