Genuine, fraudulent, restored, or pastiche - "Renaissance" pendants, 16th or 19th century

 

Much/most of the design work of the nineteenth century - fashion, furniture, art, architecture - was a rehashing of earlier styles; nearly everything came with a label or description subtitled "Revival." Beginning as early as the 1850s, there appeared a taste for Renaissance Revival jewelry. Original antique pieces, copies, or new designs, all based on Elizabethan and continental jewelry of the late Renaissance period, were once again the height of fashion. 

A good deal of confusion later developed because the newly-made pieces so skillfully mimicked the stylistic qualities of the original pieces. And sometimes, these new items were even fraudulently marketed as being original. Perhaps more problematic was the fact that older pieces were often heavily restored, reconfigured, or augmented with additional features to make them more attractive to a contemporary audience. Original pieces that had languished unworn in aristocratic collections for two centuries were taken out and "spruced up", sometimes greatly altering - and effectively destroying - the original jewel.

The vogue reached its peak in the 1870s and was fairly over by the end of the following decade. The no longer fashionable jewels disappeared from the scene, put away again, only to reappear decades later - the originals, the altered, the fakes - in auction houses and museums, where those who would now possess them often couldn't be entirely certain of what they'd actually got. Expert jewelers, conservators, and the guardians of museums and private collections throughout the world are still trying to sift through the confusion left behind by these gorgeous but often - accidentally or intentionally - duplicitous objects.

I'm not going to wade into the task of labeling what is real and what is fake in the images here - though I think the latter predominates - I'm just going to share a selection of these odd and lavish, fantastical and sometimes even quite beautiful jewels.