jewelry, history of jewelry, gems

Frégnac surveys European jewelry from the Renaissance through the Belle Époque, presenting jewels as expressions of changing artistic styles, fashions, craftsmanship, and social customs. Beginning with the Renaissance, the book follows the development of jewelry through the Baroque and Rococo periods, Neoclassicism, the nineteenth-century historicist revivals, and the innovations of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Particular attention is given to the relationship between jewelry and contemporary decorative arts, costume, portraiture, and court fashion, as well as to changing preferences in gemstones, precious metals, enameling, and methods of setting and mounting stones. Rings, necklaces, pendants, brooches, earrings, bracelets, tiaras, and other personal ornaments illustrate successive stylistic developments, while important surviving jewels and the work of notable designers and jewelers provide examples of each period. Richly illustrated, the volume offers a predominantly historical and artistic rather than gemological account of European jewelry over approximately four centuries.