Message:

<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Bronwen, post: 2166502, member: 5833&quot;]I have Walter Schurmann, Gemstones of the World, translated from the German, 1977.&nbsp; I have a couple of others, but they seem to draw heavily on Schurmann &amp; are more about pretty pictures than informative text.&nbsp; It&#039;s Schurmann I keep within arm&#039;s reach.&nbsp; I suppose because he was German, he gives extensive space to agate, the mining &amp; stone cutting at Idar-Oberstein, including <i>lagenstein</i>, layer stone, &amp; the making of cameos.</p><p><br /></p><p>The confusion of all these terms drives me nuts in the glyptics literature because they have been used so inconsistently.&nbsp; In recent years some books have come out documenting individual private collections of engraved gems that are beautifully photographed &amp; that do take more care about the terminology used for the stones &amp; try to regularize it.</p><p><br /></p><p>When the author got a last minute opportunity to add my previously unknown Leda &amp; the Swan to her paper on Teresa Talani, she asked me how to describe it in the list appended at the end of all the Talanis she had been able to find.&nbsp; I had a draft of the paper, so could see that other cameos had been described by their owners variously as hardstone, banded agate, or just agate, or chalcedony, or sardonyx.&nbsp; Any one of them would have been correct, with &#039;hardstone&#039; being the least specific &amp; sardonyx the most.&nbsp; (Of the handful of Talani cameos I have seen, all are sardonyx.)&nbsp; Sardonyx (white &amp; dark brown) is one color scheme of banded agate, one type of agate, all of which are formations of chalcedony, which is one kind of microcrystalline quartz, one form of quartz.&nbsp; Chalcedony &amp; the other microcrystalline quartz, jasper, are what is usually meant by the term hardstone (<i>pietra dura</i>.)</p><p><br /></p><p>I tried to tackle some of this here (it needs work):</p><p><br /></p><p><a href="https://cameotimes.com/index.php/reference/materials-guide?start=2" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="https://cameotimes.com/index.php/reference/materials-guide?start=2" rel="nofollow">https://cameotimes.com/index.php/reference/materials-guide?start=2</a>[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

Your name or email address:

Do you already have an account?

• No, create an account now.
• Yes, my password is:
• Forgot your password?

Stay logged in