Enameling Info

Enamel is a kind of glass fused to metal, usually copper, silver or gold, at high temperatures [around 800 degrees Centigrade]. Enameling adds a beautiful touch to precious metals. It takes a "regular" piece of jewelry and makes it unique. Most enameling is done by hand and takes a steady hand and with good eye. Enameling may have been invented independently in around the world. However, the most widely used enameling orignated in Cyprus. Please wear your enameled jewelry with care. Just as a dropped glass can shatter... enameling can shatter or crack if banged against another object or dropped. Because enamel is essentially glass, it must be treated as such. While techniques have improved, and our enamel pieces are designed with the utmost of quality and care, little things such as medications you may be on, or lotions and shampoo can react with the jewelry you are wearing and may cause the enamel to chip or wear faster than expected. So again, wear your items with care, do not expose them to harsh or common household chemicals, remove all jewelry before bathing, swimming or immersing in a hot tup or steam bath. Treat it like the precious item it is and it will last a lifetime!

To View our Charm Catalog Click Here, Many Colorful Enameled Styles!

What are Enamels? To most people, enamel is a hard, glossy paint used on woodwork and doors. But this is not a true enamel. Technically, enameling in its simplest from means fusing powdered glass to a (normally) metal backing at high heat.

Many road signs, and even some kinds of pots and pans, are enameled this way. So are some of the most beautiful ornamental objects ever fashioned by human skill.

Not many retail stores sell handmade enamel jewelry today. Fine enamels have long had an honored place in the story of jewelry-making and other decorative arts. In past centuries people thought them just as beautiful as gems. There is a great level of skill and workmanship required to make enamels, thus they were valued highly.

When enamels were first developed, they provided durable bright colors that were much easier to shape than gemstones. As the art developed, it was used to create enameled pictures and colored accents on jewelry. Enameling accompanied gold in tiaras, neckbands, large costume clips and brooches or pins—especially in the Gothic, Renaissance and Art Nouveau periods.

In other periods, enameling, like sculpture and mosaics, provided a vivid means of religious communication. Enamels depicted biblical stories and images in churches for the illiterate to see.

Today, enamels are not as rare as gemstones, but the skill to create fine enamelwork is. Technical advances in materials and tools make this art more attractive to today's jewelry artisans and hobbyists, however. They create beautiful pieces that typically reach a small local market. These enameled products intrigue the senses and add an extra touch of beauty to their underlying jewelry.

Where did enameling originate? Little is known about the origin of enameling. The earliest known enameled artifacts, found around the Mediterranean, date from the sixth century BC. These enameled jewelry pieces and small figurines with enamel fused to gold backing probably came from Greece.

The Egyptians had cemented inlaid bits of colored glasses in metal filigree and clay long before this. The Mediterranean enamellists adapted this. They used metal wires or strips attached to the metal backing to create separate areas, packed powdered glass into the cells, and fuse it by heating. This was the primary enameling technique in that region for the next ten centuries.

The Celtic tribes that spread across Europe had established themselves in the British Isles by about 400 BC. They decorate their weapons and other objects with enamels. Instead of attaching wire strips to the metal backing, the Celts gouged out cells or cast them in the metal backing to contain the enamel. Then they poured molten glass, melted separately, into them. They probably developed these techniques independently of the Mediterranean enamelists.

Celtic enamelwork was the major influence on European enameling until the third century AD. Items from their workshops have been found all over northern Europe. Fine Celtic enameled pieces from the Middle Ages found in Ireland reveal an advanced state of this art there.

The Angles and Saxons who invaded Britain were making enameled clasps, buttons, belts, and brooches by the sixth century AD. Modern excavation of the Sutton Hoo burial ship treasure in Southern England yielded a solid gold pursemount decorated with enameled falcons, ducks and armored warriors. It also had garnet gems set in it. Later Saxon enamels were even finer.

Byzantine enamel also developed about the sixth century AD and reached its peak in the tenth century. It built on traditions of enameled religious icons dating back to the first century AD. Early Byzantine Christian artisans used both enamel work and mosaics to decorate the interior walls and domes of their churches. Working with gold wires and back they used well-defined colors, with simple, strong, but sensitive pictorial designs.

The popularity of Byzantine enamels, among the most beautiful ever produced, reached throughout the known world. Demand fostered workshop production. The styles of fine illuminated manuscripts and religious enamels influenced each other.

Enamelists also acknowledged stained-glass window designs. Eventually the designs became heavier and squarer, suiting medieval notions of purity and order.

Along the Rhine valley in Germany a native, almost primitive style showed in plaques, crosses, and altarpieces. In the Meuse valley, the Mosan school flowered in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. It produced some jewelry as well, showing purer Byzantine influence. The European nobility continued to commission religious pieces and jewelry, despite wars and plagues.

France became the main center for manufactured enamels in the twelfth century AD, a position it held until the twentieth. Fifteenth century French artisans pioneered enameling without metal divisions between areas of color. Firing enamel on both back and front of a piece, to equalize stress and prevent the surface from cracking off, developed in Flanders.

Limoges, in France, became a center of pictorial enameling, using another new technique—applying enamel on enamel, instead of laying it into metal cells. In painted enamel, or “Limoges Enamel,” which developed in the early 1600s, many layers of translucent enamel, sometimes over opaque white enamel, were fixed onto a copper plate. This was done simply by painting a mixture of finely ground enamels and lavender oil onto a previously enameled surface before refiring.

Limoges enamels combined many advantages of oil paintings, in more permanent from. Their popularity spread throughout Europe. Individual artists even signed original commissioned portraits—for the first time in the history of enameling.

Thus, with the other decorative arts, enameling flourished during the Renaissance. Imitating the paintings and sculpture of the era, elaborate jewelry sculpted in mythical and historical scenes was popular. Vases, dishes, and similar objects were embellished with intricate, colorful figures. Many crowns and other royal items were decorated with enamel.

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Information on enameling was compiled from various sources. Mainly from the Gemological Institute of America's text on enamels, enameling processes and forms of enamelwork (1994).

Enameled Ancient Egyption Bracelet with image of Hathor, Nubian Meroitic Period, about 100 B.C. from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Collection.

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