Title: Antique hand crafted jewelry Goldsmith filigree silver belt
Catalog Number: 4021
Category: Silver / Ancient
Artist:
Country & Origin:
Historical Period: 19th Century
Approximate Date: 1800 to 1930
Signature: Unsigned
Condition: Museum Quality
Size:
Height: 30 inches
Width: 1 1/2 inches
Depth: B - 4 X 2
Weight:
Description & Provenance: This is a wonderful one of a kind vintage hand crafted filigree silver belt. It took local craftspeople months to make this belt. A (filigree) belt crafted in silver and gold wash. A fantastic handmade creation of goldsmiths at the middle of 19th century. The belt is made of silver has some gold wash and very heavy in weight. Detail is very good. It is perfect. The belt is beautifully detailed and has a grape motif on each moveable link. The quality and workmanship here is quite impressive. The condition is very good just some light wear of the silver from many years of devoted use.
Origin, Encyclopedia & Researched Articles:
Encyclopedia Name: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filigree
Filigree (formerly written filigrann or filigrane) is a delicate kind of jewel work made with twisted threads usually of gold and silver or stitching of the same curving motifs. It often suggests lace, and in recent centuries remains popular in Indian and other Asian metalwork, and French from 1660 to the late 19th century. filigree involves threads being soldered together to form an object and ajoure involves holes being punched, drilled, or cut through an existing piece of metal.
The word, often thought derived from the Latin filum, thread, and granum, grain, is not found in Du Cange, and is indeed of modern origin. According to Prof. Skeat it derives from the Spanish filigrana, from "filar", to spin, and grano, the grain or principal fibre of the material.
Verbal History:
In ornaments derived from Phoenician sites, such as Cyprus and Sardinia, patterns of gold wire are laid down with great delicacy on a gold ground, but the art was advanced to its highest perfection in the Greek and Etruscan filigree of the 6th to the 3rd centuries BC. A number of earrings and other personal ornaments found in central Italy are preserved in the Louvre and in the British Museum. Almost all of them are made of filigree work. Some earrings are in the form of flowers of geometric design, bordered by one or more rims each made up of minute volutes of gold wire, and this kind of ornament is varied by slight differences in the way of disposing the number or arrangement of the volutes. But the feathers and petals of modern Italian filigree are not seen in these ancient designs. Instances occur, but only rarely, in which filigree devices in wire are self-supporting and not applied to metal plates.
The museum of the Hermitage at Saint Petersburg contains an amazingly rich collection of Scythian jewelry from the tombs of the Crimea. Many bracelets and necklaces in that collection are made of twisted wire, some in as many as seven rows of plaiting, with clasps in the shape of heads of animals of beaten work. Others are strings of large beads of gold, decorated with volutes, knots and other patterns of wire soldered over the surfaces. In the British Museum a sceptre, probably that of a Greek priestess, is covered with plaited and netted gold wipe, finished with a sort of Corinthian capital and a boss of green glass.
Though filigree has become a special branch of jewel work in modern times, it was historically part of the ordinary work of the jeweler.
The Egyptian jewelers employed wire, both to lay down on a background and to plait or otherwise arrange d jour. But, with the exception of chains, it cannot be said that filigree work was much practiced by them. Their strength lay rather in their cloisonné work and their molded ornaments. Many examples, however, remain of round plaited gold chains of fine wire, such as are still made by the filigree workers of India, and known as trichinopoly chains. From some of these are hung smaller chains of finer wire with minute fishes and other pendants fastened to them.
It is probable that in India and various parts of central Asia filigree has been worked from the most remote period without any change in the designs. Whether the Asiatic jewellers were influenced by the Greeks who settled on that continent, or merely trained under traditions held in common with them, it is certain that the Indian filigree workers retain the same patterns as those of the ancient Greeks and work them in the same way, down to the present day. Wandering workmen are given so much gold, coined or rough, which is weighed, heated in a pan of charcoal, beaten into wire, and then worked in the courtyard or verandah of the employer's house according to the designs of the artist, who weighs the complete work on restoring it and is paid at a specified rate for his labour. Very fine grains or beads and spines of gold, scarcely thicker than coarse hair, projecting from plates of gold are methods of ornamentation still used.
Calcutta is a famous place for filigri work, traditionally known as Calcutti Work. Cuttack in the eastern India state of Orissa, is also famous for its filigree work. Due to lack of patronage and modern design ideas this is a dying art. Most filigree work revolve around images of Gods and Goddesses.
Passing to later times we may notice in many collections of medieval jewel work reliquaries, covers for Gospel books, etc., made either in Constantinople from the 6th to the 12th centuries, or in monasteries in Europe, in which studied and imitated Byzantine goldsmiths' work. These objects, besides being enriched with precious stones, polished, but not cut into facets, and with enamels, are often decorated with filigree. Large surfaces of gold are sometimes covered with scrolls of filigree soldered on; and corner pieces of the borders of book covers, or the panels of reliquaries, are frequently made up of complicated pieces of plaited work alternating with spaces encrusted with enamel. Byzantine filigree work occasionally has small stones set amongst the curves or knots. Examples of such decoration can be seen in the Victoria and Albert, and British Museums. Examples include the Cross of Lothair in Aachen.
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