Featured CAMEOS: Show & Tell or Ask & Answer

That's my devout wish.

 

That, or I hope someone with deep pockets and an axe to grind buys it to file the SNAD and teach the seller a harsh lesson on why you research first, sell second.

 

Hope they do not have the person who counted the horses also doing the accounting:

"carved as a three horse-drawn chariot"

 

I'm still inclined toward Hypnos, but see also Tassies #s 10132 ff.

 

Nahhh - he works for the NIHS these days.

 

It's always highly satisfying finally to identify a cameo subject after years of being on the lookout for it.

The gold paper collar around this has "Camillo Pestrini" written by hand in ink. I was never sure if he was cutter or subject.



As has happened so many times, eBay provided the clue, a framed pair of plaster impressions taken from engraved gems. One of them was this one:



Once I knew my cameo was a copy, I went on a hunt for more info. The Beazley Archive at Oxford let me down. Had to go through near the entirety of La collezione Paoletti, Volume II, page by page, but there it was: the Greek comic playwright Menander, after a sculpture now in one of the Vatican Museums. I should say so-called Menander, as the identification is not certain.

 

^5! Got 'im!

 

Thank you. I'm pretty chuffed. You can find a handful of other Pestrini cameos on the Internet, but all the ones I have seen are in hardstone, with the last name only engraved on the front. Two in a museum in Stuttgart are attributed to Camillo, but most others are tentatively attributed to Clemente (or Pietro, who seems to have been an ill-tempered hotel keeper). Stuttgart does not say why they believe theirs are by Camillo & I could not find any way to ask them. It is my belief that all the hardstone pieces are by Clemente.

Oxford's Bodleian Library has a database of letters that lists four that mention an engraver, Camillo Pestrini, all with 'cammei' among the key words. The letters are held by a library in Italy. Maybe the Antiquers community would like to take up a collection to send me over?

 

Our pages look very different & much more cluttered. It may be that EU regulations prevent/require some things that are not mandated here in the US. There used to be a small but clear choice to Report Item near the body of the description. There is now so much extraneous stuff interspersed in the actual listing one must do a lot of scrolling to get the simple facts about the item. I went through listings line by line, thinking I must be overlooking the option to flag an item, but...

 

Only bots are allowed to flag items now, apparently.

 

And here I was thinking it was all in aid of eBay getting the most money they can by preventing SNADS.

How does one tell the difference between black MOP and abalone?

 

Black MOP is dyed shell, or dyed something. It's naturally white. A lot of mother of pearl used in the last 50 years is synthetic. It's flat and far more stable than real shell. Using it doesn't affect an item's value. Black MoP is really shell given a fancy name.

 

I don't quite understand this question. I think we are not using the same definitions for the terms. For me, MOP = nacre. Nacre = the iridescent lining many mollusks produce to wear next to their bodies. (All produce a smooth inner layer, but we do not consider all equally attractive.) Abalone = one of the mollusks that produce nacre.

I do not know of any mollusk that produces nacre that is black in the way that the engraved piece that started this train of thought is black. If you look at photos of 'black' Tahitian pearls, produced by the black lip oyster, they are much more colorful than this. The various abalone species produce nacre that ranges from pastel glints in white to a riot of bright colors, like some black opal; I have never seen abalone nacre that was actually black.

The most economical source for sections of nacre to be used for engraving would be freshwater clams. Plentiful, easy to harvest, sturdy, large. I can't recall ever seeing an item promoted as deserving of a premium price based on the source of the nacre. (Not talking Renaissance footed cups made with nautilus shell here.)

These are mass produced using genuine shell that looks like abalone to me: