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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Bronwen, post: 2706756, member: 5833&quot;]Very nice hardstone cameo, with only the teeniest, tiniest ding to the bridge of the now, which no one is going to notice.&nbsp; Noses on stone cameo rings have a hard life.</p><p><br /></p><p>I&#039;m only just waking up, but my preliminary searching confirms my suspicion that this as the sort of thing gets vaguely described as &#039;head of a youth&#039;.&nbsp; [Edit; original link did not work.&nbsp; Here a single example from search results:]</p><p><br /></p><p><a href="http://www.beazley.ox.ac.uk/record/8A1F8C4D-530B-4249-90FF-090A626D25AA" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="http://www.beazley.ox.ac.uk/record/8A1F8C4D-530B-4249-90FF-090A626D25AA" rel="nofollow">http://www.beazley.ox.ac.uk/record/8A1F8C4D-530B-4249-90FF-090A626D25AA</a></p><p><br /></p><p>However, my impression is that these &#039;unpublished Tassies&#039; (you don&#039;t need to know what that means) were written up by Oxford classics undergraduates &amp; described rather than identified.&nbsp; They may in fact have been identified in the Tassie catalogue.&nbsp; This one is ringing a bell.&nbsp; Some resemblance to <a href="http://www.beazley.ox.ac.uk/record/AD9CAF7F-16EF-4856-A088-B9918A677051" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="http://www.beazley.ox.ac.uk/record/AD9CAF7F-16EF-4856-A088-B9918A677051" rel="nofollow">Antinous</a>. Could be <a href="http://www.beazley.ox.ac.uk/record/D375754A-D5D5-48A5-A9C4-63D93C8180F0" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="http://www.beazley.ox.ac.uk/record/D375754A-D5D5-48A5-A9C4-63D93C8180F0" rel="nofollow">Augustus</a>.&nbsp; Need to look some more.</p><p><br /></p><p>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.&nbsp; I just spent some time looking at items in my own collection.&nbsp; I have a little bloodstone cameo brooch that I believe was made over from a gent&#039;s ring, which has a similar frame with a curved, closed back.&nbsp; The T hinge &amp; C clasp probably put the additions to the late 19th, so the original ring a bit earlier.&nbsp; (I imagine a widow having her late husband&#039;s ring made into something she can wear in memory.)&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; Eighteenth &amp; 19th century gem engravers mainly copied work from 2,000 years before, so dating hardstone cameos can also be difficult.</p><p><br /></p><p>Wish I could give you something more specific.&nbsp; The ring is later than Georgian but probably pre-1900.&nbsp; The cameo I suspect is early to mid-Victorian.&nbsp; After that there was a definite shift toward the pretty, away from the historical.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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