PLATE XXX
jewelled hat-ornaments, (aigrettes, etc.)
late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries
Though never in general use, feathers with settings mounted with precious stones and attached by jewelled brooches were worn long before this date; and Charles the Bold's hat—chapeau montauban—(Lambecius, Bib. Caes. Vindobon., II, p. 516) was enriched with feathers of this description magnificently jewelled.
About the commencement of the seventeenth century the feather aigrette was often replaced by one of precious stones. A jewel of this form is in the Waddesdon Bequest. It is 3½ inches in height, and formed of five plumes—three jewelled with rubies and diamonds and the others enamelled white—rising from an open-worked ornament in the form of military trophies, enamelled and set with four diamonds. A design for an aigrette of almost exactly the same style may be seen among the engravings for jewellery by the Augsburg goldsmith Daniel Mignot. The engravings of Paul Birckenhultz (c. 1617) likewise contain designs for similar ornaments. These jewelled aigrettes were much in fashion in England at the time of James I, and a "feather jewel" or "jewel of gold in fashion of a feather, set with diamonds," is mentioned several times in the royal accounts. The finely executed drawings for jewellery in the Victoria and Albert Museum by Arnold Lulls, jeweller to James I, include four coloured designs for jewelled aigrettes (Pl. XXX, 1). They are provided with short, stout pins, and set with rubies, sapphires, emeralds, and diamonds, arranged in the most tasteful manner, and are evidently intended to be further enriched with enamel. Other jewelled aigrettes in favour in the seventeenth century were composed solely of precious stones. Reference will be made to these in a later chapter dealing with the ornaments of that period.
HAIR-PINS
Besides the enseigne worn occasionally by ladies, the jewelled aigrettes of more frequent use, and the gold circlets set with precious stones, more elaborate forms of head-decoration were employed. Though these were often entwined with ropes of pearls and sprinkled with precious stones, they belong rather to costume proper. There remain, however, hair-pins, of which we obtain a certain amount of information from the inventories, and from the few actual specimens that still remain.
Hair-pins, like other articles of Renaissance jewellery, are remarkable for their variety of design, particularly as far as the heads of the pins are concerned. In the Germanic Museum at Nuremberg are several hair-pins with heads variously ornamented, one of them being in the form of a small enamelled hand. The shaft of the pin is often flat, open-worked and enamelled; occasionally the head is attached to it by a ring and hangs loosely from it. A gold enamelled hair-pin is among the jewels of Princess Amalia Hedwig (d. 1607), the contents of whose coffin, opened in the eighteenth century with those of the Counts Palatine of Neuburg at Lauingen, are now in the Bavarian National Museum. This pin has a small open rosette hanging loosely from it set with five diamonds and five pendent pearls. Contemporary portraits show how these pins were worn, and in a portrait of a young woman by Peter Moreelse in the Rotterdam Gallery, just such a pin is seen thrust in under the close-fitting lace cap so that the pendent head rests upon the forehead.
In the inventories of the time hair-pins are termed bodkins; and among Queen Elizabeth's New Year's gifts are several of these richly decorated bodkins. Thus: "A bodkyn of golde, garnished at the ende with four smale diamondes and a smale rubye, with a crown of ophales, and a very smale perle pendant peare fashone." "A bodkin of golde, with a flower thearat, garnished with smale rubyes and ophals on one side." "A bodkinne of silver, with a little ostridg of gold, pendant, enamuled, and two waspes of golde lose enamuled." In the inventory of jewels of Anne, Duchess of Somerset, second wife of the Protector Somerset (1587), is "a bodkynne of golde, with clawes in the ende, inamyled blacke."