Renaissance Chains
In the Renaissance, gold chains tended to replace collars, and portrait miniature of the donor tended to replace the earlier badges with symbolic devices, although "picture boxes" containing miniatures could be highly extravagant pieces of jewellery. The Elizabethan artist Nicholas Hilliard was both a goldsmith and miniaturist, and so produced the whole of pieces like the Armada Jewel, given by Queen Elizabeth I of England to a courtier. When the Earl of Rutland returned from an embassy to Denmark, sixteen members of his party were given chains of gold with the James I of England's picture, and others received just a picture. During the sixteenth century collars became marks of a specific office or Order, and subsequently remained so.
Read more about this topic: Livery Collar
Famous quotes containing the words renaissance and/or chains:
“People nowadays like to be together not in the old-fashioned way of, say, mingling on the piazza of an Italian Renaissance city, but, instead, huddled together in traffic jams, bus queues, on escalators and so on. It’s a new kind of togetherness which may seem totally alien, but it’s the togetherness of modern technology.”
—J.G. (James Graham)
“‘Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number,
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you—
Ye are many—they are few.”
—Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822)