THE IMPORTANCE OF JEWELRY IN THE MODERN GOLDSMITH'S ART

Since time began jewelry has been used either for ornamental or for functional reasons, but always as a mark of distinction. The shape, dimension, complexity and richness of jewelry are important features which characterize the person who wears it. In ancient times, objects made of gold were nearly exclusively worn by the upper classes because of the high cost of material and labor - a worker had to work hard and for a long time to make objects of such great complexity. Those who could not afford such costs sought poorer materials such as bronze, a viable chromatic alternative to gold. In the course of time imitation became a productive reality, so that, by the end of the 19th and in the early 20th century, imitation jewelry was being produced in a large scale . In the beginning they used marcasite, synthetics and rhinestones as substitutes for precious stones, and not precious or semi-precious stones such as crystals, lapis lazuli, mother of pearl and others to create color effects. The use of all these colored materials, including ebony, plexiglas and above all silver, has been of great importance for the art of the modern goldsmith's. Between 1940 and 1960, first in America and later in Europe, a sort of competition took place: everyone wanted to try to eliminate a certain formal rigidity in the art of making jewelry and give a new identity to the design of jewelry, which was becoming more and more creative an innovative. It was prevalently during these decades that so many workshops were founded, and that the various artists who worked in them, at first in a experimental way and then with convincement and for stylistic reasons, managed to achieve fame and notoriety, finding their own role in the world. This thanks to a wave of innovations in the fields of painting and sculpture-innovations brought about by artists of the caliber of Kandinsky, Klee, Calder, etc, who awakened the artists of the whole world with their creativity and modernity. A new way of creating jewelry was born; various artists began to make modern jewelry which was no longer the result of cyclic repetitions and imitations, but an expression of the artists individuality. As already pointed out, it was the low cost of material which encouraged the birth of such creations. And so, during the following years, thanks to an ever increasing demand and a conscious optimism (favored by the particular historical period), silver, copper, and bronze gradually began to be substituted by gold, which became the leading material, even in the experimental field. In this way jewelry had come full circle; it had regained its former value and had again become the magical, symbolic, original object which characterized the person who wore it and the artist who designed and made it. So jewelry has made its small contribution to the jeweler's art, at least, because it showed that it was possible to create objects with less noble materials. The most important thing is not the richness of a creation, but the idea and artistic concept which lays behind it.