by Doctor Science
This week in the Dept. of Now For Something Completely Different: I've been wondering why, though diamonds have been popular among upper-class Europeans for centuries, they rarely appear in European portraits.
I can see you've got an open thread cued up, LJ, but since it's no longer Friday where you are I'm going to post this anyway. Feel free to use it as an open thread if you feel like it.
I noticed this a year or so, when I happened to read The Essence of Style: How the French Invented High Fashion, Fine Food, Chic Cafes, Style, Sophistication, and Glamour by Joan DeJean. A lot of the book is about Louis XIV and his court, and DeJean talks about how Louis collected diamonds and made them a huge fashion:
On Feb. 19, 1715, at the last court function he was able to carry off before his death later that year, the reception for the Persian ambassador, Mehemet Riza Beg, the King demonstrated just how far he had taken the art of the diamond in the years since 1669 and proved to the entire world that no one would ever be more successful at the playing the role of The King. He appeared with the Blue Diamond hanging around his neck; elsewhere on his person he displayed virtually the entire collection of crown jewels, all 12 million livres' worth. The outfit was so heavy that, royal chroniclers reported, the King had to rush away immediately after dinner to take it off.I hadn't realized that Louis XIV had been so fond of the Liberace look, so I went looking for pictures. This is where things got a bit odd.During the long years of his rule, Louis and his jewelers had become highly imaginative about finding a place for astonishing quantities of diamonds on a man's body. The King's hat was adorned with a pin made up of seven big stones, the largest of which weighed 44 carats. There were diamonds on the hilt of his sword, on his shoe buckles, even on his garter buckles. Above all, every item of his clothing sported diamond buttons, diamond-surrounded buttonholes, and sprays of diamond extending from the buttonholes-- up and down the front opening, along every pocket, all up the sleeves and the side slits, and even all down the back slit of his frock coat. In the 123 buttons on his overgarment alone, the King showed off at least 1,500 carats of diamonds. Because his clothes had been turned into a sort of pretext for the display of diamonds, Louis' person must have been least as dazzling as the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, in which the Persian ambassador was received. Not other ruler has ever matched the caratage worn by Louis XIV. Of this final reception of his reign, the Duc de Saint-Simon remarked that "the King was bursting with diamonds; he sagged under their weight." Today, we love words such as "glitz" and "bling": they might have been invented with this man in mind.
I quickly found Antoine Coypel's painting of Louis XIV receiving the Persian Ambassadors:
--but where is the bling? Here is a closeup of Louis:
and although there are some bits of sparkly trim, presumably diamonds, he certainly doesn't seem to be dripping with them. Most strikingly, there is no trace of the Blue Diamond.
The Blue Diamond, also known as the "French Blue", was a huge, dark-blue diamond. It disappeared during the French Revolution, only to re-appear several decades later, cut down to form the Hope Diamond. This is *not* the kind of item you overlook.
I have wasted a shocking amount of time looking, and I cannot find any image of Louis XIV wearing the Blue. In 1749 Louis XV had the Blue incorporated into an emblem for the Order of the Golden Fleece. The emblem was reconstructed in 2008:
Louis XV frequently displayed the Order's emblem in portraits, but the only image I can find in which he is apparently wearing this staggeringly bejeweled emblem is a painting by Carle Van Loo, which the curators at Versailles merely date "1751-1775". A close-up of the emblem:
shows a design which isn't exactly like the reconstructed Great Emblem. And if one of these stones is the French Blue, it doesn't look particularly blue.
I now fell into an Internet research vortex, looking for how diamonds are shown in pre-19th century portraits. The brief answer: not much. Pearls are *everywhere*, but not diamonds. Or at least, not obviously.
What I eventually realized is that diamonds were being painted as *dark*. For instance, here's the detail of the bodice in a portrait of Marie de' Medici, c. 1600:
The diamond-shaped shiny gray things are actually diamonds, I think. You can see the same basic treatment of diamonds in a portrait by Augustin Justinat of the young Louis XV from 1717:
I'm not actually sure which elements on the coat are the diamonds -- are they the greyish blobs? or the blackish lumps? -- but I'm quite certain the eight-pointed brooch or emblem has a group of diamonds in the center. As in Marie de' Medici's portrait, they look like rather steely glass.
In Marie Antoinette's 1775 coronation portrait the diamonds in her hair are a bit more recognizable:
--though to my eye they still look more like metal than jewels.
The Regent Diamond is a major French Crown Jewel. Louis XV often wore it on his hat, and, later, Marie-Antoinette did so as well. In a 1785 picture of Marie-Antoinette and her children walking in the garden, the Regent is rather dark:
Compare this to the diamond as it is in the Louvre today:
The collection of French crown jewels was broken up in the tumults of the Revolution. The French Blue disappeared for good, only to turn up decades later re-cut as the Hope Diamond. The Regent was briefly stolen, but Napoleon redeemed it and had it mounted on his ceremonial sword when he became emperor. In this detail from a portrait by Francois Gerard, you can see that the diamond looks a lot more diamond-like than in previous outings, though still not as shiny as it appears today:
All of a sudden, going only a few years into the 19th century, I start to find pictures of diamonds that actually look like diamonds. The best are in miniatures by Louis-Marie Autissier. This portrait of Marie-Antoinette's only surviving child, Princess Marie Thérèse (the Duchess of Angoulême) is only about ten inches high:
but Autissier depicts the diamonds in her tiara *perfectly*:
[source.]
What I really don't understand is why no painter seems to have done this before. Yes, this kind of detail isn't easy, but that's what portrait-painters of the rich and famous were *paid* for, and when it came to depicting rich fabrics, lace, and pearls, they spared no effort or expense -- look at any of the pictures in this collection about lace in art for examples.
So what was it about diamonds that was so difficult? Did they actually look dark to painters before 1800, somehow? Was it something about the lighting? I notice that these days Versailles' Hall of Mirrors gives the overwhelming impression of *light*, but historical depictions, like the picture of Louis XIV receiving the Persians, above, emphasize neither the light nor the reflections in the room. Was it lack of artificial lighting? Or of glass-cleaning technology?
As for the painters, I also wonder if they maybe traditionally used some technique to paint diamonds that was unstable --something like painting a layer of a silver compound, which then tarnished. But surely they would have noticed that this was happening, and experiment until they got effects like Autissier did in the early 19th C.
Noticing things is easy; noticing that you're *not* seeing something is hard.
Just throwing this out there, but it might make a difference that Autissier's miniatures were painted on ivory rather than canvas.
Posted by: karl | October 25, 2013 at 01:01 PM
Those earlier time periods were not noted for how often people took baths; perfumes and powders attempted to hide body odor, and the powder in hair got into clothing and jewels. I would not be at all surprised if the diamonds in earlier portraits looked dark because there was dirt in the backs of the settings.
We are used to open settings that allow light in. Not all of those settings were open to the same degree to allow light into the sides and back of a stone. Also -- gem cutters control the refraction of light within a stone. The sort of faceting we are used to began to be used (as I have been told) during Louis XIV, and was not done with as great a skill as is used nowadays, or as great an amount of precision. Without the mathematical precision that is used to make light refract properly for sparkle, it's not surprising that diamonds would be painted as dark.
Posted by: fiddlergrrl | October 25, 2013 at 01:28 PM
karl:
What one would usually expect would be that painters would experiment with different underpaintings, to get the kind of effect Autissier got on ivory. This modern oil painting lesson, for instance, recommends using thick white underpainting for diamonds. Ze considers painting pearls to be much more difficult (and interesting) -- and it has been a necessary skill for painters to the European upper classes for centuries.
What is immediately striking, if you compare 19th/20th century to earlier diamond depictions, is that in the modern paintings diamonds seem to be underpainted with white. In the earlier works the underpainting looks dark or very dark -- which makes me wonder if it was a shiny, silver-based pigment that has tarnished.
Posted by: Doctor Science | October 25, 2013 at 01:41 PM
fiddler:
Your argument is basically that diamonds looked dark to people at the time, right? Earlier in The Essence of Style, DeJean quotes a contemporary who said of one of Louis XIV's early diamond-studded outfits that the King "appeared to be surrounded by light".
Also, there are images like e.g. this picture of Catherine the Great, surrounded by diamonds.
Although, hmm, there may be something to what you say. Here's a picture of the Russian Imperial Crown, which is in the Catherine the Great picture, and the diamonds *do* look rather dark and dirty.
Posted by: Doctor Science | October 25, 2013 at 02:19 PM
In support of fiddler's argument:
Here is a painting of Catherine the Great with many of the Russian state regalia.
Here is what many of the items look like now.
Posted by: Doctor Science | October 25, 2013 at 02:21 PM
i suspect that the settings and cut of the diamonds in the older portraits were such that the stones simply didn't have the sparkle that later stones did.
the so-called "brilliant" cut wasn't introduced until the mid-17th C, so anything older was probably a "mine" or "rose" cut: cuts which do not enhance the internal reflections the way the brilliant cut does. so, they'll end up looking far duller (and will let more of their backing show - which was probably silver). and the cuts that we're familiar with today, which really bring out the sparkle, didn't come into widespread use until the 19th C (better machining, better science, better tools).
Posted by: cleek | October 25, 2013 at 02:37 PM
in other words: painters painted diamonds that way because that's how most diamonds cut and set before the 1800s looked.
Posted by: cleek | October 25, 2013 at 02:42 PM
Diamonds are traditionally costly partly because they were once rare and hard to obtain.
So maybe these folks weren't wearing many diamonds because they didn't have many.
Now that we know about kimberlite pipes, and have found many of them, diamonds are no longer rare. This is so much the case that a cartel has long attempted, and fairly successfully, to buy the entire production in an effort control the supply.
I guess my point is that in the old days, and for some N, even a king could amass only N carats of good diamonds, because that's all that were known to exist. Now, the supply available to a sufficiently wealthy person is effectively infinite.
Posted by: joel hanes | October 25, 2013 at 04:55 PM
Human Rights Watch report on some drone strikes in Yemen--
link
Amnesty International on drone strikes in Pakistan--
link
AI documents (I haven't read the report, just the summary) a "rescuer" attack, where people who ran to help the victims of a previous strike were themselves attacked.
Posted by: Donald Johnson | October 27, 2013 at 02:22 PM
And on the gossipy level, a very admiring portrait of Glenn Greenwald. ( I tend to agree with GG--if you have the talent, you should be a gadfly. He says it in a somewhat more colorful, not suitable for ObiWi way.)
link
Posted by: Donald Johnson | October 27, 2013 at 02:41 PM
And now back to serious links. Henry Farrell from the Crooked Timber blog and someone else (forgot the name) write about how Manning and Snowden are making America's long reliance on hypocrisy as a foreign policy tool a less viable option.
The article is behind a firewall at Foreign Affairs, but Farrell supplied this bypass which he says should work for a few weeks--
link
Posted by: Donald Johnson | October 27, 2013 at 02:47 PM