Oxidized silver owl head ring with blue topaz eyes

How it is made

The words of the trade, one by one, explained to those who do not know them.

01

Lost-wax casting

The model is built in wax, coated in refractory plaster and then heated until the wax runs out: a void of the exact shape is left, and molten silver is poured into that void. To get the piece out the mold has to be broken, so every casting consumes both the wax and the mold, and the model you started from no longer exists. It is the way to obtain what the saw and the file could not — ribbons crossing over one another, undercuts, voids closed on every side — but if the metal does not reach the end of a thin branch the piece comes out maimed, and there is no fixing it: you melt it down and start again from the wax.

02

Figurative subject

A recognizable animal within fifteen millimeters is not obtained by adding detail: it is obtained by getting a few proportions right. In the owl there are three — how far apart the eyes sit, how much wider than tall the head is, where the beak ends — and whoever looks checks them all together, in one go, before even noticing the plumage. The model is carved once only in wax, and from then on every example repeats it: one eye half a millimeter higher than the other does not stay the fault of that piece, it becomes the face of every one that follows.

03

Burin engraving

The burin is a goldsmith's small chisel pushed by hand. It does not scratch: it lifts a shaving of metal and leaves a clean groove that picks up the light. It is the mark that for five centuries has distinguished the Florentine goldsmithing school.

04

Oxidizing

The silver is darkened on purpose, and then polished back only where the light has to return. The black stays in the voids and the recesses, the light on the raised work: it is a drawing made by subtraction, and whoever does it decides where to stop the cloth.

05

Blue topaz

Topaz is an aluminum silicate, and in nature it is almost always colorless. The blue seen in jewelry almost always comes from a treatment: the colorless rough is irradiated and then heated, and the color that comes out is stable and does not fade. Naturally occurring blue topaz exists, but it is rare and usually very pale — on a saturated blue stone the treatment is therefore the rule and not the exception, and it is a declared and accepted practice in the gem trade. For whoever sets it, something else matters: topaz cleaves along a clean plane, parallel to the base. A knock in the wrong direction does not chip a corner, it opens the stone in two — which is why it is held on claws that take it round the outline and leave it free, and why a setting is never tapped down again on a topaz already in place.