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is recorded as the founder of the first royal cabinet of gems; we find also a work upon this study dedicated to him by the Babylonian Zachalias. Unfortunately, the engravers never ventured to place their names upon their works much before the times of Augustus, so that Cronius and Apollonides, mentioned by Pliny as (after Pyrgoteles) eminent in this branch, are the only artists of this age of perfection of whom there exists any historical record.

The Romans, following their original teachers the Etruscans, adopted from them at first the scarab-signet, and retained this form until late in the republican period, as the modernized treatment of many of the intagli upon such gems plainly shows. It is impossible to fix the date when they began to substitute signet-rings for this primitive ornament. Pliny mentions that amongst the statues of the kings only two, Numa and Servius Tullius, were represented as wearing rings. These early signets, also, according to Ateius Capito, were not set with engraved stones, but had the seal cut upon the metal of the ring itself. When the use of gold rings was introduced amongst them by the Greeks (those of Sicily, no doubt), then engraved gems also began to be admired and employed for signets. This change of fashion, which took place in the later days of the republic, produced the numerous intagli that are turned up in the vicinity of Rome, distinguished from those of Greek and of Imperial workmanship by the deeply-cut intagli upon them, retaining much of the Etruscan style, and giving nearly the same subjects as the original scarabs, but with a better defined outline and more correct drawing. Many of these bear traces of having been originally set in iron rings, and thus indicate the period of the first introduction of engraved stones into that city.

But under Augustus gem-engraving in all its branches reached its very highest point, and more especially in the

department of portraits. Under the patronage of Mæcenas flourished Dioscorides, Solon, Aulus, Gnaeus; all the talent of Greece; either attracted to the metropolis of the world as offering the most promising field for their genius, or else originally brought there as the freedmen of those nobles whose family names they assumed on manumission. Now became

universal the practice of the engraver placing his signature upon his best works, a convincing testimony to the high estimation in which that class was held, in this permission to commemorate themselves upon the ornaments of the highest personages.

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This also is the age, par-eminence, of camei, whether portraits or groups, or single figures; for those that can with certainty be assigned to the pure Grecian period are of extreme rarity. The regular intercourse now established with the interior of Asia supplied the Sardonyx, and that in pieces of a size and beauty not attainable in modern times. To Severus inclusive it may be said that the best works of the Roman school are cameo portraits of the emperors and their relations.

During these two centuries the trade of making Pastes was also carried on to an enormous extent to meet the requirements of the poorer classes, who could neither dispense with so necessary an ornament, nor yet afford the cost of an engraved gem of any merit, and thus were enabled to gratify taste or vanity at a very trifling outlay. This business throve amazingly, and has left us innumerable relics of the extra

ordinary skill of the workmen in glass until it ceases quite suddenly in the third century, together with the productions of the gem-engraver himself. Camei were often reproduced in Pastes with wonderful fidelity and an admirable imitation of the material, especially where the cast has been re-worked and polished after the fashion of a gem. But Camei in Sardonyx were also produced in large quantities, many of them extraordinary for art and material, some bearing the engraver's name, but the greater portion unsigned, until the reign of Severus. In fact, some of the finest extant belong to the times of Hadrian, the most flourishing period of Roman art in all its extent; but from the date just mentioned gemengraving declined and became extinct with extraordinary and unaccountable rapidity. Gold medallions and coins had superseded the intaglio and cameo imperial portrait as personal ornaments; the spread of Christianity acted more and more as a check upon the reproduction of other representations of the elegant Western mythology; and those permitted by the change in religious sentiments were only the tasteless and barbarous symbolical figures of the new Egyptian and Oriental creeds. At length, in the 5th century, Roman gem-engraving entirely vanishes, its last traces fading away in the swarms of ill-cut and worse drawn Abraxas Jaspers and Manichean amulets. Of the Byzantine nobles the signets were of metal, charged with the letters of the cognomen quaintly arranged in the form of a cross; and the few men of taste yet surviving treasured up the gems, the works of previous centuries, as precious articles of vertù, not to be profaned by

common use.

In the mean time the art had taken refuge under the protection of the young and vigorous monarchy of Persia, when, together with the resurrection of the Achemenian dynasty and religion in the 3rd century, its productions had

come again into as general request as during the ages preceding the Macedonian Conquest, which have left us such stores of cylinders and Assyrian seals. During the long rule of the Parthians (a truly Turkish race), that region had indeed been singularly barren in engraved stones; it may be said entirely so; so dubious are any intagli that can be referred to the Arsacidæ. But on the contrary, the four centuries of the revived Persian empire have left to us abundant memorials of their sovereigns and their religion, in works somewhat rude it must be confessed, but still far less so than the contemporary monuments of effete Western civilization, and extremely valuable historically from the legends that surround the regal portrait, expressing his name and highsounding titles. Barbarous as the style of most of these intagli is, and coarsely as the lines are sunk into the stone, there is a force and individuality of expression about many of them which display the engraver's appreciation of the true principles of his art. This class is continued down quite to the Mohammedan Conquest in the 7th century, and then suddenly comes to an end simultaneously with the dynasty whose features it had so long perpetuated.

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Their place is taken by the only forms permitted by the religion of the conquerors,-elegant Cuphic inscriptions arranged in cyphers wrought in a neat and precise manner upon the choicest stones. The demand for these signets

throughout the East, and the taste required for the graceful combination of the flowing curves distinguishing Arabic calligraphy, kept alive all the mechanical processes of the art until the time of its revival in Italy.

The Byzantine school of the same interval merely deserves a passing notice, the sole evidence of its existence remaining to us being a few camei of religious subjects, in which the miserable execution is on a par with the tastelessness of the design. Throughout the West for the same ten centuries (from the fall of Rome to the Italian Renaissance) gemengraving was, with a few doubtful exceptions, entirely unknown. The signets (still as much required, and for purposes of the same importance as in the times of antiquity) were seals of metal, or else antique intagli set in rings, having their subjects interpreted in a scriptural sense, and legends added around the bizzel to set forth this novel interpretation. Official seals in the Middle Ages were large and elaborate designs cut upon a metal matrix; but the demand for antique intagli to be set in personal signets was enormous; not regulated however in any degree by their beauty, but solely by the nature of the subjects upon them, according to the prevailing belief in the talismanic virtue of certain sigils, determined by the rules of the various Lapidaria then so much studied.

Thus the art slumbered on, seemingly destined never to be revived; totally extinct in the West, confined in the East to the production of the intricate convolutions of cyphers and monograms, when with the first dawn of the Revival in Italy it not only woke up, but within the space of a single lifetime attained to its second maturity, rivalling its ancient parent in beauty and skill, and in one class, the camei, far surpassing her in numbers, and perhaps in excellence. Towards the middle of the 15th century Italian taste had grown rapidly

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