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Callais, Turquois

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62                   NATURAL HISTORY OF GEMS.
This identical art of inlaying with Turquois makes its appearance again in a quarter where least to be expected— amongst the Aztecs, when first discovered : wood or bone, however, being substituted for gold in the groundwork. Longolius gives a minute description of a monument of Mexican ingenuity in this line, shown to him by Gri-moaldus, Charles V.'s envoy to the Pope. He took it for a mask of the Devil (classically expressed, as "persona Furiae"), and, in truth, it fully bore out that idea. It was of wood, the features being represented by an inlay of Tur­quois, Emerald, and green and red Jaspers, as artificially as if painted ; the eyes of red amber, reflecting the beholder's face in a terrific manner. In the Hertz Collection was a mask of the same kind, but less elaborate, the inlay con­sisting of Turquois alone, with mother-of-pearl eyes, and tusks of ivory, the whole being " of aspect very hideous and terror-inspiring." It was accompanied with the sacri­ficial knife of Obsidian. Such an appropriate disguise is said to have been assumed by the priest of Tlaltoe, god of the earth and lower regions, when about to offer to him the accustomed human sacrifice on the summit of the Teocalli. Another relic, in the same collection, of this art was a human skull, similarly inlaid with patterns in Turquois and Obsidian ; and the sockets of the eyes filled in with disks of mother-of-pearl.
But to return to Grecian mineralogy, we need not be surprised at finding the term " Smaragdus," the synonym for green, applied to a gem now only valuable when of a pure blue. De Boot in his day defined the best as " exactly the colour of purified verdigris, presenting to the eye the agreeable greenness of a milky blue :" and even in the last century, according to Dutens, many people preferred the Turquois of that tinge, if pure and unclouded. The very-rare antique works in relief in Turquois, which have come
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