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Updated: June 24, 2025
All the inventions and thoughts of the ancients, whether conveyed to us in statues, bas-reliefs, intaglios, cameos, or coins, are to be sought after and carefully studied: The genius that hovers over these venerable relics may be called the father of modern art.
Orcagna's tabernacle at Or San Michele is, as Symonds has expressed it, "a monumental jewel," and "an epitome of the minor arts of mediæval Italy." On it one sees bas-relief carving, intaglios, statuettes, mosaic, the lapidary's art in agate; enamels, and gilded glass, and yet all in good taste and harmony.
Transparent glass seems now to have been first brought into used and intaglios to have been first cut upon hard stones. The furniture of the period is greatly superior in design to any previously represented, and the modelling of sword-hilts, maces, armlets, and other ornaments is peculiarly good.
All its reliefs and intaglios have electrotyped themselves in the medallions that hang round the walls of your memory's chamber. The sea remembers nothing. It is feline. It licks your feet, its huge flanks purr very pleasantly for you; but it will crack your bones and eat you, for all that, and wipe the crimsoned foam from its jaws as if nothing had happened.
There are rings of bishops and kings; jeweled baubles from Egyptian tombs and gold-wrought ornaments of the Montezumas; a cameo where a single face with its shadows makes six laughing and six weeping outlines; a cat's-eye quartz to which the one the king of Siam has is perhaps the mate; diamonds and pearls, amethysts and topazes, beryls and opals, single emeralds of rare beauty and doublets of great size, rubies of the real pigeon's blood, and sapphires whose heart is blue as the bluest midnight, but whose angles refract a radiance red as fire; chains of carved beads; seals, intaglios, to almost all of them some legend attaching.
No hint of war, no breath from the snowy streets, entered that curious chamber where Prince Peter Nirski kept some of the chief of his famous treasures. It was notable for its lack of drapery and upholstering only a sofa or two and a few fine rugs on the cedar floor. The walls were of a green marble veined like malachite, the ceiling was of darker marble inlaid with white intaglios.
Vasari speaks with characteristic enthusiasm of the glyptics of the Greeks, "whose works in that manner may be called divine." But, as he continues, "many and very many years passed over during which the art was lost".... until in the days of Lorenzo di Medici the fashion for cameos and intaglios revived.
As we retrace our steps down the Rue Richelieu we may enter, on our L. the equally rich and sumptuous museum of coins, medals, antiques, intaglios, gems, etc. Having regained the Rue des Petits Champs, we resume our westward way, noting at No. 45, corner of the Rue St.
His eminence, although quite blind, had acquired, by the exquisite delicacy of his touch, and the combining powers of his mind, such a sense of antient beauty, that he excelled all the virtuosi then in Rome, in the correctness of his knowledge of the verity and peculiarities of the smallest medals and intaglios. Mr.
His lodging was above the workroom and shop of a recoverer of ancient coins and intaglios, skilful cleanser and mender of these and merchant to whom would buy. The man was artist besides, maker of strange drawings whom few ever understood or bought. Glenfernie liked him an elderly, fine, thin, hook-nosed, dark-eyed, subtle-lipped, little-speaking personage.
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