The Jewellery Collection. Transcending Centuries and Cultures

Today the Museum’s jewellery collection comprises 1680 pieces and continues to grow. It spans a breadth of different cultures but also highlights common/universal themes of why jewellery is worn beyond simply adornment. Since prehistory, jewellery has accompanied men, women and children through life, marking rites of passage from cradle to grave. Regardless of country or culture, jewellery has been worn as symbols of status, as signs of authority, distinction and allegiance, or of faith and superstition. Above all, jewels have always been expressions of devotion, friendship and grief, reflecting personal hopes and memories. The collection also demonstrates how fashions in dress or hair often determined what types of jewellery were worn and how international art movements inspired jewellery design, while social, economic and political trends were reflected in the choice and availability of materials used by the goldsmith.

Before exploring the collection and the history of jewellery through these themes, a brief account of how the collection evolved helps to understand why it is so all-encompassing. Although jewellery was not the focal point of the founding collection, initial acquisitions were made in the field of traditional jewellery, also known as folk jewellery. Over two hundred pieces formed the basis of the future jewellery collection, chiefly from regions across Germany but also, unusual amongst German museums of the time, from Italy, Spain, Portugal, the Balkans and the Eastern Mediterranean. A canon from Aachen, Franz Bock (1823–1899), donated about forty pieces of Spanish, Portuguese and Near Eastern pieces in 1891–1893. Regional dress and its accompanying accessories and jewellery were determined by geographical custom with traditions handed down from one generation to the next, distinct from changing contemporary fashions. Across Europe, such traditional jewellery design reached its peak in the second half of the nineteenth century when, for political reasons and informed by historic allegiances, various regions merged to create new nation states. As an expression of national sentiments, the individuality of regional arts and crafts was celebrated and valued by decorative art museums.

Following these initial acquisitions in the late nineteenth century, it was not until 1919 that jewellery was once again a focus for the collection. This was the year the Munich artist and prolific collector Wilhelm Clemens (1847–1934), born in Grevenbroich, north of Cologne, donated his vast art collection to the City of Cologne. Accrued over forty years, it showed Clemens had an eye for outstanding and unusual pieces and was particularly attracted by medieval and Renaissance artwork. His gift contained 282 pieces of jewellery, 192 of which were finger rings, including an unusual selection of early Christian and Byzantine examples.

The next significant expansion of the Museum’s jewellery holdings was in 1977 through a generous donation of 174 pieces by the renowned goldsmith Elisabeth Treskow (1898–1992) which included 115 finger rings. Treskow was professor of the Academy of Fine and Applied Arts in Cologne and had close cultural links with the city. As early as 1930 she rediscovered the ancient technique of granulation, the application of tiny spheres of gold to a surface, which dated back to the third millennium BC and was favoured by the Etruscans. Her achievements using this complex technique, which became dominant in her creations, have been much lauded by later goldsmiths. Her interest in antiquity and experience restoring the Shrine of the Three Magi in Cologne Cathedral, made between 1190 and 1220, led to a deep passion for ancient jewellery and glyptics, the art of engraving on gemstones. This is reflected not only in her own designs but also in her donated collection, which would not be out of place in an archaeological museum.

The Cologne collection was becoming a valuable tool for the study of jewellery. By the late 1970s Rosy Petrine Sieversen (1914–2001) recognised its significance and felt her personal collection of chiefly nineteenth-century jewels would make a valuable contribution to the Museum. The 250 pieces Sieversen donated had been chosen to complement her own dress, and she particularly loved parures and demi-parures that had been fashionable amongst the wealthy middle classes in the nineteenth century, attracted more by their design, beauty and historic value than by the monetary worth of the gemstones. With a major donation to the museum in mind, Sieversen acquired examples made by major nineteenth-century jewellers such as Eugène Fontenay (1823–1887), Ernesto Pierret (1824–1898), Lucien Falize (1839–1897), Alfred Meyer (1832–1904) and Carlo Giuliano (1831–1895) and gave them to the Museum in the late 1970s and 1980s.

Due to the broad sweep of its holdings, the Museum’s jewellery collection is ideal for studying the history and significance of jewellery. On a functional level, dress fashions played an important role in the choice of jewels and the styles and materials employed by the goldsmith. Ancient fibulae and medieval ring brooches were designed to fasten garments, later evolving into decorative adornments. Belts made of metal or leather and often featuring appliqués were used to gather the dress at the waist. Beyond function, jewellery often held symbolic value. Archaeological finds from prehistory show that as well as for adornment or to signify status, jewellery could also have an amuletic purpose. Jewels from natural materials were thought to protect the wearer against life’s dangers: shell necklaces bestowed women with fertility, while men displayed claws and teeth they had brought back from their hunts to signify superiority over the animal kingdom and virility. The collection contains similar amulets made and worn many centuries later, exploiting the perceived magical and medical powers of gemstones like coral, which was believed to relieve blood-related illnesses and was often given to children. Jewellery could also express religious beliefs. Inscriptions on jewels from the Ancient world invoked the help of the ancient gods, and the collection contains rare survivals of early Christian bronze rings with encrypted symbols indicating allegiance to the new religion, such as the dove, dolphin, lamb and rabbit. Christian saints often featured on rings, and, from the medieval period, the Virgin Mary appears as the symbol of motherhood, venerated by women seeking guidance. The cross pendant was the most visible sign of the Catholic faith. During the Renaissance period, elaborate pendants could bear a Christian message, such as a deer set with a baroque pearl symbolising Christ, or the mythical phoenix representing rebirth, resurrection and chastity. Symbolic ornament could also have a moral message. Skulls and skeletons in memento mori jewels, particularly popular in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, reminded the wearer that death was inevitable and served as a prompt to lead a virtuous life. From the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, mourning jewels were a means of expressing grief, featuring funerary scenes, often made of black jet and even cast iron, known as Berlin iron.

One of the most enduring symbolic uses of jewellery throughout history has been as tokens of friendship, love and marriage. The ancient Greeks and Persians wore jewels to express and incite love and desire, with motifs including love deities such as Eros or Anahita. The betrothal or wedding ring can be traced back to ancient Rome, when it was given by a prospective husband as a sign of commitment to marriage. A lasting design from this period is that of the clasped right hands (dextrarum iunctio) forming the bezel of the ring and mirroring the act of blessing during a wedding ceremony. In Roman belief the right hand was sacred to Fides, the goddess of trust and loyalty. By the fifteenth century, diamonds were associated with betrothal and marriage rings, symbolising virtue and constancy. Rubies followed, the gemstone of love and associated with the goddess Venus, occasionally replaced by or in combination with garnets. Turquoise was the stone of friendship, from the Renaissance through to the nineteenth century, and found in rings, brooches and parures. Other love iconography is found throughout the collection: inscribed declarations of love, a couple with a pine cone, for erotic love, a dog as a symbol of loyalty, a butterfly alluding to Psyche, the goddess of the soul, and the preserved hair of a loved one woven into a jewel. Pearls as symbols of purity were often given to a bride, except in countries such as Spain and Italy, where they were thought to bring bad luck. In many early cultures women were given a belt as a fertility amulet, a belief still resonant in Renaissance Europe, when belts were common wedding gifts. Throughout nineteenth-century Europe elaborate bracelets were commissioned to mark the occasion of a wedding.

The Cologne collection also demonstrates how throughout European history, jewels were indicators of status and class and how societal and economic change influenced design. In Roman times gold jewellery was highly valued, especially as a foil for pearls, emeralds and coloured gemstones. A woman’s social standing, and her husband’s, was measured by the quantity of jewellery in her dowry. In medieval Europe, gold and silver were affordable only to the very wealthy, and gemstones were left in their natural uncut form, en cabochon, the imagery often devotional. Before professional craft guilds were established from the late medieval period, goldsmiths primarily worked for the Church and the princely courts, but new sources of patronage emerged among the wealthy merchant classes, giving goldsmiths more autonomy. Portraits of the time show how gold jewellery with multicoloured enamels and gemstones contrasted with the dark and heavy fabrics of contemporary fashions, which were embellished with dress ornaments. Men wore elaborate hat badges and pomanders suspended from belts were believed to protect against the plague or other illnesses. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, silks and satins in pastel shades formed the backdrop to subtle enamelled jewels, and diamonds and rock crystal in intricate facet cuts were set in silver to enhance their sparkle. The Industrial Revolution in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries led to a demand among newly affluent middle classes for daytime demi-parures and evening parures, featuring less expensive and more colourful stones than the diamonds worn by the aristocracy. Industrial methods of producing jewellery were increasingly applied as well as cost-effective techniques such as stamped gold or wirework (cannetille), which required less gold.

From the mid nineteenth century growing international travel and trade exhibitions in London and Paris helped disseminate an eclectic mix of design influences among goldsmiths and their clients. Castellani in Rome championed the Classical Revival style, influencing French jewellers such as Eugène Fontenay. In Paris, jewellers such as François-Désiré Froment-Meurice (1802–1855) ushered in the Gothic Revival style inspired by medieval architecture, and Alexis Falize (1811–1898) encouraged a Renaissance revival by reintroducing the technique of Limoges enamelling.

By 1900 European goldsmiths were rebelling against industrial methods of jewellery-making and were weary of historical revivals. A more naturalistic approach to design emerged during the late nineteenth century, in part influenced by Japanese arts and crafts. At the Paris Exposition Universelle in 1900 René Lalique (1860–1945) was hailed as the ‘emancipator and moderniser’ of French jewellery and inspired many contemporaries such as Lucien Gaillard (1861–1942), Lucien Gautrait (1865–1937), Eugène Feuillâtre (1870–1916) and Édouard Colonna (1862–1948), originally from Cologne. Lalique’s Art Nouveau style was sinuous and inspired by nature, while the German Jugendstil style and work by the Austrian Wiener Werkstätten, such as designed by Koloman Moser, reduced natural forms to geometric forms. All shared the view that design and craftsmanship was of greater importance than the monetary value of the materials used.

After the Paris Exposition internationale des arts décoratifs et industriels modernes in 1925, which gave its name to the Art Deco period, jewellers adopted a new aesthetic. Abstract forms and unconventional compositions of gemstone colours and cuts were inspired by Modernist art movements, such as Cubism, Constructivism, Suprematism in Russia and the De Stijl movement in the Netherlands. The Paris jewellers Raymond Templier (1891–1968) and Jean Després (1889–1980) belonged to this avant-garde school. The Modernist principles of the Bauhaus school of applied arts in Weimar advocated a reduction of ornament and were influential in promoting affordable materials such as chrome and plastics as suitable for artistic jewellery design.

After the Second World War, a yearning in society for a fresh start found expression in the arts and jewellery design. In 1961 the Goldsmiths’ Company hosted the groundbreaking International Exhibition of Modern Jewellery, held at Goldsmiths’ Hall in London, with the aim to stimulate public interest in jewellery as an art form, a discussion which continues today. In the decades that followed, artist jewellers set up their own studios, using a wide range of materials and tools from traditional to experimental and high-tech. The jewellery scene is now truly global and no longer dependent on dress fashions. It has become an expression of the times and, for the artist jeweller, design can be almost biographical. Jewellery design has never been so diverse and free from convention.
When the jewellery collection of the Museum of Applied Arts was fully published in 1985, it comprised 910 pieces. It has since expanded to 1680, chiefly with donations and acquisitions chosen by the curators to enrich the collection with works by twentieth- and twenty-first-century artist–jewellers from Cologne and around the world. With this publication, it will be unusually well catalogued compared to comparable jewellery collections across Europe and the United States. With the exception of the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, who published their comprehensive collection of jewellery from antiquity to modern times in 1979, research into other large collections often relies on type-specific catalogues published in the early twentieth century, such as catalogues of finger rings in the British Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Examples of more recently published ring collections include the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford and the Alice and Louis Koch Collection in the Swiss National Museum, Zurich.
 
The Museum of Applied Arts (MAKK) is also one of the few museums to have a gallery dedicated to the whole history of jewellery, along with the Victoria and Albert Museum, the recently opened Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, which covers 4000 years of jewellery, and the Schmuckmuseum Pforzheim, which dedicates the whole museum to the subject. The Alice and Louis Koch Collection with its display of some seventeen hundred rings also provides the visitor with a broad historical overview. Elsewhere, national or city collections are more usually split by date across multiple institutions. In New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art has a wide-ranging historical collection displayed across various departments, but the city’s Museum of Arts and Design prioritises contemporary artist jewellery. The Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris covers jewellery from the Renaissance to the twenty-first century, with jewels from antiquity housed in the Musée du Louvre and medieval jewellery in the Musée de Cluny – Musée national du Moyen Âge. In Munich the city’s jewellery collections are also distributed around the city, with the Staatliche Antikensammlung housing Greek and Roman jewellery, a post-Renaissance collection in the Bayerische Nationalmuseum and a dedicated collection of twentieth-century and contemporary pieces in the Pinakothek der Moderne. Other significant collections of jewellery in Germany and Austria can be found in the Kunstgewerbemuseum, Berlin, the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg and the MAK – Österreichisches Museum für Angewandte Kunst in Vienna.

In its historical and geographical scope, and in the high quality of the artefacts, the Cologne collection can be considered one of the world’s foremost jewellery collections.

 

About the author

Based in England, Beatriz Chadour-Sampson is an international jewellery historian, author and lecturer. Her publications range from the classical world to the present day and include her doctoral thesis on the Italian goldsmith Antonio Gentili da Faenza (1980) and catalogues for the jewellery collection of the Museum für Angewandte Kunst, Cologne (1985) and for the historical rings in the Alice and Louis Koch Collection, Switzerland (1994 and 2019). She was consultant curator for the redesign of the William and Judith Bollinger Jewellery Gallery at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London and guest curator of its Pearls exhibition (2013-14). She curated the Alice and Louis Koch Collection, in the Swiss National Museum, Zurich (2019), and Gübelin Gem Museum in Lucerne (2023).