The Pleasures of Collecting

by Gardner C. Teall

IN Beau Brummel’s time not to know all about gem-engraving, the intaglio and the cameo, was thought to be devoid of one of the most important cultural attributes of every eighteenth-century gentleman. Those were the picturesque days of post-riders and sealing-wax, days that scarcely anticipated the letter-writing necessities of our own time, when we can scarcely stop to put on the stamp and one lick of the flap has taken the place of the perfumed elegance of yesterday’s wafer, leisurely impressed with some exquisite seal.

It was only natural then that the seal should be a factor in the diversions of polite society while possessing a utility not yet exterminated by demands on man’s time. Not only did every gentleman have a seal ring, but often he had several, and sometimes many for different occasions. Frequently these seals or sigilii, as the Latins called them, were engraved with devices directly upon metal. However, the far more popular method was that which is one of our chief heritages from antiquity—engraving on gems or on semi-precious stones by means of the intaglio process. Intaglio, derived from the Italian intagliere (to cut into), means incised engraving, as opposed to the cameo process, or engraving in relief. Cameo-engraving is a later art, as generally practised, and cannot compare with that of intaglio-engraving, with which it has nothing in common but its subject and the material on which it is cut. An intaglio is the product of a reverse and much more difficult process than that by which the cameo is evolved. An impression from a well-cut intaglio leaves a very fine design in relief, and it is marvelous to behold the results obtained by the infinite pains of gem-engravers. In our own day the masters of the art can be counted on the fingers of one hand, so greatly has the demand for work of the sort diminished. Indeed, there is almost no call for it in America. Probably this is due to the fact that so few people really either understand the importance of the subject, the history of glyptic art, or realize the beauty of the fine works of the sort.

It should be borne in mind that although engraved gems, unlike Greek painted vases, are chiefly valuable as handmaids to history in preserving to us contemporary portraits of their times, they still make known to us, as Collingnon says, a whole phase of Greek thought that was developed in the Macedonian epoch.

The Greeks never greatly favored the Egyptian scarab beetle-form for engraved gems and later introduced the oval, which is known as the scaraboid form, especially popular from 600 B.C. to 500 B.C., in the Archaic Period. With primitive engraved gems and scarabs (2500 B.C. to 900 B.C.) as well as with later ones, the archæologist has to move cautiously, since imitations were manufactured at a very early time. The researches in Crete by Arthur Evans brought to light great numbers of engraved seals and stones that are unquestionably of remote antiquity, and, by the form of their engraved characters, indicate the existence of a system of writing of a far earlier date than had been assigned to calligraphy on Greek soil. The most interesting examples of this class were found in the Palace of Minos at Cnossos, and were used for sealing documents in the Cretan script, while others were used in sealing storage vessels. That there is nothing new under the sun seems again to have been demonstrated in the discovery at Mycenæ of a massive engraved signet portraying three ladies in modern-looking divided skirts, a subject quite as up-to-date as the beflounced corseted, frilled, and bonneted ladies that the Cretan frescos disclosed a few years ago, to the bewilderment of the Parisian dressmakers.

However, the intaglii which typically mark the early Mycenæan period are the Island Stones (900 B.C. to 600 B.C.), a name given to a lenticular stone of steatite, rock crystal, carnelian, or chalcedony, such stones being chiefly found in the Greek islands and in the Mediterranean region, where Mycenæan remains are to be found. The decorative devices employed were nearly always animals, such as the lion, deer, bull, goat, singly or quasi-heraldically arranged in pairs, facing in or facing out. Their artistic merit was often of a high order, though this excellence was somewhat over-balanced by the figures being arranged to occupy the entire area of a gem’s surface. As Dr. Walters of the British Museum observed, “this horror vacui, or dread of leaving a vacant space, was characteristic of Greek artists at all periods.”

The Transitional Period proper, from 500 B.C. to 450 B.C., produced very fine gems with genre subjects. These were probably influenced somewhat by the freedom acquired by the Greek vase-painters, whose art reached its perfection in that era. From thence onward no subject seems to have daunted the gem-engraver who reproduced the most intricate details and reduced to miniature marvelously well the beauties of those groups of colossal statuary that particularly inspired him, subjects from paintings or his own devices, or figures, heads and portraits of his contemporaries, men, women and children—portraits which must have been possessed of the virtue of likenesses to an extraordinary degree, else they would not for centuries have continued in such favor. As Renton says, “we are forcefully reminded of the extreme durability of engraved gems when we reflect that some at the present time contained in our museums and collections have been buried in tombs or in the earth; others have been thrown upon the shore, washed by the sea or exposed to fire, pillage, and other dangers, but still appearing with the engraving in some instances as clear, sharp, and defined as it was the day they left the artist’s hands.” It is this careful and peculiar finish to the work that distinguishes the truly antique gems from the spurious.

We have little reliable data concerning the artists in glyptic art from the primitive period represented by the Samian Theodorus, who made the famous ring for Polycrates, to the period of the art’s perfection, 450 B.C. to around 400 B.C. To the latter period belongs, by right of his excellence, Pyrgoteles, who engraved the seals of Alexander.

The least doubtful names, perhaps, are those of Agathopous, Apollonides, Aspasios, Athēniōn, Boēthos, Dexamenos, Dioskouridēs, Epitynchanos, Hērakleides, Hērophilos, Hyllos, Mykon, Nikandrus, Onēsus, Pamphilos, Prōtarchos, Solōn, and Teukrus, tedious to catalogue perhaps, still a small number out of proportion to the vast quantity of intaglii that have been recovered from the past. We are sure of Dioskourides under Augustus, but even in antiquity names were forged upon gems at a later date or by an alien hand, such forgeries being especially common from the time of the Renaissance on. Indeed, it became quite as much the fashion to mutilate antique gems by adding bogus signatures as it did later to imitate the glyptic art of the ancients and attempt to pawn off forgeries and fabrications on the enthusiastic but indiscriminating. Of this the reader will find further mention in the chapter on Fraudulent Art, which follows. In ancient times intaglii were also imitated in glass and much affected by the poorer classes, so early had the idea of cheap imitation jewelry taken root.

However, such work was obviously false, while there have been some very clever imitations engraved on very fine gems. The famous Poniatowski Collection was the greatest of the gigantic frauds of the sort perpetrated. In the happier days of the First Empire the patronage of the Empress Josephine had brought appreciation of the glyptic art to a pinnacle, whence it fell from mere discouragement by the exposition of the Poniatowski Collection fraud in a London market. These gems might best be described as regular pictures in stone and portraits of all the celebrated men of antiquity, each blandly “authenticated” with his proper name and the artist’s signature! No wonder collectors and amateurs turned, frightened, to scan their own collections. If such traffic was fostered by dealers of their time, what recourse had they outside careful and arduous scholarship? Still, minute rudimentary knowledge of gem-engraving and its chronological phases should at once have set them at ease. The amateur of to-day knows that a signed gem is an exception to the rule and rests secure in the knowledge.

Although the various periods of Greek glyptic art have been indicated, it may be helpful to repeat them here in tabulated form, following mainly Walter’s scheme of classification.