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When a mid-seventh-century B.C. Etruscan tomb was unearthed near Cervetari, Italy, in 1836, word spread about the exquisite silver-gilt vessels and gold jewelry recovered there. A young Roman goldsmith named Fortunato Pio Castellani (1794–1865), backed by the Duke Michelangelo Caetani, was inspired to create a fashionable new line of jewelry closely modeled after these ancient Etruscan prototypes. Together with his sons, Alessandro and Augusto, Fortunato Pio mastered the “lost” art of granulation, in which tiny gold balls were affixed to a smooth gold base to form a design. The Castellanis’ artistic work was at times interrupted by political upheavals in the decades leading up to the creation of the unified Italian state in 1870. When Alessandro’s clandestine republican activities attracted the attention of the police in 1860, his father sent him away from Italy. Over the next few years Alessandro opened shops in London and Paris, selling jewelry “after the antique” to an international clientele. When Augusto died in 1914, his son Alfredo turned over the best pieces of his father’s jewelry collection to the Italian state. Today many of these items are on display in Rome’s National Etruscan Museum at Villa Giulia.
When a mid-seventh-century B.C. Etruscan tomb was unearthed near Cervetari, Italy, in 1836, word spread about the exquisite silver-gilt vessels and gold jewelry recovered there. A young Roman goldsmith named Fortunato Pio Castellani (1794–1865), backed by the Duke Michelangelo Caetani, was inspired to create a fashionable new line of jewelry closely modeled after these ancient Etruscan prototypes. Together with his sons, Alessandro and Augusto, Fortunato Pio mastered the “lost” art of granulation, in which tiny gold balls were affixed to a smooth gold base to form a design. The Castellanis’ artistic work was at times interrupted by political upheavals […]
