Spreading the culture of art jewelry all over the world is an ongoing battle, even if it has already been historicized, exhibited and kept in museums and has become the protagonist in many exhibitions, fairs, conferences and publications. Italy is much more reluctant to allow jewelry the possibility of being a free creative expression, free to develop and interpret the spirit of the moment. In Italy, proposing jewelry as a creative medium of expression provokes stonewalling: the jewelry world doesn't consider it jewelry and the art world doesn't recognize its creative research value. Even though in recent years new events and exhibition spaces nationwide have been added to the historical activity of the council and galleries in Padua, the Italian panorama in relation to the promotion of research jewelry remains lacking.
In Italy, from the end of the 1940s until the 1970s, we can identify a sort of intellectual fashion, which focused only on this theme and ignored the research of people totally devoted to jewelry. During those years, but also in recent times, a large number of publications, articles, exhibitions (the last of which was held in 2008) dealt with jewelry by artists, pieces signed by famous painters and sculptors, which were welcomed as an expression of the rebirth of the goldsmith's art. Although it is not only an Italian phenomenon, for nearly three decades it achieved an incredible popularity in Italy.
The first Italian to involve visual artists in the creation of jewelry was Mario Masenza. After World War Two, in the elegant jeweler's shop Gioielleria Masenza in the heart of Rome, he presented these new jewels next to the traditional ones. (The first exhibition dedicated entirely to jewelry by visual artists was organized by Masenza in 1949 at gallery Il Milione in Milan.) In the early 1960s, also in Rome, Danilo and Massimo Fumanti, members of a family of historic jewelers, decided to invest money and involve artists to increase their production. In 1967 in Milan, Giancarlo Montebello and his wife Teresa Pomodoro started to produce jewels in small series designed by painters and sculptures. (Bergesio 302) Art galleries began to commission jewelry from their artists to be sold alongside the paintings and sculptures.
Beyond the cultural value of this practice, a negative consequence emerges: the dominant idea that the artistic value of a jewel emerges from the fact that a painter or sculptor participates in its realization. The label 'gioielli d'artista' (jewels by artist) placed the focus elsewhere rather than on objective consideration of the piece itself. If we look at this type of jewelry without considering the important names linked to it, it will be clear that most of the work hasn't any aesthetic autonomy. These objects totally depend on the artistic language of the painter or sculptor who designed them and they are literally transpositions into the dimensions of jewelry – miniaturizations of art works. The majority of these artists didn't participate to the concrete production of the jewels. They would present a simple sketch that the jewelers had to interpret and transform, or they might work wax, with a very few chasing or embossing the object. But all required a goldsmith to finish their pieces and to handle complex or skilled tasks such as setting stones, constructing mechanisms and so on.
Outside Italy it is more common to find nuanced judgments on this point. Writing in 1961, Graham Hughes wrote that 'This is sometimes called artists' jewelry but that is misleading: the point of the exhibition is to prove that all good jewelers are artists, to diminish rather than increase the gulf between the different types of jewel.' (Hughes) Or as Ralph Turner put it in 1976, 'It is a common mistake to assume that an artist who is painter or sculptor can necessarily create a work of art in jewelry. The medium is a difficult one and requires an attitude of mind, combined with technical skills that are not to be acquired overnight.' (Turner 24-25). In Italy, the attribution of artistic validity seems to follow this equation: art jewelry = jewelry by painters and sculptors. This misleading concept became a dogma and contributed to the division between the idea and its realization, bestowing only on a visual artist the power to transform craft into art.
This statement confirmed the activities of E.N.A.P.I. (in English, the National Board for Craft and Small Industries) a state institution founded in 1925 to renovate Italian crafts through the participation of visual artists, who provided drawings for projects in ceramics, embroidery, jewelry and leather that were executed by craftspeople.
From this prospective it seems obvious that the jewels by visual artists received a lot of attention as a product with a certificated artistic aura. The activity of art jewelers remained in a shady area of culture, penalized because they were located in the craft world.
The only thinker in Italy who developed a different opinion on this theme was Guido Gregorietti, the most important Italian jewelry historian. In the first edition of his book Jewelry Through the Ages, published in 1969, he declared: 'An important 20th-century development is the interest taken in jewelry by certain international famous artists.' (Gregorietti 303). In the revised publication of the book, he was more critical: 'This jewelry is the transfer of the expressive features of the artist from painting or sculpture to metal in reduced dimensions.' (Gregorietti 135). Moreover, he dedicated most of the content and all the images of the chapter to those makers who worked especially on jewelry (art jewelers rather than artists making jewelry). The explanation for this significant change can be found in the bibliography, where he included the main foreign publications dedicated to contemporary art jewelry, such as Gerard Bott's Schmuck (1971) or Graham Hughes's The Art of Jewelry, (1972) and Karl Schollmayer's Neuer Schmuck (1974). It is no accident that in 1983 Fritz Falk (at the time director of the Schmuckmuseum in Pforzheim) asked Gregorietti to write the critical essay for the catalogue of the exhibition Ten Padua Goldsmiths: Modern art jewelry from Italy. This exhibition was a fundamental step towards the international acknowledgement of the School of Padua, the main centre for research jewelry in Italy. In his introduction Gregorietti clears up the differences between the two kinds of jewelry. 'Although the artistic value of these works (jewels by artists) as the personality of their authors are excellent, the belief prevailed that only the goldsmith with a specific status have the best qualification for the design and realization of art jewelry, as without a deep material knowledge it is not possible to reach a poetic effect of the work.' (Gregorietti) As a fine connoisseur of jewelry history, Gregorietti understood that the real innovation in the field had to be looked for in the jewelry made by art jewelers, but his voice has been unheard for long time.
In 1997, when I was working on my thesis, which dealt with two private collections of gioielli d'artista, thanks to Gregorietti's publications I had the opportunity to encounter another way to conceive of art jewelry. Although recent publications such as Gioielli d'Artista in Italia 1945-1995 completely disregard the activity of art jewelers, following Gregorietti I traveled to Padua. There I found not only the school, but a link to the international art jewelry scene. At the university, the reality of art jewelry, its history and protagonists, was just not found in the program. In Padua, thanks to the activity of the Municipality, of two private galleries and the library of Istituto Pietro Selvatico, I started researching and developing a series of reflections that I'm still carrying forward.
In the past fourteen years something has slowly begun to change in Italy. We have more galleries and spaces that show art jewelry. But in general there is not a real understanding of the value of this kind of jewelry practice. It is still not uncommon to find approaches to this world that reveal old prejudices. In one of the rare articles about this issue in a national newspaper, the choice of language is interesting. Presenting the work of Annamaria Zanella, the articles describes her as a 'sculptor-goldsmith' and her work as a 'necklace – sculpture.' (Pini 43) Is this just conventional language to make the message clearer to a wide public, or could it be considered the trace of an ancient division between the arts?