Silver Jewellery - A Brief History

by Jeff Hall

Antiquity
Pre-Mycenaean

Silver was used in ancient Italy and Greece for personal ornaments, vessels, jewellery, arrows, weapons and coinage. It was inlaid and plated. It was also mixed with Gold to produce white gold as well as being mixed with baser metals.

Examples of ancient jewelry were found in Queen Pu-abi's tomb at Ur in Sumeria(now called Tall al-Muqayyar), dating from 3000 BC. In the crypt the queen's body was covered with jewellery made from gold, silver, lapis lazuli, carnelian, agate and chalcedony beads.

Aegean lands were rich in precious metals. The considerable deposits of treasure found in the earliest prehistoric strata on the site of Troy are not likely to be later than 2000 BC.

The largest of them, called Priam's Treasure, was a large silver cup containing gold ornaments consisting of elaborate diadems or pectorals, six bracelets, 60 earrings or hair rings, and nearly 9,000 beads. Silver was widely used in the Greek islands however only a few simple vessels, rings, pins, and headbands survive.

Mycenaean and Minoan.

Three silver dagger blades were found in a communal tomb at Kumasa.Silver seals and ornaments of the same age were also found in these regions. A silver cup found in Gournia dates to circa 2000. Some vases and jugs from Mycenae are also made of silver. Some of the Mycenaean blades are bronze inlaid with gold, , silver, niello and electrum.

Bronze to the Iron Age

Engraved and embossed silver bowls made by Phoenicians have been found in Greece. Most of them have elaborate pictorial designs of Egyptian or Assyrian character and therefore probably foreign to Greece.

However some simpler types, decorated with rows of animals and flowers, can hardly be distinguished from the first Hellenic products. A silver bowl from around the 5th century BC can be found inthe Metropolitan Museum of Art showing a fine flower style.

Silver vases and toilet articles have been found beside the more common bronze in Etruscan tombs. For example, a chased powder box of the 4th century BC in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Roman

During the 4th century BC, the trend of ornamenting silver vessels with relief was revived. This type of work, elaborated in the Hellenistic Age and particularly at Antioch and Alexandria, remained the common method of decoration for silver articles until the end of the Roman Empire.

A lot of Roman silverware was buried during the violent last centuries of the ancient world. The largest, the Boscoreale treasure (mostly in the Louvre), was accidentally saved by the same volcanic eruption that destroyed Herculaneum and killed Pliny in AD 79.

A slightly smaller hoard found at Hildesheim (now in Berlin) also belongs to the early empire. The acquisition and appreciation of silver plate was a sort of cult in Rome.

Technical names for various kinds of reliefs were in common use (emblemata, sigilla, crustae.) Weights were recorded and compared and frequently exaggerated. Large quantities of bullion came to Rome from their battle victories in Greece and Asia during the 2nd century BC.

Early Christian and Byzantine

The earliest Christian silverwork closely resembles the pagan work of the period and uses of the techniques of embossing and chasing. The design is sometimesclassical, decorated with pagan scenes.

Most of the silver has been found in Syria, Egypt, Cyprus, Asia Minor,and Russia. It is mostly chalices, censers, candlesticks, and bowls and dishes. The techniques of chasing and embossing were often employed, but abstract patterns and Christian symbols inlaid in niello were also used.

The 6th and 7th centuries saw the appearance of imperial control stamps,- early forerunners of hallmarks.

Middle Ages
Carolingian and Ottonian

In the last quarter of the 8th century the design focused on the human figure and the use of niello (chip-carving technique.)

Examples are the Tassilo Chalice (umlnster Abbey, Austria) and the Lindau Gospels book cover (Pierpont Morgan Library, New York City).

Most influential silver design was commissioned by Royalty or the church.Liturgical plate and reliquaries, altar crosses, and the like underwent no fundamental change; Ottonian work of the later 10th and 11th centuries can be distinguished from that of the 9th only in the development of style.

For example, the larger, more massive figures, with their strict pattern of folds, on the golden altar (c. 1023) given by Henry II to Basel Minster (Mus,e de Cluny, Paris), are markedly different from the nervous, elongated figures of the Carolingian period.

Romanesque

In the 12th century the church was the chief patron of the arts, and the work was carried out in the larger monasteries. Under the direction of such great churchmen as Henry, bishop of Winchester, and Abbot Suger of Saint-Denis, near Paris, a new emphasis was given to subject matter and symbolism.

Gold and silver continued to be used as rich settings for enamels as the framework of portable altars, or small devotional diptychs or triptychs and shrines such as the shrine of St. Heribert at Deutz (c. 1160) and Nicholas of Verdun's Shrine of the Three Kings at Cologne (c. 1200).

The growing naturalism of the 13th century is notable in the work of Nicholas' follower Hugo d'Oignies, whose reliquary for the rib of St. Peter at Namur(1228) foreshadows the partly crystal reliquaries in which the freestanding relic is exposed to the view of the faithful; it is decorated with Hugo's particularly fine filigree and enriched by naturalistic cutout leaves and little cast animals and birds.

The increasing wealth of the royal courts, of the aristocracy, and, later, of the merchants led to the establishment of secular workshops in the great cities and the foundation of confraternities, or guilds, of silversmiths, the first being that of Paris in 1202.

To be Continued