Baroque-Era Rose Cuts of Colored Stones: Highlights from the Second Half of the Seventeenth Century

GEMS & GEMOLOGY WINTER 2020 Rose cuts encompass a variety of faceting arrangements, all of which lack a flat table (figure 1). In contrast to the considerable literature on the use of rose cuts in diamonds, there has been a dearth of information regarding their use in colored stones. The story of diamond fashioning started with the polishing and/or slight modification of the crystal faces of natural diamond octahedra, creating what is known as the point cut. Thereafter, simple table cuts were developed from the fifteenth century onward, becoming more complex over time (Lenzen, 1966; Falk, 1975; Tillander, 1995; Klein, 2005; Gilbertson, 2007; Ogden, 2018). Diamonds with rose cuts came later as a typical product of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, employing a cutting process that began with a rough cleavage fragment from a diamond octahedron. The standard appearance generally consisted of a flat base topped by a dome with six triangular facets at the center. Between the dome top and the base was an intervening layer with six, 12, or 18 additional facets (figure 2). Despite some inconsistency in terminology, these cuts are primarily denoted as Antwerp roses (6 + 6 facets), half-Dutch roses (6 + 12 facets), and full-Dutch roses (6 + 18 facets), respectively (Eppler and Eppler, 1934; Stranner, 1953). Visual evidence of the foregoing historical progression in diamond cuts is readily found in references depicting jewelry objects from bygone eras and in seventeenth-century sketchbooks of goldsmiths or jewelry designers such as T. Cletcher (1629) or G. Légaré (1663) (figure 3; see, e.g., Gans, 1961; Walgrave, 1993a,b; Scarisbrick, 1993). Political and economic circumstances related to the development of rose-cut diamonds are discussed by Kockelbergh et al. (1992) and De Bie (2014). In the decidedly less voluminous literature on colored stones cut without flat tables, the first appearance of such a faceted gemstone in art is found in a sixteenth-century painting by A. Bronzino (1542) portraying Venus, Cupid, Folly, and Time (an allegory of lust) (see Prim, 2018). The oval gemstone in that work shows a crown covered by multiple facets in the form of elongated rhombuses. Other isolated art and jewelry pieces from the second half of the sixteenth century and the seventeenth century likewise offer several examples (see, e.g., Prim, 2019). A notable influx of items displaying colored stones cut without flat tables then occurred with the 1912 discovery of the so-called Cheapside Hoard, dated before the Great Fire of London in 1666. Exemplars are contained in the catalog prepared for the 2014 exhibition BAROQUE-ERA ROSE CUTS OF COLORED STONES: HIGHLIGHTS FROM THE SECOND HALF OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY