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16thCentury Renaissance Ultramarine Angel GiltFiligree Crystal Medallion Pendant

About the Item

With artistic value as a Renaissance chiaroscuro painting with precious ultramarine lapis-lazuli pigment, this early 16th-Century period gilt-filigree silver pendant medallion encases a colorful figure of a winged angel with a staff in its left hand, which is protected by a bezel-set oval table-cut rock crystal. It is similar to 16th-Century European devotional medallions featuring religious icons, which are either painted on the reverse-side of rock crystal or on the enclosed enameled metal/vellum, such as at the Louvre and TheMet. Given the three-dimensional figurative technique with subtle shading and crystalline shadow-or-light colors of ultramarine, copper, gold, white and pink like the finest Italian paintings during the Renaissance, the medallion was likely painted by a professional artist or student based in Venice, where depiction of biblical subjects would have been influenced by its contemporary painters such as Bellini, Giorgione, and Titian. In further support of this origin, the angel's hair is arranged like a bob, which was a popular Italian style depicted in paintings until the mid-16th Century. Especially in Italy during the Renaissance, there was no division between the figurative arts and jewelry. Many of the famous Italian painters, such as Botticelli, served apprenticeships in the workshops of revered goldsmiths who created jewelry by commission. The type of jewelry on which such artists lavished most of their creative and technical attention was the pendant. So the artistic value of an Italian Renaissance pendant is always more than the intrinsic value of its materials. As the centuries-old medallion was found in the Polynesian Triangle along an ancient maritime trading route of the South Pacific Ocean, it may have been commissioned by nobility as a physical guardian-angel for a European naval officer, who would have traveled by Portuguese, Spanish, or Dutch fleet with international sailors and documentarians including Italians beginning in the early 1500s since navigation by Ferdinand Magellan. The medallion was purchased in the late 20th Century from a native Moorean resident near Marlon Brando's private atoll island, when the buyer was vacationing along this Tahitian trading route. While missing one of eight appliques on one side of the oval-shaped filigree frame, the oxidized-silver pendant is structurally sound with no loose parts. We think this accidentally asymmetrical shape only calls attention to its age and remarkable survival. It is unclear if the jump ring attached to the pendant bail is original to the medallion, while it appears handmade. As our photos of the front suggest, parts of the pendant seem to have been gilt, such as the twisted wire around the bezel and leaf shapes on the sides, which echo the secondary warm tones of the painting.

Metal:

Silver,Enamel,Copper,Gold

Stone:

Crystal

Stone Cut:

Old European Cut

Weight:

21 g

Dimensions:

Width: 2.19 in (55.63 mm)Depth: 0.5 in (12.7 mm)Length: 3 in (76.2 mm)

Style:

Renaissance