JEWELLERY IN PICTURES
One aspect of the present subject, more attractive perhaps than any
other, is that which concerns the representation of personal ornaments
in pictures. Scarcely as yet have pictures been fully appreciated from
the point of view of their utility to antiquaries or the light they
throw upon matters of historical inquiry. The important part which from
the fifteenth century onwards they have played in connection with the
subject of jewellery is sufficiently attested by the number of times
they have already been referred to during the course of the present
inquiry.
The truth, reality, and accuracy of the artists' work has eminently
contributed to the value of these pictures. A sympathetic way of seeing
things and reproducing them and a fine feeling for naturalistic detail
is characteristic of all the work of the painters of early times, when a
strength of realism made its wholesome influence universally felt. Such
works, while they display the grandeur and magnificence of former ages
and point out the fashions and customs of our ancestors, show in detail
not only the bright splendour of patterned draperies in many materials,
but also the shimmer of goldsmith's work in the form of a variety of
actual ornaments, now for the most part entirely lost. In this way they
set before us details unnoticed by chroniclers, and convey clearer ideas
than can be attained by reading the most elaborate descriptive
inventories.
The special capability of the early painters for representing articles
of jewellery need merely be alluded to again, seeing the close
connection already shown, that always existed between them and the
goldsmiths, in whose workshops most of them passed their apprenticeship.
Every jewelled ornament figured in their works is, in fact, designed
with the full knowledge of a goldsmith versed in his craft.
The artists of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries are notorious for
the extreme and elaborate minuteness of their painting of jewels. In the
portraits of the time careful accuracy in depicting ornaments was the
duty, and evidently the delight, of the painter. In every early picture
the various details of costume and jewellery are rendered with
scrupulous care and refinement. Though placed in the most prominent and
decorative positions, jewellery was never, in the best works, allowed to
intrude or to occupy an exaggerated place in the composition. For
however minutely defined these accessories may be, they are so fused
into the general design that they are only apparent if one takes the
trouble to look for them.
In addition to recognised masterpieces, there exists a vast number of
pictures obviously not by the first masters, which, though of only
moderate quality, do not actually offend by their inferiority. These
equally well serve to illustrate details of jewellery and dress. In a
picture of the first order such details, of importance in themselves,
sink into insignificance beside the splendid qualities of a work of art:
in less important pictures the ornamental accessories are all in all. It
would be of great value to students if all public collections that
possess costumes and ornaments could bring together--as has been done
with marked success in the Germanic Museum at Nuremberg--series of
portraits specially chosen to illustrate these details, such portraits,
like the actual articles of dress and jewellery, being, of course, old
ones, not modern copies.
We may state, in general, that jewels figured in portraits are to be
relied upon as being the actual objects possessed by the persons
represented. All the early painters displayed, as has been said, a
special love for jewel forms. They not only took their beautiful
models as they found them, but being themselves mostly masters of the
jeweller's craft, they devoted much attention to the adornment and the
arrangement of the jewels of their models. It may be urged that painters
are apt to indulge their fancy by decorating their sitters with jewels
they do not possess, introduced to improve the colour or arrangement of
the picture, or introduced in accordance with orders, like those of the
good Mrs. Primrose, who expressly desired the painter of her portrait to
put in as many jewels as he could for the money, and "not to be too
frugal of his diamonds in her stomacher and hair."
It is unlikely, on the contrary, that any of the early painters departed
from their usual methods of truth, reality, and accuracy; or,
considering the elaborate detail with which they depicted jewellery,
that they ever specially invented it for the portrait in which it
occurs. It is much more probable that they worked from what they saw:
for masters of painting have in all ages worked from models in
preference to carrying out their own designs. An instance may be cited
of the care which painters paid to the ornaments of their sitters.
Preserved in the Archivio di Casa Gerini at Florence are certain
unpublished documents[189] of the years 1579 to 1584 relating to the
artist Alessandro Allori, in which is a list of the clothes and jewels
that had been lent him from the wardrobe of the Grand Duchess, Bianca
Cappello, when he was painting her portrait.
[189] Kindly communicated by the late Sir Dominic Colnaghi.
One or two of the peculiarities of artists in representing jewellery
are worthy of being mentioned. It is to be observed that the presence or
absence of gilding on jewellery often serves to distinguish between
German and Flemish paintings. Holbein almost always employed gold upon
golden objects; but in the works of Mabuse, so rich in elaborate detail,
paint alone suffices to produce the effect. The artists of those days
possessed a marvellous facility for imitating the brilliance of gold by
colour alone.
In examining the jewellery of sixteenth and seventeenth century
portraits numbers of what appear to be black stones are frequently to be
seen. These were evidently intended to represent diamonds. From early
times, when the custom existed of improving, as it was considered, the
colour of all stones by the use of foils, diamonds--the old stones of
Golconda and Brazil, different in colour and quality from the diamonds
of to-day--were usually backed with a black varnish composed of
lamp-black and oil of mastic. This _tinctura_, or colouring of the
diamond, which is alluded to by Cellini, would account for the intense
and clear blacks and whites used by the artists of the time in depicting
that precious stone.
In the work of some of the finest painters of the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries, so masterly is the handling, that in the
contemplation of broad effects one may fail to notice how much detail
the artists were able to combine with such breadth. In fact the detail
they displayed is hardly less precise than that of the earlier painters.
Mr. Davies[190] has some interesting remarks to make on the different
modes of depicting jewellery adopted by first-class painters--by the one
who paints it in detail and the other who treats it with freedom. "The
first paints you, touch by touch, his chains, his bracelets, his tiara,
link by link, and gem by gem, with precision so great that if you called
in a fairly capable goldsmith, of little or no intelligence, he would
use them as a pattern and produce you an exact facsimile. The second
obtains his result by summarized knowledge, letting his line lose itself
and find itself again, a flash on a link, a sparkle on a gem suggesting
all to the eye with a completeness which is fully as complete as the
literal word for word translation of the other man. Call in a really
intelligent goldsmith to this work and he would find it quite as easy
as, or even easier than, the other to understand and reproduce from, but
it would not do to make a tracing from, nor give as a pattern to one of
his unintelligent apprentices."
[190] Davies (G. S.), _Frans Hals_, p. 88.
Very attractive and valuable guides to the jewellery of the early period
are the early Flemish-Burgundian paintings (p. 90), and those of the
Italian masters of the fifteenth century (p. 167). The most fertile of
sixteenth-century pictures for the present purpose are the German
(p. 189), as may be judged from Herr Luthmer's _Goldschmuck der
Renaissance_, in which are reproduced in colours a number of specimens
of jewellery figured in contemporary pictures. In the second half of the
sixteenth century and the early part of the seventeenth, the painters of
the Low Countries especially excelled in the delineation of jewel forms.
Among these artists are Sir Antonio More, Peter Pourbus, Lucas de Heere,
Zucchero, Marc Gheeraerts, D. Mytens, Van Somer, and Janssens. By these
and by numerous followers of Holbein, many pictures were painted, and
exist in England at the present day. The technique of the great Dutch
and Flemish painters of the seventeenth century, even of such as Frans
Hals, was not incompatible, as Mr. Davies has shown, with the clear
representation of personal ornaments.
The majority of pictures of the early part of the eighteenth century
offer but slight indication of the jewellery of the time. The
conventional style of portraiture which then found favour did not allow
such individual characteristics as personal ornaments to obtain a place
in the portrait. In the canons for painters laid down by C. A. Du
Fresnoy of Paris, entitled _De arte graphica_, which ruled artists of
the first half of the eighteenth century, it was particularly enjoined
that "portraits should not be overladen with gold and jewels." "The
portrait painters," as Reynolds expressed it in speaking of his
predecessors as far back as Lely and Kneller, "had a set of postures
(and ornaments too) which they applied to all persons indiscriminately."
Seeing the reliance that may be placed on the jewellery figured in the
portraits of earlier times, it is not unnatural to expect such detail to
be of considerable service in art criticism. In the identification of a
portrait much may rest on the identification of its jewels: for "a
portrait," as Mr. Andrew Lang says, "with the jewels actually owned by
the subject, if not 'the rose' (for it may be a copy of a lost original)
has certainly been 'near the rose.'" But critics seldom think of
examining the numerous extant royal and noble inventories and other
documents such as wills containing lists of jewels, and of comparing the
jewels described in them with those displayed in portraits.
This method, neglected as a rule in criticism, has been employed by Mr.
Lang with conspicuous success in his _Portraits and jewels of Mary
Stuart_, and has served to identify the remarkable portrait of the
Scottish Queen in the possession of Lord Leven and Melville. Interesting
as it is when the jewels depicted in the portraits are identical with
those described in their owners' inventories, it is even more so when
the actual jewels thus represented have survived to the present day,
such as is the case with the Penruddock Jewel shown in Lucas de Heere's
portrait of Sir George Penruddock; the Drake Jewel in Zucchero's
portrait of Sir Francis Drake; the Lyte Jewel in the portrait of Mr.
Thomas Lyte; the earring of Charles I belonging to the Duke of Portland,
shown in Van Dyck's portraits; and the earrings of Henrietta Maria in
Lord Clifford's possession, shown in portraits of her painted by the
same artist.