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Updated: June 29, 2025
These glorious gates were the gifts to their native city of members of the family of Pantaleone of Amalfi, merchant princes who had amassed an immense fortune by trade in the Levant. They are splendid specimens of niello work, which consisted in ornamenting a surface of bronze by engraving upon it lines that were subsequently filled in with coloured enamel or with some precious metal.
Cristoforo was employed to carve reliefs for the high altar, and the duke gave the friars a jewelled crucifix and marvellously wrought set of chalices, patens, candelabra, paci of niello, engraved with Beatrice's name and arms.
When Theophilus has finished his directions, he adds: "And take great care that no further work is required." To polish the niello, he directs us to "pumice it with a damp stone, until it is made everywhere bright." There are various accounts of how Finiguerra, who was a worker in niello in Florence, discovered by its means the art of steel engraving.
A hand of S. Blaise is contained in a beautiful filigree reliquary, and is kept under glass. A head reliquary has a fine pierced pattern and a punched border of early Renaissance character, with niello medallions of the Evangelists' symbols. Another, not quite so good, is dated 1349, and has similar nielli, with interlacings of oak-sprigs.
The ground between the ornament has been cut down, probably for the insertion of niello or enamel colours. It was found in the parish of Laverstock, Hants, in a cart-rut, where it had become much crushed and defaced. The form is remarkable, the front rising pyramidally. Two birds of conventional form face each other, a flower ornament dividing them; these decorations, like those on Mr.
The process as described by Theophilus is as follows: "Compose the niello in this manner; take pure silver and divide it into equal parts, adding to it a third part of pure copper, and taking yellow sulphur, break it very small... and when you have liquefied the silver with the copper, stir it evenly with charcoal, and instantly pour into it lead and sulphur."
A globe-shaped ciborium, with cresting and knop of the fourteenth century, is interesting. Upon the globe a pattern with beasts and leaves is chased; the foot is conical and sexfoil in plan, with little niello medallions and piercings on the perpendicular parts of two steps. The knop has pinnacles and pierced gables.
A handsome coral rosary hung from one side of an inferential belt, which emerged into certainty with a large clasp of silver wrought in niello; and, on the other side, where the belt again became inferential, hung a scarsella, or large purse, of crimson velvet, stitched with pearls.
I saw one who poured water into a mortar, and ground it with all his might with a pestle of iron, fancying he did a thing useful; but it remained water only, none the less. Stoicism, hedonism, the gospel of 'Sweetness and Light'; what is it, may I ask, that your aesthetic priests furnish, to feed immortal British souls? Knee breeches, sun flowers, niello, cretonne, Nanking bowls, lily dados?
There are also six arm reliquaries of the usual pattern, two of which have little doors of niello, two or three heads, and an ostensory, at the top of which is a thorn from the crown of thorns. The church of S. Simeone was a "Colleggiata," instituted in 1150 by Archbishop Lampridius, and dedicated to S. Stephen.
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