Engraved Gem - Renaissance Revival

Renaissance Revival

The late medieval French and Burgundian courts collected and commissioned gems, and began to use them for portraits. The British Museum has what is probably a seated portrait of John, Duke of Berry in intaglio on a sapphire, and the Hermitage has a cameo head of Charles VII of France.

Interest had also revived in Early Renaissance Italy, where Venice soon became a particular centre of production. Along with the Roman statues and sarcophagi being newly excavated, antique gems were prime sources for artists eager to regain a classical figurative vocabulary. Cast bronze copies of gems were made, which circulated around Italy, and later Europe. Among very many examples of borrowings that can be traced confidently, the Felix or Diomedes gem owned by Lorenzo il Magnifico (see below), with an unusual pose, was copied by Leonardo da Vinci and may well have provided the "starting point" for one of Michelangelo's ignudi on the Sistine Chapel ceiling. Another of Lorenzo's gems supplied, probably via a drawing by Perugino, a pose used by Raphael.

By the 16th century carved and engraved gems were keenly collected across Europe for dedicated sections of a cabinet of curiosities, and their production revived, in classical styles; 16th-century gem-cutters working with the same types of sardonyx and other hardstones and using virtually the same techniques, produced classicizing works of glyptic art, often intended as forgeries, in such quantity that they compromised the market for them, as Gisela Richter observed in 1922. Even today, Sir John Boardman admits that "We are sometimes at a loss to know whether what we are looking at belongs to the 1st or the 15th century AD, a sad confession for any art-historian." Other Renaissance gems reveal their date by showing mythological scenes derived from literature that were not part of the visual reportoire in classical times, or borrowing compositions from Renaissance paintings, and using "compositions with rather more figures than any ancient engraver would have tolerated or attempted". Among artists, the wealthy Rubens was a notable collector.