While I rarely wear it, I love jewelry.  I don’t care for articles of conspicuous consumption, gold-and-gem laden stuff in which “luster = lucre.”  (My favorite period is Art Nouveau, whose sins of gaudiness are altogether different.) What I admire are pieces whose craftsmanship transcends their material value, whose conspicuousness is not done away with, but sublimated into the opulence of artistry and technique.

For beauty, delicacy, and technical mastery, no jewelry in the ancient world surpassed that of the Etruscans.

Gold Etruscan earring, 400–300 BC. British Museum. (Wikimedia Commons image.)

Even if you frequent museums’ collections of ancient art, you may never have taken notice of Etruscan jewelry. It’s a rarity. At a gallery of ancient art in New York City, I asked a curator whether an Etruscan ring for sale there could be worn.  “No,” he admonished. “If you lost this ring, it would be a tragedy.” Then, insouciantly flashing an ancient Roman ring on his finger, “If you lost this one, it wouldn’t be a big deal…” Roman rings are a dime a dozen–in the world of antiquities dealers, at any rate.

Perhaps you’ve never even heard of the Etruscan people,  a strange and wonderful early Italian civilization assimilated into oblivion by Rome. The Etruscan language is undeciphered, and there’s not much text  left to decipher, although the Romans reported the existence of an Etruscan literature. We do know that the Etruscans spoke a non-Indo-European language, i.e., one not native to Europe, which suggests that they immigrated from somewhere in the East. They practiced an unusual degree of gender equality. Their tombs are not grim antechambers of death, but staged parties.

But back to the jewelry. Etruscan jewelry became wildly popular during the 19^th century. Jewelers sought to imitate it, but the Etruscan technique of granulation eluded them. In the image above, you can see minscule beads on the surface of the central boss. After many failed experimental attempts to replicate Etruscan granulation, some 19^th-century jewelers  imitated the technique by hand-soldering individual beads onto the surface of a jewel!

The “fusion welding” technique of the Etruscans was ultimately revived not by trial and error, but the rediscovery and study of techniques that had survived in the remote village of St. Angelo in Vado in Umbria.  So in the substantial catalog of Etruscan jewelry’s charms may be found “the romance of lost and rediscovered mastery.”