Featured CAMEOS: Show & Tell or Ask & Answer

I hadn’t bought a cameo in a while and my trigger finger was itchy so when I came across this I couldn’t resist! @Bronwen helped me figure out that it is Apollo. My first signed Lamant!

Before and after cleaning:



A few more photos:
(Bronwen, what do you think the other letters and numbers indicate?)

 

How beautiful! And how dirty it was when you got it. Looks much better now.

 

LOL...
According to wikipedia, "Apollo delivered people from epidemics..."
How timely, I'll have to wear him often!

 

What a difference between dirty Apollo and him after his bath!
Good catch, bluumz!

 

There's actually a whole tale about Hermes/Mercury delivering a town from plague by carrying a ram around it & Hermes with a ram ('kriophoros') is an image seen regularly on engraved gems. The Wiki article says worship of Apollo & Hermes got conflated in some places.

Bluumz is succumbing to my preference for restoring cameos to their original pristine appearance. It's possible that some of the dark material in crevices was left there deliberately to accentuate the lines. I've never found a written description of this technique but suspect it involves leaving some of the final polishing rouge. As we see, it is water soluble.

No way to know for sure but they can be put there by a dealer as inventory numbers or price codes. From what we found out about Lamant, he seems to have been a dealer himself, so could be his own notations. Looking through signatures I have on file, many have extraneous numbers/letters.

 

@bluumz In case you need more evidence:



This did have more brown on it - highly water soluble. An object lesson.

For everyone generally, these are visually very convincing, modeled from an actual shell. There are genuine shell ones, but if identical in all details to this one, plastic. Scene is of 2 maidens making offerings to an effigy of Cupid with his dog, emblematic of faithfulness in love. The doves are associated with Venus; the lamb symbolizes innocence.

 

Dear all,

I got my tax return this week and coincidentally there is an antique market today in my town. So I went there and I found an antique cameo ring. Could you maybe tell me who is pictured and how old it is?
Dimensions of the cameo are approx. 26.5mm x 19mm

 

Very nice hardstone cameo, with only the teeniest, tiniest ding to the bridge of the now, which no one is going to notice. Noses on stone cameo rings have a hard life.

I'm only just waking up, but my preliminary searching confirms my suspicion that this as the sort of thing gets vaguely described as 'head of a youth'. [Edit; original link did not work. Here a single example from search results:]

http://www.beazley.ox.ac.uk/record/8A1F8C4D-530B-4249-90FF-090A626D25AA

However, my impression is that these 'unpublished Tassies' (you don't need to know what that means) were written up by Oxford classics undergraduates & described rather than identified. They may in fact have been identified in the Tassie catalogue. This one is ringing a bell. Some resemblance to Antinous. Could be Augustus. Need to look some more.

The ring itself looks like it has been refashioned: the frame for the cameo appears to be rose gold; the split shoulder shank is yellow gold. I just spent some time looking at items in my own collection. I have a little bloodstone cameo brooch that I believe was made over from a gent's ring, which has a similar frame with a curved, closed back. The T hinge & C clasp probably put the additions to the late 19th, so the original ring a bit earlier. (I imagine a widow having her late husband's ring made into something she can wear in memory.) In truth, it is difficult to pin down an age because the construction techniques of the ring are so classic you could run into them today. Eighteenth & 19th century gem engravers mainly copied work from 2,000 years before, so dating hardstone cameos can also be difficult.

Wish I could give you something more specific. The ring is later than Georgian but probably pre-1900. The cameo I suspect is early to mid-Victorian. After that there was a definite shift toward the pretty, away from the historical.

 

This came in today.. it's broken a little bit on one side, another hair line crack on the other.. and signed L. Liguoro (?) on the back.. but it's pretty large..
On a side note, if I don't comment for a while, I don't receive notifications from this thread.. is this how it's supposed to work ?

 

Nice to find a signed one. The signature is acid etched, & they're almost always difficult to read, like bubble letter graffiti. Probably from the 1930s. Afraid I do not not know many names from that period, so don't have that advantage in trying to read it. Good job on the photo. Are you sure the first initial is L? I see a possibility it is G, as common for first names as J is in English. The Italians make a capital G like an oversized g.

Do you have other cameos? Or are we corrupting you? About notifications, you should get notices for any thread you have so much as given a like to a response; doesn't matter how long ago you have made a post, once should be enough. If you get notifications for other threads, doesn't sound as though the problem is with your personal settings. The system seems to be glitchy that way. Others have apologized for a delayed response to a tag, saying they were not notified. Let's see if you get a notice for this message.

 

It's the first signed one.. it might be G, I'm just guessing here and it's really hard to take picture of the signature..

The problem is not that you are corrupting me.. the problem is you made me incorruptible to the not so well carved ones and very corruptible to the beautiful carved ones.. and these are usually out of my range

For this specific thread I don't get them after a while if I don't post anything.. now I will get them because of my recent post.. I don't comment a lot on this thread, but I like to read about them and see the cameos... thank you for trying to help !

 

It is always hard; you did very well. It's the signature that's muzzy, not your photo. I only get a good pic of a signature by accident. I can't tell while I'm framing it whether that one is going to work, as what I see in the viewer is not always what the camera picks up, or the siggy is so thin & light it hard to see even directly. I can only say that having the light source hit at an angle seems to work better a lot of the time.

Good! Next step in one's downfall is deciding your price range is more than you thought. It felt like crossing a threshold the first time I bought a cameo for > $100 (prices have gone up overall since then.) The bargains are hidden in the poorly described ones, where seller is clueless or just not good at crafting a listing.

 

That also happens to me sometimes. If you click on the link at the top for "Watched Threads" you will sometimes find links to threads for which you've never gotten a notification. Seems to happen daily to me. And this thread is often on the list, as it was today.

 

Interesting to know. I never check there.

 

Ditto!

 

Good to know, thank you !

It seems I'm already falling.. but this a fall I very much enjoy..

 

Most of my cameos are not what could be called investment grade, but the ones that are I think will be more likely to hold their value, unlike money sitting in a bank account. In the current market they are nearly liquid. Not that I have plans to sell any time soon, but if I had to...

 

That's what I'm telling to myself too.. but my husband doesn't see it the same way..

 

How many tools does he have that he has only used once?

 

Ha ha.. correct..