gems, garnet, almandine, Germany, jewelry making, jewelry arts

The decorative craft of placing garnets on colourless or yellow glass was invented by Claudius vom Creutz in the Imperial city of Nuremberg circa 1589. The legal milieu surrounding development of the technique can be traced through information set forth in Imperial Privileges from 1591, 1653, and 1714, and in relevant historical literature, in particular various entries in the “Nürnberger Ratsverlässe über Kunst und Künstler im Zeitalter der Spätgotik und Renaissance” and the “Jahrbücher der Kunsthistorischen Sammlungen des allerhöchsten Kaiserhauses”. Details specified within the Imperial Privileges, and concomitant practices employed to protect the rights granted by such privileges via infringement suits, afford insight into the legal system from the end of the 16th to the beginning of the 18th century. Two glass goblets in the collections of the Bayerisches Nationalmuseum in Munich and the Glasmuseum in Passau exhibit a decorative embellishment of red stones that literature has attributed to the technique developed by Creutz. These were examined by X-ray fluorescence analysis, using a mobile facility within the museum exhibition rooms or laboratories and it was found that faceted Bohemian garnets with rose cuts were affixed by layers of reddish-brown or yellow lead glass to the bodies of the engraved glass goblets. This process entailed using heat to melt the lead glass, which simultaneously involved heating the garnets and the glass goblets below their melting temperatures.