The pendant hanging from the light blue cord, front view

Collection Marte·Pendente

Oxidized silver Marte pendant with blue topaz and three colored stones

Name: Oxidized silver Marte pendant with blue topaz and three colored stones
Brand: Anna Gioielli
SKU: PA177PV
Price: 400.0 EUR
Availability: InStock

Four carats and fifteen of blue topaz on fifteen grams and eighty of pierced silver, and not a gram of gold.

€400,00 PA177PV

Drawn and built by hand at the bench, in Tosi.

The body of the pendant is a silver plate opened into a net of irregular voids: no hole is like the one beside it, and the outer profile closes no figure — on one side it drops into a wide lobe, on the other it stops with a step. The recesses stay black and the raised areas are re-polished, as in all the Marte pieces: the design comes forward by contrast. At the bottom, inside a closed silver setting folded by hand over the outline of the stone, sits the blue topaz, oval, with the crown cut in a checkerboard: the light does not come out whole, it divides among the small squares, and the blue stays bright even where the metal around it is dark. The other three stones are small, round and separate from one another — they do not touch and they make no surround: each has its own small round setting, with the rim brought up bright. Green above left, purple to the right, pink below beside the topaz. At the top the bail is cut from the same pierced plate. From the back the piercing goes right through and the seat of the topaz stays open: the stone can be seen from behind as well. Seen edge on, the plate is not flat, it curves.

Fifteen grams and eighty of silver at nine hundred and twenty-five thousandths, for a pendant of forty-five millimeters by thirty-one: for a plate pierced across its whole face that is a high weight, and it is not in the net, it is in the edge and in the solid parts left between one void and the next, because that is where the piece holds. The blue topaz is four carats and fifteen, and it is the only stone whose weight the company states: for the other three — amethyst, peridot and pink amethyst — it gives the names and not the carats, and we do not add the carats. There is no gold here: silver and nothing else, settings included, and so no joint between two metals that behave differently under the flame. The pale blue silk cord with silver ends that appears in the photographs is forty-eight centimeters long.

The material

Weights and carats as the workshop declares them.

15.80 gramsSilver 925‰

4.15 carats Blue topaz · oval, checkerboard crown

Metals: Silver 925‰
Finish: Oxidized in the recesses, polished on the raised areas
Dimensions: Pendant 45 × 31 mm · cord 48 cm
Technique: Made by hand: the silver plate opened into irregular voids and pierced right through, oxidized in the recesses and re-polished on the raised areas; the topaz closed in a silver setting folded over the outline of the stone; the three colored stones set one by one in their round settings; the bail cut from the same plate.

The stones

Blue topaz

At the bottom center, in a closed silver setting

Cut: Oval, checkerboard crown
Carats: ct 4.15
Note: Weight stated by the company

Amethyst, peridot and pink amethyst

Three separate stones on the pierced field, each in its own round setting

Cut: Round
Note: The company states their names, not their carat weight

The openwork body filling the frame, with the topaz at the bottom and the three coloured stones

The pendant resting on a light stone, in three-quarter view

Three-quarter view from above, with the silver end caps, the lobster clasp and the extender chain of the cord

Side view: the thin thickness of the slab and its curve

The reverse: the openwork passes right through and the seat of the topaz stays open

The pendant on the wood, from the front, with the cord knotted at the top

Close-up of the checkerboard topaz in its bezel and of one of the small round bezels

How it is made

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

Irregular voids: In geometric piercing the error is measured against the module that repeats; here there is no module, and every void has to be decided as it is opened. The risk shifts: not that a mesh comes out crooked, but that at some point the solid is left too thin, and the piece gives way exactly there. Whoever does it holds together two things that pull in opposite directions, an outline that has to look random and a thickness that has to carry.
Oxidizing: The silver is darkened on purpose, and then re-polished only where the light has to come back. The black stays in the voids and the recesses, the bright on the raised areas: it is a design made by subtraction, and whoever does it decides where to stop the cloth.
Checkerboard cut: On the crown the facets do not converge towards a point: they cross in a grid of squares, like a checkerboard. It is a cut that looks not for sparkle but for the depth of the color, and that is why it is used on quartzes and on gems where the color is the subject.
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. Blue topaz of natural origin does exist, but it is rare and usually very pale — on a saturated blue stone, treatment is therefore the rule and not the exception, and it is a declared and accepted practice in the gem trade. For whoever does the setting something else counts: topaz cleaves along a clean plane, parallel to the base. A knock given in the wrong direction does not chip a corner, it opens the stone in two — that is why it is held on claws that take it around the edge and leave it free, and why on a topaz already in its seat a bezel is not pushed over.

I don't look at what others are doing: I would rather create in my own style. That is what makes our jewelry recognizable.
Fabio Gori — Anna Gioielli, Tosi

Made for you

Every piece leaves the bench made to order: sizes and details are agreed before the work begins.

The goldsmith's workshop is also the place where made-to-measure jewellery is created and family pieces are restored: if you have an idea, or something you want brought back to how it was, that is where it starts.

Ask for a made-to-measure piece

Made by

Anna Gioielli

A goldsmith's workshop in Tosi, on the slopes of the Pratomagno: Anna opened it in 1988, her sons Fabio and Francesco carry it on. Piercing, repoussé, chasing and burin engraving — the Florentine school, with the workshop in full view of the shop.

All the creations by Anna Gioielli