FILIGREE, jewel work of a delicate kind made with twisted threads usually of gold and silver. Though filigree has become a special branch of jewel work it was originally part of the ordi nary work of the jeweller. Signor A. Castellani states, in his Memoir on the Jewellery of the Ancients (1861), that the jewel lery of the Etruscans and Greeks was made by soldering together and so building up the gold, rather than by chiselling or engraving the material. The art may be said to consist in curling, twisting and plaiting fine, pliable threads of metal, and uniting them at their points of contact with each other, and with the ground, by means of gold or silver solder and borax, by the help of the blow pipe. Small grains or beads of the same metals are often set in the eyes of volutes, on the junctions or at intervals at which they will set off the wire-work effectively. The more delicate work is generally protected by framework of stouter wire. Brooches, crosses, ear-rings and other personal ornaments of modern filigree are generally surrounded and subdivided by bands of square or flat metal giving consistency to the filling up, which would not otherwise keep its proper shape.
The Egyptian jewellers employed wire, both to lay down on a background and to plait or otherwise arranged jour. But, with the exception of chains, it cannot be said that filigree work was much practised by them. Their strength lay rather in their cloisonne work and their moulded ornaments. Many examples, however, remain of round plaited gold chains of fine wire, such as are still made by the filigree workers of India, and known as Trichinopoli chains. From some of these are hung smaller chains of finer wire with minute fishes and other pendants fastened to them. In ornaments derived from Phoenician sites, such as Cyprus and Sardinia, patterns of gold wire are laid down with great delicacy on a gold ground, but the art was advanced to its highest perfection in the Greek and Etruscan filigree of the 6th to the 3rd century B.C.
It is probable that in India and various parts of central Asia filigree has been worked from the most remote period with out any change in the designs. Whether the Asiatic jewellers were influenced by the Greeks settled on that continent, or merely trained under traditions held in common with them, it is certain that the Indian fili gree workers retain the same patterns as those of the ancient Greeks, and work them in the same way, down to the present day. Wandering workmen are given so much gold, coined or rough, which is weighed, heated in a pan of charcoal, beaten into wire and then worked in the courtyard or veranda of the employer's house according to the designs of the artist, who weighs the complete work on restoring it and is paid at a specified rate for his labour. Very fine grains or beads and spines of gold, scarcely thicker than coarse hair, projecting from plates of gold, are methods of ornamentation still used.
Passing to later times we may notice in many collections of mediaeval jewel work reliquaries, covers for the gospels, etc., made either in Constantinople from the 6th to the i 2th century, or in monasteries in Europe, in which Byzantine goldsmiths' work was studied and imitated. These objects, besides being enriched with precious stones, polished, but not cut into facets, and with enamel, are often decorated with filigree. In the north of Europe the Saxons, Britons and Celts were, from an early period, skilful in several kinds of goldsmiths' work.
The Irish filigree work is more thoughtful in design and more varied in pattern than that of any period or country that could be named. Its highest perfec tion must be placed in the loth and i Ith centuries. The Royal Irish Academy in Dublin con tains a number of reliquaries and personal jewels, of which filigree is the general and most remarkable o r n a m en t. The "Tara" brooch has been copied and imitated, and the shape and decoration of it are well known. Instead of fine curls or volutes of gold thread, the Irish filigree is varied by numerous designs in which one thread can be traced through curious knots and complications, which, disposed over large surfaces, balance one another, but always with special varieties and arrangements difficult to trace with the eye. The long thread appears and disappears without breach of continuity, the two ends generally worked into the head and the tail of a serpent or a monster. The reliquary con taining the "Bell of St. Patrick" is covered with knotted work in many varieties. A two-handled chalice, called the "Ardagh cup," found near Limerick in 1868, is ornamented with work of this kind of extraordinary fineness.
Much of the mediaeval jewel work all over Europe down to the 15th century, on reliquaries, crosses, croziers and other ecclesias tical goldsmiths' work, is set off with bosses and borders of fili gree. Filigree work in silver was practised by the Moors of Spain during the middle ages with great skill, and was introduced by them and established all over the peninsula, whence it was carried to the Spanish colonies in America. The Spanish filigree work of the i 7th and i8th centuries is of extraordinary com plexity (examples in the Victoria and Albert Museum), and silver filigree jewellery of delicate and artistic design is still made in considerable quantities throughout the country. The manufac ture spread over the Balearic islands, and among the populations that border the Mediterranean. It is still made all over Italy and in Malta, Albania, the Ionian islands and many other parts of Greece. That of the Greeks is sometimes on a large scale, with several thicknesses of wires alternating with larger and smaller bosses and beads, sometimes set with turquoises, etc., and mounted on convex plates, making rich ornamental headpieces, belts and breast ornaments. Filigree silver buttons of wire-work and small bosses are worn by the peasants in most of the coun tries that produce this kind of jewellery. Silver filigree brooches and buttons are also made in Denmark, Norway and Sweden. Some very curious filigree work was brought from Abyssinia of ter the capture of Magdala—arm-guards, slippers, cups, etc., some of which are now in the South Kensington museum. (See also