The miniature pieces of jewellery worth more than a Botticelli

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After Lorenzo de’ Medici’s death in Florence in 1492, the best specimens from his collection of cameos were valued at a considerably higher sum than his best Botticelli paintings.

Mademoiselle Avrillion recalled that the Empress Josephine’s greatest pleasure when in residence at Château de Malmaison was to sit by the fire showing off hers. For George Spencer, 4th Duke of Marlborough, who had nearly 800 superlative examples, they were, according to Sir John Boardman, ‘a solace from his busy sister, wife and many children’.

Tragically, Marlborough’s collection was broken up at auction in 1899. To date, less than one-third of them has been accounted for and, ever since I became ‘cameo conscious’, it has been my dream to re-discover one of those fabulous missing jewels.

I came to appreciate cameos late in life, having always associated them (foolishly) with my grandmother’s Wedgwood imitation cameo brooches and dull, dusty exhibits in provincial museums. What changed my mind was a 2,000-year-old Roman agate cameo of an elegant hound still set in its original gold ring displayed in the window of Bernardo Antichità, the only proper jeweller on the Ponte Vecchio in Florence, Italy.

For the two years we lived in that city, I visited that ring more or less daily. How I longed to possess it. Eventually, I plucked up the courage to enter the shop and try it on. Our twins don’t know how close they came to being moved from the international school (costly) to the local state school (free).

I may not have acquired the ring from Signor Antichità, but, thanks to the hour or so he spent showing and telling me about his stock (for he had many other exquisite pieces), I did acquire a passion for cameos.

There are two types of glyptics: intaglio, which are cut into stone, and cameos, which are carved in relief. The oldest intaglios — Mesopotamian cylinder seals — date to about 3500BC, whereas it wasn’t until about 500BC in Greece that we see the earliest examples of miniature sculptures being carved out of gemstones, such as jasper, carnelian, rock crystal and amethyst.

When the first multicoloured, multilayered sardonyx was imported from India, it allowed, to quote expert James David Draper, ‘artists to manipulate the strata of the stone in relation to the design, exploring the stone’s depths to enhance its visual impact’.

Figures or objects could be picked out in one or more colours against a solid or translucent ground. Interestingly, the cutting method has barely changed in two and a half millennia. Instead of using a chisel or riffler as you might expect, the carving is achieved with the point of a drill, which is used to rub abrasive powders into the stone.

Cameos feature in every period of Western history. Initially, they spread from Greece to the rest of the ancient world. From the fifth century onwards, cameos went primarily into church treasuries and were used to decorate reliquaries, crosses and book covers. After about 1400, wealthy patrons of the Arts began to build impressive private collections.

The popularity of cameos grew and grew throughout the Renaissance and into the 17th and 18th centuries (no Grand Tour shopping list could be said to be complete without a cabinet of cameos). Elizabeth I gave Sir Francis Drake an enamelled gold locket set on the front with a sardonyx cameo of two heads. Catherine the Great owned a staggering 10,000 examples. Queen Victoria commissioned a cameo with the jugate heads of herself and Albert for the Royal Order of Victoria and Albert.

What makes these tiny gems so desirable? The skill required to create a well-executed cameo is clearly sufficient reason in and of itself — in other words, their allure could be explained solely on the grounds of the workmanship involved. Yet there are other, complicated reasons.

In the same way that a cook can make a sauce stronger by reducing it, an artist can make their subject more powerful by shrinking it. A cameo is not only a miniature work of art, it is a concentrated work of art. A minute cameo portrait or scene can engender as great an emotional response as the most magnificent, large-scale drawing, painting or sculpture. Interestingly, many of the world’s most famous artists, from Botticelli to Sir Joshua Reynolds, feature cameos in their pictures.

However, where cameos have the advantage over, say, Michelangelo’s David or Picasso’s Guernica, is that you can wear them. You can set them into rings, pendants, brooches, earrings, bracelets, tiaras and even, as Napoleon’s Crown of Charlemagne (which incorporates cameos taken from the treasuries of Bourges, Arpajon and Saint-Denis) proves, a crown.

Small is, indeed, beautiful.

This feature originally appeared in the October 14, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.