gems, glyptic, engraved gems, agate, cameo, intaglio, seals, cylinders, Italy, Renaissance

Gem making, or glyptic as it is conventionally called, produced artifacts which were highly prized in Italy during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Its esteem among artistic media arose from the inherent value of the materials and their enduring physical properties, and it demanded dexterous execution. Although the products of this work have been well explored as sources to which the expansive field of Renaissance art responded, the making of gems as a process has been scarcely studied by art historians in the same way. Period understandings of two ways that gems were made, by geological formation and refinement in artisan workshops, bring forward renewed insights that may apply more widely across media and across communities of viewers. The subterranean and artistic processes of making gems, one below ground and the other above, had more in common according to Renaissance thought than might be presumed. They were described in the period with a shared set of terms which centered on a particular activity, that of imprinting. A persistent vocabulary in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century usage is composed of the Latin terms imprimere and imprimitur; the Italian terms imprimere, impronta, and impressione; and their lexical and grammatical variants. Such words appear in a range of contexts which reflect understandings from the perspective of natural philosophy, as the geoscience of the time was called, and from the perspectives of medicine and astrology, which treated the origins and uses of gems in great detail. In practice, imprinting was a technical necessity in gem cutting workshops: the extreme hardness of many gem materials required the craftsman to impress them with slurries composed of abrasives, guided by tools and wheels. This dissertation examines the place of imprint in attitudes to gems ca. 1450–ca. 1550 in order to explore how they inform works of art in different media. To clarify layers of Renaissance knowledge about gems and responses to them, an essential groundwork in the sources uncovers the expansive range of meanings associated with the term gemma in Italian and Latin usage. On the basis of a reconsidered spectrum of meanings for gemma, period understandings of imprint as a formative feature of gems are seen in new light as paramount to attitudes about these objects’ origins and uses. At the center of this study’s reference to documentary and literary sources are primary evidence from Renaissance medicine, natural philosophy, workshop activity, letter writing, and antiquarian study, among other disciplines and practices. Reconstructing perceptions of gems’ origins in such ways, the dissertation applies the findings to ways of making sculpture and painting and to types of viewer response to these media. Chapter 1 gives an analysis of the notion of “imprint” in Italian and Latin sources in order to elaborate the heuristic concept unifying the rest of the chapters. Chapters 2–4 are a suite of case studies. The series is selective, prioritizing close analyses over a commitment to cover a field in total. It explores three important works in sculpture and painting by canonical artists: Donatello’s Chellini Madonna, Lorenzo Lotto’s Bernardo de’ Rossi and its associated Allegory, and Andrea Riccio’s Getty Madonna. The case selection is intended to address three themes that bring forward key cultural dimensions of gems’ intrinsic ties to impression. Principal topics in the sources on gems, they treat questions of combining physical materials, sensory relays, and intercultural resonance. This study demonstrates that designs in sculpture and painting could be modeled on the making of gems, a model understood not merely as a motif but as a process, and that such strategies could be perceived by types of viewer engaged with study and observation of mixtures, flows, and energies in different specialized fields of Renaissance knowledge. The approach reveals a particularly important relation between the beholder and the artwork. It explores the means by which perception of imprint in the artwork could engage one’s imagination, emotion, and cognition in ways modeled on contemporary understandings of how gems were made.