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Antique Column: Cameos

By Nadja Maril

Cameos are one of my favorite types of antique jewelry. They look great on everything from the lapel of a business suit to the collar of a frilly white dress. They are made from a variety of materials and often come with a story, often having been passed down through multiple generations.

You can wear one on a piece of velvet as an elegant choker with an evening gown or pin one of your favorite cameo brooches on to the brim attached to the brim of a soft hat.

While full-faced cameos tend to be more rare than those showing a profile , the value of a cameo is determined more by quality and materials than by subject matter alone.

By definition, a cameo is a small relief sculpture carved out of a single piece of stone or shell. The earliest cameos, made by the Romans and Greeks, were carved from hard stone, which can be difficult to work with since it is harder to carve than shell. When a design is carved within a concave area, leaving the highest parts of the carved design level with the edge of the stone, the piece is referred to as chevet, chevee, cuvette, or curvette. A well done hard-stone cameo is highly valued.

Most commonplace are cameos carved from shells. The varying colors in the layers of the shell provide contrast between the background and the foreground. Cameos are also commonly carved from lava, coral, ivory, and jet, as well as gemstones.

Reintroduced to modern Western culture during the eighteenth century, cameos became status symbols during the mid nineteenth century. If you wore a cameo, it signified that you had been on a grand tour of Europe, where of course you made a visit to Italy . A popular tourist destination was the ruins of Pompeii at Mount Vesuvius . Lava cameos made from limestone found in the region were sold as souvenirs. Nearby, at the seaside resort of Torre del Greco , craftsmen carved cameos from shell and coral, which they also sold to the tourists. Coral was believed to possess the power to ward off evil, and it became a popular material for cameo jewelry.

Victorian cameos favored naturalistic designs that included flowers and trees. Deities from Greek mythology, the biblical Rebecca at the well, and bacchante maidens, complete with grape leaves intertwined in their tresses, were popular subjects. The demand for cameos became so great that the quality of some cameos being made deteriorated as carvers worked faster and faster to meet their customers' demands. While cameo brooches were the most popular items, there are cameo rings, bracelets, earrings, and necklaces. Cameo jewelry was often sold in sets.

How do you judge a cameo? Look for fine detail, not crude, irregular carving. Unusual subjects, such as a biblical or mythological scene, are much harder to create and rarer to find than the heads or busts of men or women that are most commonplace.

One way of dating a cameo of a woman's head is to look at the profile of the nose and the style of hair and dress. The twentieth-century ideal of beauty is a pert, turned-up nose, but a nineteenth-century cameo will have a woman with a nose that is aquiline or Romanesque. Often in cameos, both antique and contemporary, a woman wears a necklace or other piece of jewelry set with a small diamond. These are called cameos habilles, a French term for dressed up.

The opposite of a cameo is an intaglio. The design is carved and recessed into the stone below the surface. Important documents were folded closed and fastened with melted wax that was then marked with a seal that identified their senders . Intaglio designs were often carved into rings for that purpose as well as placed on watch fobs and other ornamental pieces of jewelry. Intaglios are always carved from hard stone or glass, never from a soft material such as shell. Today you will often see imitation intaglios made of molded glass.

During the late to mid nineteenth century, reverse-painted crystal intaglios were very popular. Favorite subjects carved into the backs of smooth crystals of quartz included dogs and horses. Painted in realistic colors, they were backed with mother-of-pearl and then set into a piece of jewelry. From the front the animals look three dimensional. More recent imitations of this technique have been made using molded and painted glass.

When calculating the worth of cameo and intaglio jewelry take into consideration its age, condition, and quality and the rarity of the subject matter. Look at the material of the setting. 18-karat gold is worth more than gold filled or sterling jewelry.. A piece set in white gold provides a hint that it was made in the 1920s, when white gold was popular. Shell cameo brooches can range in value from $35 to more than $1000.

Editor Nadja Maril is a nationally known author and authority on antiques. Questions or comments for her column should be e-mailed to nmaril@whatsupmag.com or mailed to 929 West Street, Suite 208A Annapolis , MD 21401 with a SASE for the return of submitted photographs. Sorry, but Ms. Maril can only give detailed responses to readers' questions when she writes about the subject in her column.