Enamel

Enamel is a part of our everyday life in so many omnipresent things. Signs, pots, dials and a lot more are enamelled, which means covered with enamel. The practical quality, which means surface-protecting quality, of enamel for the everyday device is used only since the 19th century on a large scale. However, a long time before it and still enamel works are a highly respected art in the jewellery production!! The alternative expression ‘glass flux’ explains nearly in one word the basic quality of enamel.

A mixture from inorganic and glass producing substances, like silicates and oxides, is put, by immersing or spraying, on the object to be enamelled. Then this layer is branded at 850 to 900 °C. In the process the enamel layer melts to a glass cover. Afterwards this process can be repeated several times to work out the desired thickness, different colours or decorative element. There are different techniques in the production of jewellery enamel, which were partly used already 1000 years ago. As can be proved the Byzantine empress Theophanu already promoted this first blossoming of enamel art. The ‚Pala D’Oro” in the Markus’s cathedral in Venice serves art historians as an important reference for this technique. Spreading from the French Limoges the arts of the enamel treatment set up till the 20th century in particular in Germany, Belgium and France. The antique email jewellery experienced its most creative and most popular time during the art nouveau. Around the turn of the century exuberant highly imaginative necklaces, brooches and earrings originated in the ’new art”of France and Germany. There were and are no borders in the creation of fantasy.