Description
The beautiful necklace is centered with a yellow gold rosette, the petals comprising stylized amphora, the center decorated with granulation and wirework, supported on either side by sphynx-like creatures with serpent tails. Garnet beads are threaded on gold wires and flanked by beaded caps. A closely comparable garnet necklace was bequeathed by Alfredo Castellani to the Museo Nazionale Etrusco housed in the Villa Giulia in Rome.
The design of the necklace is taken almost directly from antiquity. Examples of closely comparable Etruscan necklaces can be found in the collection of the Louvre in Paris, acquired by the French state around the same time as the Campana Collection, circa 1863. An engraving of these necklaces, including one similarly centered with a rosette, was published in Etrurie et les Étrusques ou dix ans de fouilles dans les Maremmes toscanes, Paris, Ambroise Firmin Didot, 1862-1864.
Fortunato Pio Castellani is one of the most important of the Revival jjewelers of the nineteenth century. Founder in Rome of a dynasty of jewelers that included Alessandro, Augusto, and Alfredo, he is renowned for the introduction of archaeological revivals, which became all the rage throughout Europe by mid-century, Initially exhibited in the 1855 Exposition Universelle in Paris, Castellani jewelry was again prominently displayed in 1862 in London, when a jury awarded him a medal for the “excellence of design and workmanship … each object … is a study for the archaeologist, the artist, and the workman.”