Faixa masculina de les denominades "faixes de Kontusz"

fragment de faixa masculina de les denominades  "faixes de Kontusz"

A sample of cloth woven with natural colored linen and white silk.  This material is used for rough suits by the gentlemen of Poland.

Jewish prayer books printed in "Typographical Amsterdam Hebrew Characters" were sought after in the decades around 1700 and well into the eighteenth century in Europe. Treasured and handed down all over Europe for generations by Jewish families, these books represent the learned and sophisticated standing of their owners. The utmost precious protection for the sacred text was a silver book cover. Complete ensembles are extremely rare. The goldsmith Tobias Schier was a specialist for such ostentatiously crafted silver covers. Several examples by Schier have survived and document the master’s outstanding abilities to transform the precious metals silver and gold into objects of great elegance and exuberant appearance.

Exceptionally for the Renaissance, this is a signed cameo, bearing the signature of Gian Giacomo Caraglio, who was born in Verona and later worked in Venice and then Cracow and who was best known as a printmaker. Bona Sforza, daughter of the duke of Milan, married Sigismund I, king of Poland, in 1518. At Sigismund’s death in 1548 she returned to Italy, where she died in 1557. The cameo is inlaid with gold that enhances details of Bona’s chain and hairnet, and a silver Medusa’s head is inset on her breast, in the same spirit of jewelry within jewelry. The only other gem signed by Caraglio, an agate similarly bedecked with gold representing Barbara Radziwill, Bona’s successor as queen of Poland, is in the Münzkabinett, Munich. The dainty frame, although dated 1554 on the reverse, is a nineteenth-century invention.[James D. Draper, 2008]

6446

6446

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