PLATE XXVII
designs for jewellery by solis, woeiriot,
hornick, and brosamer
While many important engravings were being issued for the benefit of the jewellers of Nuremberg, a great quantity of jewellery was produced at Munich under the patronage of the Dukes of Bavaria. Duke Albert V had as court painter a skilful miniaturist, Hans Mielich (1516-1573), whom he employed to paint in the form of an inventory exact copies in miniature of his jewels and those of his wife, Anne of Austria, preserved in his treasury. In addition to these drawings, now in the Royal Library at Munich, are a number of others, which came into the possession of Dr. von Hefner-Alteneck, and on his death in 1904 were purchased for the sum of £2,500 for the Bavarian National Museum.[126] Though the majority of these drawings for jewellery, in themselves works of extraordinary beauty, were copies of objects then already in existence, the presence of jewels similar to Mielich's designs leads to the supposition that this artist exercised a strong influence on the jewellers of his day, and that a number of jewels were also executed at the command of the Duke from original sketches of his. None of the actual objects depicted by Mielich have survived, save a large gold chain set with pearls, rubies, and emeralds, which corresponds, particularly in its rich enamel-work, to one of the drawings lately added to the National Museum. This chain is known as the collar of the Order of St. George. The size and quality of its stones and the great beauty of the enamelled settings render it, without doubt, the finest article of its kind in existence. It is preserved in the Royal Treasury (Schatzkammer) at Munich, together with a number of other objects of the same type.
The last decades of the sixteenth century saw the appearance of a new species of ornamental design, whose chief advocate, Theodor de Bry (1528-1598), of Liège, with his sons Johann Theodor and Johann Israel, settled in Frankfort-on-the-Main about 1560. It is a rich and varied surface decoration, often of white upon a black ground, composed of scroll ornament richly set with flowers, fruit, grotesques, and figures of animals, the whole being charmingly designed, and engraved with great brilliancy of touch. In addition to his more famous knife-handles, de Bry executed several engravings for clasps, buckles, and metal attachments to girdles.
For the counterpart of the artistic style of de Bry one must look to the Low Countries and particularly to the work of the engraver Hans Collaert (1540-1622), of Antwerp, who developed remarkable fertility in the production of patterns for jewellery. Collaert's designs require special attention, because of the tendency, elaborated largely by him and other engravers of the school of Antwerp, towards exuberant cartouche ornaments with a mixture of extravagant and loosely arranged strap-work, and stud -or boss-work. This style, full of grotesques and arabesques, pervaded the work of every craftsman of the day, and dealt a final blow to any further development of pure Renaissance ornament. Collaert's chief series of pendants, eleven in number, published in 1581 under the title Monilium bullarum inauriumque artificiosissimæ icones, are probably the best known of all designs for jewellery of this epoch. One of these engravings, in particular, has been several times reproduced. It is a large pendant hung from a cartouche and surmounted by a figure of Orpheus with a lyre, with two seated female figures. The rest of the jewel is made up of scroll ornaments and bracket-shaped terminal figures, and is hung with three drop pearls. This pendant is of peculiar interest in connection with its bearing on what has already been said with regard to the attributions given to Cinquecento jewellery. Two striking instances of misapplied attributions of this kind may be quoted. In one[127] work the engraving in question is described as: "Pendant par Benvenuto Cellini (Musée de Florence)"; and in another[128] as: "Gehänge in der Bibliothèque nationale zu Paris nach seinem [Cellini's] Model gearbeitet!"
It has been usual—while acknowledging the great influence of these engravings on the jewellery of the time—to doubt whether jewels exist which have been executed in exact imitation of them. To show that such designs were actually followed, we may point to a jewel figured by Herr Luthmer in his catalogue of Baron Karl von Rothschild's collection at Frankfort-on-the-Main, which follows in every detail the particular engraving by Collaert just mentioned as having been ascribed to Cellini. Collaert's influence was considerable in his day, and his compositions circulated not only in Flanders, but also in Germany and other prominent jewel-producing centres. Jewels are repeatedly met with, which, though they do not follow in every detail Collaert's published designs, are obviously inspired by them. A very notable example of such is a jewel, to be referred to subsequently (p. 247), in form of a gondola containing figures of Antony and Cleopatra, which was sold by auction in London for a very large sum a year or two ago. With Collaert were several minor designers of jewellery, such as Abraham de Bruyn (1538-after 1600), among whose engravings are seventeen models for pendants and portions of jewels in the style of the admirable French jeweller-engraver Etienne Delaune. Other Dutch and Flemish engravers of ornament belong more to the seventeenth century, and will be dealt with later.
At the furthest corner of Germany from Flanders was the ancient kingdom of Hungary, where jewellery was employed in almost Oriental profusion. The native costume is luxurious even at the present day, and in olden times the nobility made a practice of attaching to it a great part of their fortunes in the form of precious stones, which, in enamelled settings of button-shape, termed "boglars," were sewn on, or were mounted in aigrettes, or set in girdles or dagger-sheaths. Independent jewels enriched with enamel-work in the Renaissance taste were produced, too, in considerable quantity. Fine examples of the latter are preserved in the museum at Buda-Pesth; while to the exhibition held there in 1884 Cinquecento jewellery of great beauty and wealth was lent by noble Hungarian families. All these display striking similarity to the jewels executed at Augsburg, Prague, and elsewhere in the latter part of the sixteenth and the early years of the seventeenth century. In addition to those which betray the influence of foreign styles, there are jewels of native work, whose surface is enriched with the so-called Draht-Email. This "filigree-enamel," which was executed from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century in Hungary and throughout the valley of the Danube, is composed of bright opaque colours fired between cloisons or partitions composed of twisted wire.