Re-Enactment of Renaissance Jewelry

Jewelry was terribly important to many people of the Renaissance period. It'd be unthinkable to go without at least some small bauble. However, the bauble itself varied with social class, time period, and gender. If you look over the Garb Pages, URL below, you will see that most portraits don't seem to feature any jewelry at all, or, if they do, very basic jewelry.

If you haven't seen the history of jewelry essay, you might find it useful to visit there.

What to Wear

And also, some suggestions for what not to wear.

Pearls

Pearls are the last best hope for a re-enactor. You can't go wrong with them, no matter how many you are tempted to use. If you're female, put them around your throat, decorate your hair with them in long strands, sew them to your garb, wear them as pendants and brooches. Pearls are good used as drops from pendants and brooches. Round is the shape that pays here (avoid "potato" or "rice" shapes), though the bigger they get, the more pear-shaped they seem to get. Freshwater is fine, and so is glass. If you are male, hat-pins featuring pearls are very fashionable. I get the feeling pearls were about the most popular gemstone, bar none, of the period, so have fun with them.

Gemstones

Cabuchon (nonfaceted and round-topped) or faceted, you can go either way. Avoid rhinestones and sequins and anything too sparkly. The simpler facets are what you should aim for -- no brilliant-cut diamonds. If you can find "table cut" gems, that's a good bet. As for what sort of stone, just about anything short of turquoise and jade should be fine. Very high-status Italians wore mostly diamonds, sapphires, emeralds, and rubies, but be aware that imitations abounded. Don't fret if you have to wear imitation gems. Incidentally, heart-shaped stones were pretty fashionable too.

Gold or Silver?

Oh, either one! Very high-status people wore gold, as they almost always did, but the more middling folk wore silver frequently. If silver's what you find, wear silver. One popular silver treatment was called "niello", meaning a darkening agent was rubbed into the recesses of the engravings to bring out the raised part more. Remember, though, that usually the star attraction of a piece of jewelry wasn't the metal itself.

Rings, earrings, necklaces, pins

Rings were extremely popular in period. Wear as many as you like. The most common form was a plain band with a wider flat bit on top where a gem would be mounted. If you want a necklace, go ahead. Women tended to wear snug necklaces and chokers, sometimes on the middle of their necks as collars. Necklaces almost always bore pendants, though the pendant could be simple in nature. Beaded necklaces were common -- they look a little plain to us, but they are seen often in those portraits that do have jewelry in them. Our "slim chain with a pendant hanging off it" doesn't seem to occur often. Usually the necklace is beaded somehow. Men wear very few necklaces. Most of them seem to be carcanets of office. Both genders, however, are seen wearing wedding rings.

Earrings are fine, but go with hoops (for pierced ears). The hoops were sometimes 1" to 2" wide, and are often beaded and have pearl drops on them. Keep designs simple -- concentrate on the stones themselves.

If you are lucky enough to find a brooch that looks right, wear it anywhere you like. Both genders wear them at the top of their doublet/dress opening, in hair (women) and hats (men), on their shoulders, anywhere that made them happy. Wear several if you have them. Brooches should be fairly clunky and not too fussy. Big pearls are good here, clustered around a central stone. Pearl drops are almost universal in brooches.

If you really don't want anything fancy, some women wore a simple cord around their throats, with no gemstones at all, or only a single bead strung in the middle functioning as a sort of pendant.

A Word About Closures

Truthfully, I don't recall seeing any clasps at all on Florentine necklaces. They don't really show that part of the necklace. Since most necklaces seem to have been strung on cord, I suspect they could slip over the head and were knotted in back (some of these necklaces are very simple and inexpensive-looking, so I suspect nobody paid much attention to making fancy jumpring style closures).

One necklace featured here (Portrait of Saint Catherine of Bologna with Three Donors, by the Master of the Baroncelli Portraits around 1470-1480) is a three-strand collar/choker style necklace, worn wound twice around the throat, beaded with what appear to be dark seed beads, with a three-holed gold spacer in front shaped like two clasped hands. The spacer itself is probably the clasp. I found very similar spacers at Fire Mountain Gems, though nothing like clasped hands.

Unfortunately, we don't have a lot of "everyday" jewelry from this era to check with, being that pieces were melted down to make new ones constantly, but I'm willing to go out on a limb and say that S-closures and wedge closures are probably all right. Cloak-clasp style closures seem like they'd be okay as well (Verocchio did a bust of a girl wearing a giornea closed with these in front, though I realize that may not mean that jewelry was closed that way too).

If you're going to make your own jewelry, be aware that if you deal with real pearls, you just about have to use silk cord (it's traditional modernly and I suspect the silk is gentler to the soft material of a pearl), and that many gemstones, esp. the quartz-based ones, will rip up cord and you have to use wire.

Examples

Ambrogio de'Predis, Bianca Maria Sforza, ca. 1493. Our lovely patrician lady wears both a lenza around her brow, along with an impressive coazzone and trinzale. Note the square-cut gems decorating the edges of the trinzale and the pearls wound around the girl's long ponytail; the pearls look multicolored, which would add beautifully to the drama. The brooch on the side of the girl's head is equally impressive, with long strands of small gemstone beads looping down to the shoulder. She wears two necklaces, one of just pearls, one of a cord or chain from which is suspended an elaborate chunky pendant with two gems (perhaps ruby and amber) and a pearl drop. Even her belt is lavishly bejeweled, with extremely large pearls and square-cut gems in gold settings. As fitting her station, Bianca is outfitted like a queen. To see her belt, please click on the thumbnail.

Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio, St. Sebastian, ca. 1490. Detail. This close-up depicts an angel wearing a garland of leaves in his hair. Jacqueline Herald mentions silver and gold garlands similar to this, so I'm including it here. Notice the pearl drop at the center, along with a cabuchon stone, and the pretty feather sticking up. Boltraffio is Milanese, but the fashion was reported in Florence as well.

Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio, Portrait of a Young Woman, ca. 1490. Detail. And here we have a young lady wearing the typical dark, thin headband and simple bead necklace of the period. There is some cross-hatching on her forehead above the band, suggesting that she is wearing a net of some sort. Her necklace is plain dark round beads with no pendant.

Albrecht Durer, Portrait of a Young Venetian Woman, 1505. Detail. This is a little late (not to mention Venetian), but it's very similar to the Mainardi portrait's necklace, except this one has no pendant. Two strings of 4 pearls are brought together by single dark green double-cone beads. At a guess, the pearls look like 4mm size.

Sandro Botticelli, La Bella Simonetta, 1475. Detail. This is a detail of the painting showing a simple black cord around this young lady's throat. There does not appear to be a pendant involved.

The Ferrarese School, Family of Uberto de Sacrati, 1490. Detail. This is a close-up detail showing a hat-gem on a small boy's cap. The cap itself is pretty interesting, with golden embroidery around the opening, but the hat-gem is extremely typical of the period.

Paolo Uccello, Portrait of a Lady, ca. 1450. Detail. This detail shows an intricate pearl necklace. I've never heard of dark pearls in any sources, but the darker florets here may be pearlescent glass beads. The only drawback is that we have no idea how this necklace fastens.

Ambrogio de Predis, Beatrice d'Este, 1490. This portrait, of a very wealthy Milanese lady, shows the general effect you want. The stones are fairly large, and the individual pieces fairly clunky, but the stones are what is important here. She wears a circlet set with small medallions (some look like roses, some like devices, but each has that drop pearl we talked about earlier) that ties at the left side. Note that the ribbon ties each have a pearl drop at the end, as well. Her hair-net is edged entirely in pearls. She wears a close pearl necklace with a chain dangling down from it and a pendant at the end of the chain. The pendant is a square-cut gem with another pearl drop. A matching brooch is pinned to the top of her outer sleeve's opening. There's some debate as to just what that circlet is. At first I thought it was metal, but subsequent examination of the original in a huge color blowup shot has revealed that the edges of the circlet AND ribbon are embossed (it could be a hem, but I doubt it, as that'd be one narrow hem, and that circlet must be pretty sturdy to hold all those drops and medallions). Now I think this is leather. Notice here, too, that the pearls in the rete (hairnet) are graduated in size, with smaller pearls at the top and getting larger as you go down the sides of the net. If I had to guess, the small pearls at the top are 6mm, going to 8mm near the bottom of the net's sides, and 10mm at the bottom.

Ambrogio de Predis, Beatrice d'Este, 1490. Detail. Here is her shoulder brooch. Note that it has two medallions on it, one of just gold, and one of gold set with a rectangular table-cut ruby. A teardrop-shaped pearl dangles from it.

Ambrogio de Predis, Beatrice d'Este, 1490. Detail. And here is her pendant. It's a fairly clunky gold chain that descends from the pearl necklace 3" or so. The pendant itself is a square-cut ruby set in gold, with another tear-drop-shaped pearl drop hanging from it.

Sebastiano Mainardi, Portrait of a Young Woman, 1490. Florentine school. This necklace is very simple indeed, made using two strands. The clear beads could be quartz crystal, which was known during the period, or glass. Since the amber-colored beads seem to be faceted, it is unlikely that they are real amber. Besides glass, citrine was used in jewelry at this time, so perhaps it is one of those substances. It is difficult to tell what the pendant is -- it seems to be a few of the amber-colored beads over a pearl, but straight vertical pendants like that aren't common. To see a writeup of the necklaces I've made based on this portrait, click here.

Piero della Francesca, Battista Sforza, 1465. This portrait depicts the wife of the Duke of Milan. In this detail, one sees that her necklace is a collar of two rows of large pearls linked by plaques of enamelled, diamond-shaped gold plaques with alternating center gems of round and dark oval or square and light-colored material. A string of pearls is suspended from it, going from one side of the collarbone to the other. Another vertical string of pearls intersects it, with what Joan Evans thought was a reliquary pendant on a chain. Reliquaries, or pendants containing some piece of Christian history (pieces of the True Cross, for example), were worn in this period.

This page last updated: January 23, 2011

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