Featured CAMEOS: Show & Tell or Ask & Answer

A weekend amusement. I keep running into these productions in my searches:

https://www.ebay.com/str/amiraditransylania

 

I have never seen anything like this account. I'm surprised they're allowed to do this. AI photos (using celebrities wearing their pieces). SOLD OUT products, yet they've only sold one item.

I think the worst part is the actual jewelry they're trying to sell.

 

Definitely eye-catching. I see sellers sometimes include items that are already sold in a gallery of their wares on their own web site, but, yes, odd for an eB member.

 

Ye gads, Why?!

https://www.invaluable.com/auction-lot/Cameo-Pendant-388-c-FD6F5F20A3

 

Holy cow, $10,000????????????

 

Another seller with no idea of what they're selling, and a stupider buyer who actually bid on that.

I bought one of those Amedeo bracelets with a cameo on it at a flea market for $10. The cameo really looked like it was carved. Of course you can't see the back through the bracelet.

It's a crap home shopping network bracelet that is not hand carved, it's somehow duplicated. You can see the carving marks.

Thankfully I was able to sell it for $30. So, I not only got my money back, I made $10 after ebay fees and such. The buyer loved it. In the ad I wrote it was not a hand carved cameo. I wouldn't screw a buyer like that.

Someone on ebay had my exact bracelet for sale at $400. I told them it's actual value, and they argued it was worth much more.

 

I don't know whether Amedeo's pieces are still being carried by Neiman Marcus, but they were an early adopter, with NM prices. He has a shop here in NYC. I've never bothered to check it out, even if he does bill himself as the King of Cameos.

His website is just: amedeo.shop

 

This is created by the same person that does my D cameos. He's an incredible carver.

 

Looking at your Sistine cameo, I'm trying to figure out what is different, besides pert noses, between cameos from the Victorian era & earlier and cameos that are done in what I think of as the modern style. I'm no artist or art historian, I'm more of an "I know what I like" kind of girl, so my analytical tools and vocabulary for this are poor, but I think the older cameos were more sculptural while the new style achieves effects that are more like print. On older cameos the figure and ground are usually clearly delineated. Where there is a sheer billowing cloak the cameist might try to pare down the white layer nearly to the brown, but generally even background features are crisp.

On the other hand,



the way the figure of Adam is outlined by cutting into a gauzy white layer down to the brown is characteristic of modern work. It's seen in Giovanni Noto's work; it's possible he was first to employ this technique regularly.

Luigi Michelini, active in the first half of the 19th century, occasionally did something similar, as with the neck & collar here:



taking his cue from the way Gnaios, a famed gem engraver of antiquity, handled it:


https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/248206

However, it's really not something you see in the work of his contemporaries or immediate successors.