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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Bronwen, post: 4479451, member: 5833&quot;]I bought him on eBay about 6 years ago.&nbsp; Before I found this community, I posted some things on the Collectors Weekly Show &amp; Tell board, starting with this guy:</p><p><br /></p><p><a href="https://www.collectorsweekly.com/stories/224523-one-mystery-solved" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="https://www.collectorsweekly.com/stories/224523-one-mystery-solved" rel="nofollow">https://www.collectorsweekly.com/stories/224523-one-mystery-solved</a></p><p><br /></p><p>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.&nbsp; The large, heavy bail has been sawn through at the bottom, where it is narrowest, &amp; the whole thing slightly distorted by what looks to have been an effort to twist it off without having to cut it into pieces.&nbsp; Fortunately, the effort at removal was evidently abandoned.&nbsp; I had my jeweller remove the hook finding.</p><p><br /></p><p>There was a bit of drama after receiving it.&nbsp; 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&#039;t gold at all.&nbsp; I still don&#039;t know the exact fineness of the metal - that&#039;s not what I bought it for - but turns out seller had tested only front &amp; assumed whole piece was the same; jeweller tested the back &amp; made the same assumption.&nbsp; Based on seller&#039;s photos I always expected different parts to be different metals, so no nasty shock there after all.&nbsp; When leaving it in his hands to have the work done, I asked the jeweller to do some more testing on other areas.&nbsp; 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.</p><p><br /></p><p>As I recall, the listing was in auction format, with no bidders.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; (Although not cheap, it was quite a bargain by current market standards.)&nbsp; I just kept staring at a closeup pic of the face &amp; felt he was willing me to buy him.&nbsp; All I knew was that he did not look like any other cameo I had seen.</p><p><br /></p><p>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 &amp; others.&nbsp; (One has since come around.)&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; I was never shaken in my faith that the cameo is earlier than the 19th.</p><p><br /></p><p>Alas, the tips of most of the tiny points of the laurel leaves with which he is wreathed have broken off.&nbsp; But if he is the approx. 300 years old I think he is, he&#039;s not in bad shape.</p><p><br /></p><p>[ATTACH=full]388777[/ATTACH] </p><p><br /></p><p>In addition to the red on black color &amp; the choice of subject matter, Nero differs from other Victorian hardstone cameos I have known in the convexity of the surface under the figure.&nbsp; It is quite a solid piece of business.</p><p><br /></p><p>[ATTACH=full]388778[/ATTACH][/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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