Valuables
|
Jewelry was similar to the type of clothing that was worn when it came to portraying rank and wealth. At the beginning of the medieval era, the only people wealthy enough to afford jewels and fine metals were the nobility. The larger and nicer your jewelry was, the higher in class you were. However, with the expansion of trade and commerce and therefore a more developed and larger middle class, more people could afford jewelry.
|
|
By the fourteenth century, the wearing of it became so common that, like with clothing, sumptuary laws were passed restricting the amount of people allowed to wear jewelry, based on amount of land owned and social ranking. Of course, these laws were largely ignored and many people of the middle class wore jewelry anyway. This caused the nobility to have to boost the extravagance of their jewelry in order to further distinguish himself or herself from the middle class. And, of course, the middle class caught on and did the same. So the cycle continued and jewelry became more and more lavish and embellished.
|
The interesting thing is that jewel cutting was still underdeveloped, so jewels then would have been much more dull and less colorful than they are now, and yet they were still extremely valuable. The main items of jewelry were brooches, belts/girdles, coronets, and necklaces/rings.
|
|
The real beauty of medieval jewels lay in the carefully designed contrast between the shining silver or gold and the decoration of the surface with niello, enamel, gems, and colored glass paste. The addition of various colored materials greatly enriched the surface of the jewel. Engraved designs were often filled with niello (a black paste-like mixture consisting of copper sulphide or silver sulphide), and then the surface was smoothed and fired. The result was a stark contrast between the matt black niello and the shining precious metal.
Serving then as declarations of status, markers of significant life events, expressions of identity, and protective talismans, the rings are highlighted as both physical objects and works of art, connected to religion, superstition, love, marriage, and identity. The rings are also displayed within the context of goldsmith work, manuscripts, paintings and sculptures that span the late second-third century A.D. to the 16th century.
