Featured CAMEOS: Show & Tell or Ask & Answer

As I thought. That's Giovanna Di Rosa's site. She finds, & evidently can afford, beautiful things. Sometimes I see things she has offered on eBay turn up in Bonham's auctions too, as well as Ruby Lane. The market for very high priced unsigned shell cameos is quite limited, so she has to use many venues to catch the eye of enough people to find those few who are in the market.

I highly recommend to everyone a visit to her site if you do not know it. A treat.

 

ditto

 

In looking at the signatures of a whole lot of cameos, I've noticed three basic means of affixing a signature to shell.

I like to call them: Scratch, Solvent, and Sharpie (not saying it's actually, "Sharpie", silly)

Examples provided below.

I'm not wondering so much about the actual methods ("what kind of solvent?"), but whether the means of signing signifies any important information -- such as age, origin of training ("only Thermian-schooled use Sharpie!"), etc.

I'm asking, because in my head, I realized I was dismissing Solvent and Sharpie as "new" and now I'm not 100% certain that is accurate.

 

Interesting thing to make a little study of. 'Scratch' is the commonly used term, or sometimes incised, for the signatures applied with a sharp point.

The ones you reasonably call solvent I call acid etched. Think this is not my coinage, that I picked up terminology already in use.

Seashells are fundamentally calcium carbonate, easily dissolved by even acetic (vinegar) &, I would guess citric, acid. I can only guess at how it was done by how it tends to look. Perhaps brushed on free hand, allowed to sit undisturbed for some amount of time, then quickly washed off. They are rarely legible if you do not already know the name.

Signing in this way seems to go with the period early in the 20th century, 1920s, I think, when there seems to have been a renewal of interest, an improvement in skill level, & adoption of a modernized style of imagery among Italian shell cutters. Giovanni Noto & the Scognamigilio family are known names associated with this revival & what they started continues today, although not always with an equal level of skill & sometimes with a sensibility that is so modernized it reminds me of Japanese anime, quite likely due to Japan's being a, maybe the, market for most of this work.

If the style alone is not enough to tell you a piece is quite modern, the presence of the name cut into the front along with the design, very legibly & boldly, guarantees it. It is a very recent practice, but not out of keeping with tradition. The rare signed engraved gems from antiquity have the name engraved on the front & that was the norm. I doubt shell cameos were ever signed at all prior to the 19th century. On most this has been done by the scratch technique on the reverse. The Saulinis were unusual in routinely engraving on the front.

I realize as I think about it that Luigi Rosi & Filippo Tignani, active in the second half of the 19th, were unusual in scratching into the back of their hardstone cameos what almost amounts to an advertisement: full name, sometimes the date, words Roma or 'engraver' (in Italian, French or English), & complete street address. Rosi always engraved his name on the obverse, in the tradition manner; Tignani signed in all kinds of ways & I have seen one with an engraved signature on the front, but seems to have preferred promoting himself on the back.

The well named Sharpie method is something I don't see much, signatures applied this way may wear off, so perhaps done more often than we know. It strikes me as a lazy or hasty way of doing it. Can imagine some tourist visitor to a Neapolitan cameo workshop, buying a cameo, then asking Oh, can you sign it for me? I think your name accurately describes the method & therefore gives an idea of age.

 

Silly Cameo of the Day posting.

 

The universal symbol for 'No Bozos'? This is a perfect example of what I think of as nouveau italien. It would not have been surprising for the name to be cut in around an edge.

 

I would have been willing to spend serious money on that... but it probably still wouldn't have been enough.

LOL, I thought the same but it's so beautiful I'm willing to overlook the glaring use of artistic license!

 

Remember it as going over $1,000.

After all, how many times have you seen the Virgin Mary dressed the same way?

 

Wee lava cameo in silver followed me home.

 

I originally called it "etched," but decided it was confusing with "sketched" and the 3-S mnemonic worked for me.

This makes sense, because these are the ones that, once I stopped dismissing them out of hand, I started thinking, "wellll... they're not NEW-new, but ... I should ask someone about this sig topic."

They are just big blobby scribbles of sadness.

These people make me crazy -- they're everywhere and for research purposes these are two names I sometimes purposefully exclude.

...although... one of the current Scognamigilios makes some pieces that strike my fancy -- not from a cameo aspect so much as a "ooh, cool kitty jewelry".

Nice for if someone lost a piece and an honest person found it.

Of the ones I've seen, when mounted (and 99% of the time they are), they appear pretty darn new.

 

Oh, and a complaint, I am so over sellers who say, "it's signed, but I can't decipher it" and then just don't bother with showing the sig.

 

If you mean Amedeo, we'll have to agree to disagree. He has a little shop on Madison Ave. & Neimann Marcus carries, or did, his stuff. Sells for outlandish prices there; turns up on eBay for a whole lot less.

'Signed' but don''t show & won't answer a request for their best shot at it. 'Signed' but really inventory numbers. 'Signed' but they mean the setting; OK, just not the signature I care about. 'Signed' meaning the setting is marked for metal fineness.

 

Code for 'wee' on eBay is 'charm'. She has a surprising degree of wear for a cameo not set in a ring. Virgin Mary. Wonder if she used to be on a bracelet with other cameos with religious subjects.

 

heh heh... I love some of his monkeys.

Fear not, though -- I would never ever ever pay for them, holy crow.

Oh yes, all of those!!! "Signed" meaning maker's mark or hallmark makes me spit.

 

The monkeys I don't mind so much, But the prices for a simple design, indifferently cut, set in silver. If you pay full price you have too much money & too little taste.

I've learned not to get my hopes up too much from listing titles. Of course the best is when there's nothing in the title or body of description using the S word, but pix clear enough to show.

 

I appreciate the sense of humor in some of his designs.

But I admit -- for some of the pieces bearing his label, "indifferently cut" is kind.

 

Oh, good grief:

https://www.the-saleroom.com/en-gb/...aign=auction-alert&utm_content=lot-image-link

Chinese hornbill?!!!

 

Victorian English and not cut that well is more like it.

 

Victorian era Italian shell of a fantasy country scene.

 

Oh yes, good grief, Charlie Brown.

But. It does raise a question I've been meaning to ask -- I'm never surprised to see a closed back on a plastic/resin cameo, but I am surprised when I see it on shell. Is it just a quirk of the jeweler, easier to set for faster turnout, or...?

I haven't seen that many of them, but enough that I've been meaning to ask.