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CASTELLANI'S

REVOLUTION

Episode 1

Gold for the Fatherland (1814 to 1860)

Introduction: A Bang or a Whimper? 

Rome, 1930: an Italian jeweller and businessman of great renown passes away. In accordance with his will, his family’s estate - extensive archives and research, and a formidable collection of jewellery and historical artefacts - is bequeathed to the Italian state. In the same year, the head of that state publishes an essay entitled “La dottrina del fascismo” (The Doctrine of Fascism). The jeweller was Alfredo Castellani. The self-proclaimed fascist was Beneditto Mussolini. Mussolini at the time was fighting a deep economic recession. By 1935 he was asking his people to donate gold for the struggling national banks. Alfredo’s bequest comes just a few years before the “Gold for the Fatherland" initiative, raising the question of whether or not, and to what extent, works by Castellani were included among the 33,600kg of gold items that Mussolini reduced to scrap to prop up the economy of his fascist regime.1

This unfortunate outcome is not verifiable. The timing is accurate though. Furthermore, there are various historical sources indicating that much of the Castellani legacy disappeared and so the question at least seems fair. If there is any truth to it, then it may appear that the astonishing epic of the Castellani firm ends “not with a bang but with a whimper”: wondrous fruits, born of a century of archaeological fieldwork, historical investigation and technical innovation, melted down into featureless blocks lining the walls of a locked bank vault... 

…But would the previous owners of the firm - Alfredo’s grandfather, (Fortunato Pio), his uncle, (Alessandro), and his father, (Augusto) - have turned in their graves at the thought? 

 …Or would they have made the same bequest?  

Haphazardly, many have written of the Castellanis. But what is often vastly understated is their active role in a century of political upheaval in Italy; in war and insurrection, archaeology and ideology. It’s a long century, beginning in 1814 and ending with Alfredo’s bequest in 1930. 

A lot happens: 

  • Etruscan and Roman archaeology helps to inspire Italian liberal revolutionaries;  
  • Disparate Italian states are unified in the Kingdom of Italy;  
  • The same historical narratives that inspired the liberals are (re-)appropriated by a new generation of self-proclaimed fascists. 

But running in parallel is the story of the Castellani firm. The Castellanis were not impartial. If not in the trenches, they were cheerleading from the sidelines. Was Alfredo's bequest a  ‘bang’ - a proud act of Italian ultranationalism - or a dying ‘whimper’ of defeated utopians?  

The stage is set, so before embarking on this almost-forgotten tale of goldsmiths, archaeologists, and revolutionaries, let me introduce you to our cast…

The Castellani Firm

Fortunato Pio Castellani: The firm's founder; wise grandfather of Alfredo; father of Alessandro and Augusto

Michelangelo Caetani: Wealthy noble and renaissance man; Duke of Sermoneta

Giampietro Marquise of Campana (XI): Collector of antiquities and civil servant allegedly working to bring down the system from the inside

Alessandro Castellani (XI): The hero of our story; lost a hand in a hunting accident yet against the odds revolutionised jewellery-making; archaeologist, activist, and entrepreneur

Augusto Castellani: The "well-behaved" younger brother, quietly working away in Rome as chaos erupts across Italy

Political Operators

Guiseppi Mazzini (XI): Lawyer, philosopher, patriot. Simultaneously known as "the Soul of Italy" and "the most dangerous man in Europe"

XI refers to those characters who, in the course of our story, will be imprisoned and exiled from their homeland

A Love Affair or a Conspiracy? 

In the 1820s and 30s, while collaborating with scholar and nobleman Michelangelo Caetani, Castellani was only just becoming what we recognise today. I will say at the outset that as yet there are almost no Castellani pieces that are accurately dated to the period pre-1850. Beware of attributions to Fortunato! Much of the firm’s work remains undated2 and is often incorrectly attributed to the firm’s founder. I would encourage the reader, throughout these two articles, to note the slightly weightier design and duller finish of some works and to contrast them with the brightness and elegance of others. This distinction, to my mind, reveals the generational shift from father, Fortunato (c.1815-50), to sons, Alessandro and Augusto (c.1850-1914). 

Fast-forward through several years: Fortunato Pio Castellani opens his workshop in Rome (1814); he produces largely renaissance revival jewellery; he is not the Castellani we think of today. In 1826 Fortunato Pio is lecturing on gold work in Rome, and a technique of his: 

He developed a chemical method to reproduce the warm, deep yellow tones of the ancient gold, and in 1826 lectured on the process to a group of scholars at an illustrious academy in Rome.3    

This quote refers to Fortunato's "giallone" technique:

Around the middle of the 19th century, the archaeological jewellery of Castellani was coloured by using chemical baths to obtain the famous “giallone” of Etruscan gold also employed in this case as a treatment to enrich the surface with a chemical gilding.4 

One of the scholars supposedly present at the lecture is the aforementioned Duke, Michelangelo Caetani. Fortunato was already studying ancient jewellery, but Caetani would open doors that the founder of the Castellani firm could not yet have imagined.

Such was Caetani’s impact on Fortunato that he earned the second ‘C’ of the Castellani maker’s mark, and became an artistic partner in the workshop. 

Caetani was an aristocrat, the heir to the Duke of Sermoneta. He was well-read, well-connected, well-educated, highly politicised and became a life-long friend of the Castellanis. Fortunato’s son Augusto talks of “our dear Duke of Sermoneta” from whom the idea of archaeological imitation was born5. When the “dear duke” visited the excavation of the Regolini-Galassi tomb in 1836, he invited Fortunato and his son Alessandro to accompany him. The Regolini-Galassi tomb dates to the Etruscan orientalizing period (c.600 BC). It marks a turning point in archaeology, in the work of Castellani, and perhaps even for Italy itself…

Snake bracelet with granulation, designed by Caetani for Castellani

To the reader: note the lighter tone of gold and the more delicate hand of this later Castellani bracelet

One of the 327 discovered pieces is the Large Parade Fibula; one piece, among many, which revealed to Fortunato that forms need not only be cast, cut, or punched, but could be added upon through the soldering of minute grains and impossibly fine filaments. The fervour that would possess the minds of the Castellanis for three generations had begun.

Large Parade Fibula - Gregorian Etruscan Museum, Vatican City

Three decades later, Alessandro - 13 years old at the time of the excavation - wrote in the Archaeological Journal that such techniques and intricacies… 

 …give to the workmanship that artistic character altogether wanting in the great number of modern works, which, owing to a monotonous uniformity produced by punching and casting, have an appearance of triviality, depriving them of all individual character, that charm which so constantly strikes us in the production of the ancients.6 

It is Alessandro, perhaps, who best characterises this love affair of the Castellani goldsmiths (more on that later). But in 1836, the game was already afoot: 

The new line of goods, in the Etruscan style and characterised by intricate, beautifully worked gold settings ornately paved with stones, cameos, enamels and tiny mosaics, took off, and by the 1830's became highly fashionable among an international clientele.7 

The author here refers to goods by Fortunato and Caetani. I would conclude that, having cross-referenced images from the collection at Museo Nazionale Etrusco di Villa Giulia with spectroscopy analysis8 of undated Castellani works, these pieces are examples of the “Fortunato period” (pre-1850):    

By the late 1840s or early 1850s the Castellani workshops in Rome were capable of producing very satisfactory copies of ancient Gold jewellery with simple rope and other filigree and some not-too-miniscule granulation.9  There is a tentative critique of Castellani’s work: 

the granulation was not quite up-to-par with the Etruscans. 

Similarly, in the British Museum archive, a description of a bracelet by Giacinto Melillo - Alessandro’s partner during the “Naples period” (late 1850s-1870s) - reads…  

The grains on the Melillo bracelet average from 0.1 mm to 0.2mm in diameter, while Etruscan granules are frequently smaller than 0.1 mm10  

Granulation and ropework: Melillo bracelet, Naples period - The British Museum

Alessandro was conscious of these challenges, noting that such work "presented difficulties nearly insurmountable." Expert Jack Ogden agrees: 

 …there would be a real likelihood that the solder would run into and flood the granulation, thus negating the whole point of the operation. It must have been extraordinarily frustrating for Alessandro to mull over all this while faced with the fact that his predecessors, 2,000 years earlier, had somehow solved the problem.11 

Referring to the same issue, the British Museum describes how it was finally overcome:

...the ancient method of granulation, which relied upon the capillary action of heated gold at melting point without the use of solder, was not revived successfully until the twentieth century by Littledale, Blackband and others including Elizabeth von Treskow12

We must not ignore that this “love affair” with the ancients is at the same time both an adventure story and a political project (more on that later). But for now, let us begin to conclude by looking at the “Italy” that our cast of characters knew at this time, pre-1850... 

The collapse of the Napoleonic project in 1814 coincides with the opening of Fortunato’s workshop in Rome. But Rome was capital of the Papal States. North of the Papal States was the Austro-Hungarian Empire (Lombardy-Venetia) and several smaller regions divided among the Austrians, the Bourbons, and the Sardinian Dukes of Savoy. To the south, the Bourbons held the Kingdom of Two Sicilies (Sicily and Naples). Italy did not exist.   

The Castellani and Caetani collaboration was not just an artistic and archaeological project, but an ideological one. Their great age of empire - of magnificence, of ancient Italian art and culture - had been lost to foreign rule. Castellani jewellery symbolised this. It was a condemnation of fragmentation, a celebration of grandeur and unity: 

Wearing Castellani jewellery could also signal one’s identification with like-minded erudite connoisseurs of literature, art, and archaeology.13

But who were these connoisseurs?  

Through the patronage of the Dukes of Savoy and of Michaealgelo Caetani it is possible to conclude that what such “connoisseurs” perhaps saw in Fortunato - apart from a political ally and a gifted artisan - was a means for their message to take physical form - to be crystalised, set in stone - through a truly Italian craftsmanship.  

 ...as a deeply patriotic supporter of the Risorgimento, the movement for the formation of an independent Italian state, [Fortunato] saw the promotion of the Italian craft tradition as a civic duty.14 

Italian liberals could wear their history and their revolution; they could exhibit tangible expressions, emblems, of the Risorgimento - the revolutionary Italian unification movement which would soon send the Pope into exile…

Aperitif

Over the Tyrrhenian Sea and the ominous silhouette of Vesuvius in the Bay of Naples, revolutionary storm clouds gather. Next week, in Episode II, they will break over the historic city. Before they do, as the first specks of a light mediterranean rain start to freshen the baked Neapolitan streets and plazas, I would invite the reader to this aperitif:  

Back in Rome, the forces of the great revolutionary Guiseppi Garibaldi took control of the city in 1849 and sent the Pope into exile. Guiseppe Mazzini and two others formed a new governing Triumvirate. 

Years earlier, the progressive Constitution of Cadiz (1812) had inspired violent radicals known as the Carbonari. Mazzini was an early follower. Later, after the Carbonari's many failed insurrections, Mazzini founded another organisation: Young Italy, calling for the collaboration of all Italians against, foreign, clerical, and absolutist powers. By the 1830s, some 60,000 Italians - Alessandro Castellani included - were members of ‘Young Italy’. 

But their 1849 revolution in Rome also failed. They were soon surrounded, under siege by the French. Within a year, Garibaldi retreated, Mazzini was exiled and Fortunato’s son, Alessandro, imprisoned. The Castellani workshop closed and its founder retired. 

Clerical (papal) authority was reasserted on the mainland. The Castellanis saw the arrest of another of their collaborators - the Marquis of Campana, celebrated collector of antiquities - for supposed misuse of public finances. Believing they were witnessing a purge of their anti-clerical allies, the Castellanis defended the Marquis, whose collection had inspired (and would continue to inspire) many Castellani works.

Castellani works inspired by the Campana collection: 1. Helios brooch, 2. Bacchus pendant, 3. Bracelets by Alessandro

By the end of the 1850s however, Campana faced 22 years in prison. The Campana Collection - of Roman, Greek, and Etruscan archaeology and renaissance Italian paintings - was sold to the Louvre15. It is difficult to imagine the sense of indignity and failure our protagonists must have felt: their allies, their history, sent into exile.  

The revolutionaries were dispersed. And although Alessandro was released from prison around 1858, he too was exiled. But our story is not over. As the truism goes, you cannot kill an idea. In Naples, precariously governed by a Bourbon monarch, Alessandro was at the centre of an emerging milieu of archaeologists, goldsmiths, and exiled revolutionaries.

Mazzini too, Alessandro’s ideological leader - displaced in London, supposedly surviving only on potatoes - was inspired anew, not least due to a new acquaintance: Jessie “Hurricane” White, an outspoken English-woman agitating for his cause across the English-speaking world.  

The revolutionaries had suffered a crushing blow; the doors of the Castellani firm were locked. But the keys had passed to Alessandro. And Alessandro, unshaken, phoenix-like among the ashes of the lost southern cities of his forebears, was only just getting started... 

In episode two of Castellani’s Revolution, our next publication, The Risorgimento will rise again.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

From the (fantastic) book  “Castellani and Italian Archaeological Jewelry”:  

 

  1. INTRODUCTION by SUSAN WEBER SOROS and STEFANIE WALKER  
  2. CHAPTER 7:  “Revivers of the Lost Art: Alessandro Castellani and the Quest for Classical Precision” by JACK OGDEN 
  3. CHAPTER 8: “A Perfect Imitation of the Ancient Work: Ancient Jewelry and Castellani Adaptations” by ELIZABETH SIMPSON 
Collection at Museo nazionale etrusco di Villa Giulia and Spectroscopy Analysis 

 

  1.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castellani_(goldsmiths) (see: gallery) 
  2.  https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-11815-3 
Miscellaneous online sources 

 

 

  1. GLUECK, GRACE; https://www.bgc.bard.edu/files/2004_-_Castellani_-_NYT_2004-12-17.pdf 
  2. RUDOE, JUDY;  “Curator’s Note” https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/H_1978-1002-144-a-b 
  3. MUNN, GEOFFREY; https://wartski.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/Jewels-by-Castellani-The-Connoisseur-1981.pdf

 

 

REFERENCES

 

  1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oro_alla_Patria
  2. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9098562/table/Tab1/?report=objectonly
  3. GLUECK, GRACE; https://www.bgc.bard.edu/files/2004_-_Castellani_-_NYT_2004-12-17.pdf
  4. https://journals.openedition.org/archeosciences/2526?lang=en
  5. DAVIS, JOHN A; “Rome during the Castelani Century” pg19.
  6. SIMPSON, ELIZABETH; ; “A Perfect Imitation of the Ancient Work” - Ancient Jewelry and Castellani Adaptations
  7. GLUECK, GRACE; https://www.bgc.bard.edu/files/2004_-_Castellani_-_NYT_2004-12-17.pdf
  8. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-11815-3
  9. OGDEN, JACK; “Revivers of the Lost Art: Alessandro Castellani and the Quest for Classical Precision
  10. RUDOE, JUDY: “Curator’s Note”; https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/H_1978-1002-144-a-b
  11. OGDEN, JACK; “Revivers of the Lost Art: Alessandro Castellani and the Quest for Classical Precision
  12. RUDOE, JUDY: “Curator’s Note”; https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/H_1978-1002-144-a-b
  13. SOROS, SUSAN WEBER, and WALKER, STEFANIE; “Castellani and Italian Archaeological Jewelry”, Introduction, pg10
  14. GLUECK, GRACE; https://www.bgc.bard.edu/files/2004_-_Castellani_-_NYT_2004-12-17.pdf
  15. MUNN, GEOFFREY; https://wartski.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/Jewels-by-Castellani-The-Connoisseur-1981.pdf

 

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