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GENTLEMEN,
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I have asked
the favour of being permitted to lay before you, in a few words, the
result of my researches on the subject of the Art of Jewellery as
practised by the ancients, not only with reference to the forms which
ornaments, serving as such brilliant additions to the female toilette,
assumed at the periods referred to, but with reference also to the no
less interesting processes of execution employed by the artists of
those times. These processes are unhappily lost, with many other
secrets of a civilization which was the mother of our own, a noble
inheritance of which barbarous ages have robbed us of the greater part.
It
must with humility be confessed, that we see at present rising, as if
by enchantment, from the forgotten cemeteries of Etruria and of Greece,
objects in gold, of a workmanship so perfect, that not only all the
refinements of our civilization cannot imitate it, but cannot even
explain theoretically the process of its execution. It appears that the
Greeks and Etruscans had, so to speak, acquired a complete knowledge of
all those practical arts in their highest degree of perfection, by the
aid of which the most ancient people of the East wrought the precious
metals.
Once
initiated into the modes of treating the raw material, and of
subjecting it to all the caprices of their imagination, the artists of
Etruria and of Greece had but to apply these processes to elegance and
to the vast resources of the art, such as their own genius conceived.
Thanks to the vivifying breath
B
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258
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