Sidney's Place: PRECIOUS STONES AND DETACHED HEADS

My subject begins with the glories of ancient and medieval jewellery and strays into the fin de siècle artistic school known as the Decadents and some connected horrors. But fear not, Beauty easily outguns Ugliness!

The Empress Theodora

The Good Shepherd mosaics from Ravenna

Our Western horizons when we today discuss gemstones are curiously limited; we only think in terms of the more commercially valuable stones – diamonds, sapphires, emeralds, rubies, pearls - and ignore the huge variety of other fine stones, often classified unflatteringly as “semi-precious”. The Romans perfected the ancient craft of mosaic, the creation of figures and designs using tiny coloured stones (tesserae). Classic examples of this art are to be seen at the Church of San Vitale and the Mausoleum of Galla Placidia, both in ravishing Ravenna, the city outpost of the Byzantine Empire in mainland Italy. Theodora, was the disreputable daughter of a charioteer, but she rose to marry mighty Emperor Justinian – admire her elaborate head-dress and the many clasps and buckles dripping exotic stones. The Good Shepherd mosaic demonstrates the precision and vibrant colours of this art-form. Islamic and Persian craftsmen kept up this tradition.

By the 8^th Century mosaics were falling out of fashion in the West but beautiful jewellery was produced, especially rings and amulets, believed to have magic powers. The artists used malleable beaten gold inlaid with precious stones, such as pearls, agate, sardonyx, carnelian, jasper, haematite, hyacinth and amethyst.

A Byzantine gold ring with stone inlays

Shoulder clasps, gold with garnet inlay, from Sutton Hoo

These early jewellery craftsmen cut their stones, much as diamond cutters do today, fully to catch reflective light; the most used cut was the cabochon, an unfaceted convex-cut. Highly prized was dark blue lapis lazuli, mined to this day in Afghanistan.

Fast forward now to the greatly arresting novel by J K Huysmans À Rebours (translated as Against Nature, or Against the Grain) published in 1884, while Huysmans was an obscure French civil servant. It follows the inner life and exotic tastes of Duc Jean Floressas des Esseintes, an immensely rich aesthete of morbid sensibility. This book, “the breviary of the Decadence”, heavily influenced Wilde among many others.

J. K, Huysmans

The Apparition, water-colour by Gustave Moreau

After lengthy consideration of interior decoration, fine colours, book bindings, ship-journeys, female flesh, dilettante scholars, theology, ancient art, rare plants, street pick-ups, classic perfumery and wine cellars, as well as an analysis of Moreau’s water-colour depicting Salome obsessed by the severed head of John the Baptist, the debauched fancy of Des Esseintes turns to precious stones. He acquires a huge tortoise at a shop in the Palais-Royal and commissions a lapidary to adorn its carapace. First he had it glazed in gold and then encrusted it with a floral pattern using startling and unusual gems:

The leaves were set with gems of a strong and definite green – asparagus-green chrysoberyls, leek-green peridots, olive-green olivines - and these sprang from twigs of almandine and uvarovite of a purplish red……For the flowers he decided on a phosphate blue: ….he chose only turquoises from the West; for the petals of the flowers he used only Ceylon cat’s-eyes, cymophanes and sapphirines. For the edging of the shell, he decided on a series of stones with contrasting colours – the mahogany-red hyacinth of Compostella followed by the sea-green aquamarine, the vinegar-pink balas ruby by the pale slate-coloured Sudermania ruby.

Des Esseintes returns from a bout of toothache to find his lavishly adorned tortoise quite dead, whether from stress or the weight of his carapace is not told. The unstable aesthete is, as usual, left frustrated and unfulfilled.

This extraordinary novel was followed by Oscar Wilde’s tragedy Salomé written in 1891, when Wilde was a famous critic and controversialist but before his triumphs as a writer of comedies. The influence of Huysmans was to be evident in the character of the protagonist and of Lord Henry Wotton in his notorious 1890 novel The Picture of Dorian Gray. Wilde first wrote Salomé in French, fortunately, as the Lord Chamberlain of the day refused a licence for any play depicting a biblical event and the play had its debut in Paris. Predictably it later had a succès de scandale.

Subversive Oscar Wilde

Aubrey Beardsley's Salome

The play comes to a climax as the Tetrarch Herod II, asks his step-daughter Salomé to dance for him. John the Baptist (in the play called “Jokanan”) had earlier mortally offended Salomé and her mother Herodias by doubting her legitimacy. Salomé at first refuses to dance but the enchanted Herod offers her whatever she wishes “even to half his kingdom”. Salomé dances her seductive Dance of the Seven Veils and demands the head of John – Donne-moi la tête de Jokanan, she repeatedly says. An appalled Herod first offers her instead an emerald gifted to him by Caesar. She refuses. Then he tenders his white peacocks with feet of gilded gold. Again refused. His final throw is his hoard of precious stones – pearls, black and red-wine amethysts, topazes, moonstones and onyxes. He even includes the veil to the sacred sanctuary; Donne-moi la tête de Jokanan is the only answer he gets.

In despair he orders John’s execution and his head is presented to Salomé on a salver. Salomé kisses the lips of the decapitated prophet and complains that they taste bitter. An infuriated Herod has Salomé killed, crushed under the shields of his soldiers.

This play was what the Victorians labelled “unwholesome” and the Biblical tale is certainly a gruesome one. It has inspired many great artists and two paintings by Rubens and Caravaggio are to be seen in the National Galleries in respectively Edinburgh and London: