Description
This description was automatically translated from German. If you have any questions about this piece of jewellery, we will be happy to help!
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Jewellery in Renaissance forms with rich enamelling is a particularly precious field of collecting. Only a few of these precious pieces have come down to us over the course of time without damage or missing parts, so it is a special stroke of luck to find one of these period pieces.
Especially in the 19th century designs in this technique were realized. First of all, from the 1850s onwards, an enthusiasm arose in France for the era of François I and Henri II, which was understood to be an age of patriotic greatness. François-Désiré and Émile Froment-Meurice created jewellery around scenes such as the "Toilet of Venus", which at the same time made scholarly references to antiquity and yet in a cheerful way did not ignore the interests of this worldly life. Other goldsmiths such as Boucheron, Falize and Wièse followed - and in 1871 Paris was already considered the capital of enamel by the Art Journal.
In Great Britain, the development took a similar course. Here, too, the Renaissance was regarded as the national style, since it referred to the glamorous era of Henry VIII and Elizabeth I. John Brogden and Carlo Giuliano produced designs in London in the 1860s that were inspired by the jewels in Hans Holbein's paintings, which is why the style was called "Holbeinesque." Queen Victoria was seen as the new Queen Elizabeth and jewellery that linked this past with the present was thus seen as a badge of patriotic pride.
Finally, in Germany, jewellery in Renaissance forms became fashionable under the term "Old German Style". Here, since the 1870s, the Dürer period was invoked. Jewellers such as Huga Schaper in Berlin and August Kleeberg in Vienna supplied high-quality jewellery in the Renaissance style, as did their colleagues in Paris and London, richly decorated with coloured enamel.
The differences between the respective national styles, which were in any case more claimed than actual, became increasingly blurred towards the end of the century. Jewellery with artistic enamel, however, remained fashionable for a long time - for the artists of Art Nouveau, such as René Lalique, also liked to use this technique, albeit now in a completely different formal language.
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