SAPPHIRE WHISPER

About:

Almost everyone in the world knows about Cameos, and can relate the word, generally, to the piece of jewelry featuring the popular lady face. Very few people, though, know exactly what is a Cameo and what it is made of. Sometimes, when asked, I find very difficult to give a detailed answer to the question, without going into boring technicalities. So the best answer I could come up with, detailed and visual at the same time, is this: A Cameo is a hand carving on a 2 layer genuine material.

Nowadays, "Cameo" is any type of carving, on any material; being this the most common way to identify an object through the idea of its original. But a genuine Cameo must show, at least, the 2 qualities:

The Carving must be made exclusively by hand. Although, this could be not easy to recognize by a non-expert eye.

The 2 Layers. This is, by far, the most important technical characteristic: Many materials can actually be carved, but this would not be enough to identify those as cameos. Carving on a two layer material (such as a conch shell) is indeed much more difficult, due to the fact that each layer can be very thin and the carver never knows when one layer ends and the other comes up to the surface.

Only playing through the 2 or more layers, the carver will obtain the desired effect of design, depth, and nuances he first envisioned. The balance between the 2 layers gives the Cameo its natural shine and artistic proportion.

Carvers from Torre del Greco could capitalize through centuries of tradition, learning the skills to carve this kind of material, unlike any other sculptor or artist trained only to work on 1 layer materials (wood, Crete, marble).

Nevertheless, very often we find Cameos carved out of such stones as Coral, Lava, Turquoise, which do not show the 2 layers. We still refer to these as “cameos”, for simplicity, but technically they belong to a different category: Carvings.  www.cameos.com