Engraved Gem - Imitations

Imitations

Cameo glass was invented by the Romans in about 30BC to imitate engraved hardstone cameos, with the advantage that consistent layering could be achieved even on round vessels - impossible with natural gemstones. It was however very difficult to manufacture and surviving pieces, mostly famously the Portland Vase, are actually much rarer than Roman gemstone cameos. The technique was revived in the 18th and especially 19th centuries in England and elsewhere, and was most effectively used in French Art Nouveau glass that made no attempt to follow classical styles.

The Middle Ages, which lived by charters and other sealed documents, were at least as keen on using seals as the ancient world, now creating them for towns and church institutions, but they normally used metal matrices and signet rings. However some objects, like a 13th century Venetian Seven Sleepers of Ephesus, mimicked the engraved gem.

Another offshoot of the mania for engraved gems is the fine-grained slightly translucent stoneware called jasperware that was developed by Josiah Wedgwood and perfected in 1775. Though white-on-blue matte jasperware is the most familiar Wedgwood ceramic line, still in production today and widely imitated since the mid-19th century, white-on-black was also produced. Wedgwood made notable jasperware copies of the Portland Vase and the Marlborough gem, a famous head of Antinous, and interpreted in jasperware casts from antique gems by James Tassie. John Flaxman's neoclassical designs for jasperware were carried out in the extremely low relief typical of cameo production. Some other porcelain imitated three-layer cameos purely by paint, even in implausible objects like a flat Sèvres tea-tray of 1840.