Renaissance

In the Spring of 2002 a magnificent collection of works of art, including the largest private holding of Renaissance jewellery in Britain, will go on permanent exhibition in London. Welcoming the news, The Times said in an editorial, “Renaissance men and women knew a thing or two about embellishment … many of the period’s great names did their time in goldsmiths’ workshops, including Lorenzo Ghiberti, Filippo Brunelleschi and Sandro Botticelli”. These beautiful treasures were assembled by Sir Julius Wernher, who himself did time in the gold trade as one of the first gold and diamond magnates in South Africa in the late 19th century. His collection has now been lent to the British nation for 125 years.

The show is a timely reminder of the verve, the intellectual and artistic energy that was released in Florence and then through all Italy early in the 15th century. After generations in which artists and goldsmiths had largely served the church, they could suddenly go in pursuit of reality instead of a religious idea. Patronage was no longer ecclesiastical, but largely secular. Medieval art had been a flat, stylised depiction of things; Renaissance artists went back to the ancient technical skills for creating a harmony based on the reality of anatomy and perspective. As The Times editorial points out, many of the greatest Renaissance artists and sculptors were initially apprenticed as goldsmiths and one can add to that list such names as Donatello, Verocchio, Cellini and, from northern Europe, Albrecht Durer.

Even before this unleashing of artistic talent, the gold business in the Italian city states of Florence, Genoa and Venice was already well established; their mints issued gold coins, their banking houses with great names like Medici, Bardi and Peruzzi had a network of agencies throughout Europe – and many of Europe’s kings and princes were in debt to them. The bankers and wealthy merchants provided the patronage under which artists, sculptors and goldsmiths could thrive (though they often had great difficulty getting paid).

This commercial prosperity also underwrote an era of discovery, the search for new routes to the east and ultimately, with Christopher Columbus, west to the New World. The Portuguese were already pushing down the west coast of Africa by the 1440s, tapping directly gold production from the ‘Gold Coast’ that had previously come across the Sahara. The Portuguese issued a new cruzado coin of African gold in 1457. Sicily was also bringing in African gold in exchange for wheat. By 1488 the Portuguese had rounded the Cape of Good Hope, opening the sea route to India and the Far East. Just four years later Columbus discovered the Americas. Thus at the same moment new sources of supply for gold and silver were found in Central and South America, while direct access was achieved to major markets in the east. Gold coin was minted in Seville in Spain, in England (where Henry VII had launched an early version of the sovereign in 1489) and, as usual, the Venice mint was busy with ducats.

Europe’s goldsmiths were busy too. The combination of increased supplies and wealthy new patrons brought an enormous expansion of their workshops, not just for gold work but for silver plate and tableware. “The 16th century was a period of dramatic shifts of emphasis in the field of goldsmiths’ design,” says J. F. Howard in his book Virtuoso Goldsmiths. “The Renaissance remained the dominant influence … the century begins with Italy as the centre from which knowledge of and taste for antiquity was diffused throughout western Europe … (but) the Orient exercised powerful influence, particularly in goldsmiths’ designs.” Italy led the way with the best workshops in Florence, Rome, Milan and Venice and famous goldsmiths such as Benvenuto Cellini (see Renaissance Goldsmiths), Manno di Sburri and Antonio Gentile. However, by 1540 the talent was increasingly to be found north of the Alps, working at the French court in Paris, or in Antwerp, Nürnberg and Augsberg. The ‘virtuoso goldsmith’ in Nürnberg was Wenzel Jamnitzer (1508-1584) who was renowned for a remarkable sense of scale and perspective in crafting gold and silver. As J. F. Howard remarks in Virtuoso Goldsmiths, “The goldsmiths … showed outstanding mastery of sculpture in precious metals”. They were equally skilled at engraving them.

The goldsmiths were also mobile, moving from country to country, either to the court of a potential patron or to the workshop of a master goldsmith. Goldsmiths could be flexible because they had only to take their hand tools with them. Italian workshops seem to have been full of young German goldsmiths learning their trade, while Cellini, perhaps the greatest of all goldsmiths, was summoned to the French court in 1540 to work for King Francis I (the royal summons was quite convenient, since it got Cellini, a boisterous fellow, out of prison for some escapade). He spent five years in France, sculpting while he was there the gold salt cellar for which he is famous. “It was oval in form, standing about two-thirds of a cubit (12 inches/30 centimetres), wrought of solid gold and worked entirely with the chisel,” Cellini wrote in his autobiography. The salt cellar, now in Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches museum, is perhaps the supreme triumph of a Renaissance goldsmith.

The achievements of goldsmiths in Europe throughout the Renaissance period may be judged from the fact that the treasuries of kings and queens (such as Elizabeth I in England) were primarily in gold and silver plate, rather than coin. And on their peregrinations around their kingdoms they took much of it with them in their baggage trains. Kings and queens prided themselves on the goldsmiths who worked for their court, for their jewels or plate were items of prestige when they met other rulers.

Between 1400 and 1600 the Renaissance transformed European culture and society. In the first hundred years the revolution was in ideas, in painting and in sculpture, but after 1500, moving into the period often called the High Renaissance, the new flow of gold and silver from the Americas transformed the goldsmiths’ world too. Over 150 tonnes (4.8 million ounces) of gold was officially imported into Spain from the New World between 1503 and 1600; much of it went through the goldsmiths’ workshops. One other new invention helped them – printing. For the first time books on jewellery designs were printed and distributed throughout Europe. Cellini himself wrote a goldsmith’s manual, “Upon which,” says jewellery historian Graham Hughes, “any modern workshop could still base its activity”. Good testimony to the impact of the Renaissance on the gold trade.

The work of Renaissance goldsmiths, in both gold and silver, came to be seen in many Europe museums. Cellini’s gold salt cellar is in Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches museum. In Dresden the Albertinum Staatliche Kunstsammlungen has its famous Green Vault collection of European goldsmiths’ work, and in Paris Musée des Arts Decoratifs has a collection of jewellery and silverware, as does the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. The new exhibition of Renaissance jewellery from the collection of Sir Julius Wernher will be reviewed by GoldAvenue when it opens in 2002.