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Vitrum Annulare, Pastes

Vitrum Annulare, Pastes Page of 384 Vitrum Annulare, Pastes Text size:minus plus Restore normal size   Mail page  Print this page
342                 NATURAL HISTORY OF GEMS.
I recognised its parent in a fine Sard, then deficient in the lower part, although perfect when the paste was cast from it some eighteen centuries before. In consequence of my information the gem. was secured by the then owner of the original : a coincidence perhaps unknown in the history of gem-collecting.*
As soon as the Glyptic art revived in Italy, the former makers of false stones now set to work to reproduce intagli in their own material, and such occasionally are to he met with in the jewelry of that ago, by which their date may be positively ascertained. For the most part these first essays are coarse, far inferior to the antique, and done in blue glass to imitate the Sapphire. At the same time, if a good antique, paste fell into an engraver's hands, existing spe­cimens show that, after repolishing, he passed it off for a real stone upon the enthusiastic but uncritical lovers of antiquity amongst his patrons. I have seen a false Garnet representing a Bacchic Feast with several small figures in the best style, mounted, in virtue of its supposed value, in a magnificently enamelled gold ring of the times of Clement VII. The paste of recent manufacture most in use during that period' was an opaque kind, a dull grey marbled with green and red, badly counterfeiting the Agate, but hard, taking a good impression of the matrix, and having much the look of a real stone, especially when polished. This false Agate is particularly mentioned by De Boot. But all that was done in this line was of small account until the art was taken up by the Regent Orleans, under whose patronage it rapidly attained to perfection and celebrity,
* Similarly the Berlin Cabinet possesses amongst Stoseh's gems a paste taken from the Taras on the dolphin, a Beryl existing in the Praun. Winckelmann, who has described the paste in terms of the highest admiration for the beauty of the design, was not acquainted with this fact.
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