Jewelry Lovers

The rough piece is first of all reduced to the approximate size and then cut down on a circular saw impregnated with diamond bort. A wheel charged with carborundum is used for the coarse preparatory grinding, and fine cutting requires sandstone. The final stage is the polishing with tripoli on tin, lead, or felt laps, or on beechwood drums. Cabochons, that is, stones with domed surfaces, are cemented on to a stick for accurate guidance, and cut in narrow grooves on the edges of the grinding wheel.

To unite the fruits of human imagination with beauty is the task of the stone carver or engraver. Glyptics, as the technique of stone carving is called, is one of the oldest branches of art in the Idar-Oberstein agate-cutting industry. It embraces two main spheres. Of these the first is concerned with the production of miniature sculptures and artistic animal models. The astonishing multiplicity of colors and structures, and the varied comeliness of the ornamental stones is thus most wonderfully enhanced by the highly developed artistic sensitivity of the carver.

Obvious models, admirably suited for this, are flowers and animals, mainly in graceful forms of tropical birds, whose colored feathers find naturalistic representations in worked stone. A favorite material is pale shimmering rose quartz, one of the massive and rarely macrocrystalline varieties of quartz, colored by manganese. It is worked into bowls, figures, and especially into elephants with uplifted trunks, which in China are regarded as symbols of good luck. The more important part of the glyptic art, however, is the cutting of gems, the zenith of stone carving, which requires from artistically gifted hand workers the most exact knowledge of their material and the greatest precision in their work. The term “gem” is applied in a restricted sense to all gem and ornamental stones carved with pictorial designs. While in cameos the picture is carved in raised relief, intaglios show it in recessed or negative relief. The carving technique remains the same in each case. The derivation of the word “cameo” is probably from the Italian cammeo, coming in its turn from the latin gemma which gave gemmology its name and which means gemstone.

According to other sources it is a loan word from Arabic, in which chumahan means agate. By far the most ancient use of engraved gems was in the cylinder seals of Mesopotamia—small hollow rolls of jasper, onyx, sardonyx, or agate, with symbolic or mythological figures and inscriptions cut into them. The impulse which radiated thence in all directions gave rise to an indigenous craft in nearby Egypt. In Mycenaean and Greco-Roman antiquity, pictures with figures developed—signetswhose themes were chosen from myth, the world of gods and nature. With their exceptional feeling for the miniature, the Hellenes raised the art of stone carving to superlative heights. The Byzantine and, in part, also the Romanesque eras produced a number of large cameos, which were used as decorative pieces in crosses, reliquary shrines, and altar tables. The withering of the early Greek culture then interrupted the blossoming of the glyptic art for hundreds of years. It flickered into short-lived existence in the late antique period during the reign of Constantine in the fourth century and in the twelfth century at the court of Frederick in Sicily, to culminate in a renewed zenith during the Quattrocento, in the periods of the Renaissance and of classicism.

Some of the most sublime pictorial works were created in the course of these epochs. One of the most exquisite is the Tazza Farnese, a shallow bowl of white and brown sardonyx; it once belonged to Lorenzo the Magnificent, and may be seen in the National Museum of Naples. As barter for one of the most famous cameos, the Gemma Augustea (Augustan Gem), which is ascribed to the hand of the great Dioscorides, Pope Paul II made an offer to the town of Toulouse, in whose walls it was then to be found, to build a bridge over the Garonne, but in vain. Considered second only to the latter, the still larger sardonyx cameo Le Grand Camée de France (the Great Cameo of France), now exhibited in the Cabinet des Médailles of the Paris National Library, is said to have been made by one of Dioscorides’ sons—Herophilos, Eutyches, or Hyllos. In 1961 the Wurtemberg Provincial Museum in Stuttgart was able to acquire the well-known Jupiter Cameo of Gotha, a splendid multilayered sardonyx. Onyx and sardonyx are the preferred members of the quartz group for carving cameos and intaglios. The varicolored layers of these minerals most easily allow the sculpturing of a polychromatic design. Usually the images are raised in light color from a dark brown or bluish-black background after the manner of a silhouette, the optical effect of strongly contrasting colors being consciously sought, because of the small size.

It would be difficult to pick out names of the highest rank in the list of numerous masters of the glyptic art, all the more since we mostly depend on conjecture; moreover, many stone carvers of later times signed their gems with Greek names. Dioscorides, a contemporary of Pliny, his sons, and the stone carvers Epitynchanos and Skylax must be mentioned, likewise Natter and Pichler who, in the age of Winckelmann (eighteenth century) turned once again to the relicts of antiquity, and, in the present, the works of Martin Seitz and Richard Hahn, so highly prized by art connoisseurs. Their creations, all of which are pictorial, are made from the most noble minerals which have been entrusted to man from the darkness of the earth. He already made use, as early as the preliterary Sumerian epoch, of the rotating drill to breathe life into the precious material; today, he needs technology and the diamond-impregnated steel point with which to amalgamate the images of his fancy with the valuable stone into an artistic unity.

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