Cameo Signature Help Needed

Do you think he may normally work in this type of stone? Then black and red is unusual.

 

Your Beatrice is beautiful! Yet another subject I would like to have. I have done a bunch of searching for De Gaetano and have come up with nothing. Gaetano seems to be a common first name for cameo carvers- I have found several in my searches. But, of course, that doesn't help to identify the carver.

 

Nope. Will add her. TU

 

Wouldn't you know: finally someone who signs legibly & is nowhere to be found. If he worked in Paris or Naples, he may be harder to find than the Roman cameists.

 

This 1753 source has a long list of names, only a few that are familiar to me:

https://books.google.com/books?id=r...de gaetano cammei&pg=PR16#v=onepage&q&f=false

 

@ Bronwen- Glad to add to your signatures list. Do you have Michele Laudicina's signature? If not, I will post it tomorrow.

 

It's possible. Germany had a rich supply of lagenstein, layer stone, when he was working. Found an old German source that says he made engraved gems 'for the Jews'. Don't know whether to interpret this as for the jewellers, for the wealthy, for the educated, or all of the above.

I had been looking at barbarian leaders to ID him until I saw the Domitian, which is beautiful lapidary work, one of the treasures of Augustus the Strong, now in the Green Vault.



This is what gave me the clue that my guy could be a Roman emperor; found him very quickly after that.

 

Another one that's new to me. Bring it on!

 

You sort of knew already:

CAMEOS: Show & Tell or Ask & Answer

 

That is an unbelievable statue. And your ring is awesome. Have you had him in your collection for a long time? What made you buy him?

 

Okay, here you go. Michele Laudicina. This is in my collection. Laudicina was a successful cameo engraver before being recruited by Fillipo Rega into the Kingdom of Naples Treasury, where he engraved coin and medal dies. Here is a paper I found about Laudicina.

Here is the cameo and the signature, which is very light. I ran a pencil over it to make it more visible. I don't know who the sitter is, but maybe I will figure it out.

 

I bought him on eBay about 6 years ago. Before I found this community, I posted some things on the Collectors Weekly Show & Tell board, starting with this guy:

https://www.collectorsweekly.com/stories/224523-one-mystery-solved

The piece is quite a large pendant locket that some idiotic previous owner seems to have attempted to have made over into a buckle. The hook part was affixed to the back of the locket compartment. The large, heavy bail has been sawn through at the bottom, where it is narrowest, & the whole thing slightly distorted by what looks to have been an effort to twist it off without having to cut it into pieces. Fortunately, the effort at removal was evidently abandoned. I had my jeweller remove the hook finding.

There was a bit of drama after receiving it. Seller represented the piece as 18K in the title, said it tested as 20K in the description, while jeweller, who did an acid test in front of me when I first brought it in, said it wasn't gold at all. I still don't know the exact fineness of the metal - that's not what I bought it for - but turns out seller had tested only front & assumed whole piece was the same; jeweller tested the back & made the same assumption. Based on seller's photos I always expected different parts to be different metals, so no nasty shock there after all. When leaving it in his hands to have the work done, I asked the jeweller to do some more testing on other areas. When I picked it up he confirmed that what I think of as the more public areas of the piece were gold, without giving me a karatage.

As I recall, the listing was in auction format, with no bidders. I know I dithered until absolutely the last few seconds before it expired to finally send in the minimum bid, which was for more than I had probably paid for a cameo prior to that. (Although not cheap, it was quite a bargain by current market standards.) I just kept staring at a closeup pic of the face & felt he was willing me to buy him. All I knew was that he did not look like any other cameo I had seen.

Have had dealers who think pretty highly of themselves as purveyors of engraved gems dismiss him as just another Victorian cameo, probably in large part because the mount is Victorian in the archeological revival style popularized by Castellani & others. (One has since come around.) Could not get it through the head of one of them that no, he was correct, figure does not look like Nero as we know him from coins, that cameo is from an Italian Baroque notion of what a Caesar looked like. I was never shaken in my faith that the cameo is earlier than the 19th.

Alas, the tips of most of the tiny points of the laurel leaves with which he is wreathed have broken off. But if he is the approx. 300 years old I think he is, he's not in bad shape.



In addition to the red on black color & the choice of subject matter, Nero differs from other Victorian hardstone cameos I have known in the convexity of the surface under the figure. It is quite a solid piece of business.

 

Wow! That's quite a story. Congratulations on a beautiful find. It is a fantastic addition to a collection. He certainly is different from any that I have ever seen. The carving is very unusual. I hope that you will be able to find out more of his origins.

 

When searching on line for anything, anywhere, that was comparable, I began to notice that museums, when they don't know for sure, almost always attribute cameos to either Italy or France, rarely to any Germanic country, even though both finished pieces and raw material were a thriving industry there. There must be other cameos from this source out there, going unrecognized.

 

Thank you. Suspect your guy is a private citizen, not a public figure, despite the classical drapery, but...? Can I have him for Pinterest? And how about the ladies above? Female portraits are so much harder to come by than the gents.

 

That is often the case with 19th century gold jewellery, even 'good' pieces. Gold was so much more expensive than it is now.

He is very special and excellently carved. I'm sure it was worth it.

I have noticed that about other fields of art as well.
I think the old Vasari prejudice that northern European art was primitive still persists. And to think that even before Vasari, northern art was far more innovative and detailed than Italian art, thanks to the use of technological inventions like loups and concave mirrors.

 

Of course. Please place them on your Pinterest board

 

It is amazing how many dealers say they are "experts", but actually know very little about what they are selling. Then they set exhorbitant prices on items. I had a chuckle recently when I came across a cameo of "Wild Bill Cody" that was actually the classical depiction of Rembrandt.

 

There is also the consideration that the piece is functional, a locket, so the parts behind the face had to stand up to use.

Thank you. Haven't had any new ones in a while. Do you, by any chance, have individual photos of the ladies? They may get too pixelated if I lift them from the group shot.

Fortunately for me, my Rembrandt says that's who it is on the back, or I might have made the same mistake. .

 

And these were all people whose name in the business has been made on the engraved gems they handle. They also tend to be dismissive if they learn a piece was acquired on eBay & don't really look closely. Fine. Leaves better pickings for the likes of us.