The art of engraving was also applied to glass and gold. The crystal box of Valerio Belli, the most skillful and industrious artist in this branch during the 16th century, deserves particular mention. It was intended by Clement VII as a present to Francis I, when Catherine de' Medici went to Marseilles in 1533. At present it is in Florence. The Milanese par tiCularly distinguished themselves in gem sculpture, as the wealth of the principal citizens of Milan enabled them to patronize this art. Jacopo da Trezza, the same artist who in 1564 executed for Philip II the famous tabernacle of the Escurial, is, as we have noted, said by some to have made in Milan the first attempts at engraving on the diamond. The greatest cameo work of modern times is the stone in the Florentine Museum, seven inches in breadth, on which Cosmo, Grand Duke of Tus cany, with his wife, Eleonore, and his seven children are represented. A Milanese, Giovanni Antonio dei Rossi, who was a contemporary of the Saracchi family (about 1570), is the artist. The Saracchi were five brothers, and the crystal helmet of Albert of Bavaria is a proof of their skill.
Gem-engraving was popular in the 18th and 19th centuries in Italy, Germany and England; the most proficient in France was Jacques Guay, court engraver to Louis XV; the French en graver Sines and the German engravers Natter and Pichler did much of their work in Italy. Toward the end of his life Natter was em ployed in England, where the English engraver Marchant (1755-1812) may be considered to have been the most artistic of the native gem cutters of the period. The best-known en graver in England in the first half of the 19th century was Benedetto Pistrucci (b. in Rome 1784) ; his two daughters Elena and Maria Elisa practised the art in Rome. Notable 18th century engravers are Antonio Berini, a native of Rome, who with Cervera and Giromelli at Rome, and Putinati, at Milan, produced very fine works. In our own times the demand for cameos and intaglios in the United States was greatest from 1870 to 1880. During that time more than 100 workmen found employment here,— many of them as portrait artists. Among these was Lebrethon, who had as a pupil our great sculptor, Augustus Saint Gaudens; another, Winer, who engraved some fine and important cameos, took up brass work ing. Perhaps the greatest artist and the most active, L. Bonet, has to-day scarcely one-sixth of his time occupied, whereas in the "Cameo Age" he required the aid of nine assistants. Some excellent work has been done in New York by Ottavio Negri, formerly of Rome. In 1903 there appeared a slight revival of the wearing of antique and old-fashioned cameos of rather a pronounced form, and quite pos sibly the glyptic art is destined to experience a return of popular favor.
A few of the famous collections of engraved gems are the Rev. C. W. King collection of antique gems, of the types used in his works, and the Cesnola and other collections, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York city; a fine collection at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts; while the Walters collection, at Balti more, Md., contains many of the finest gems in America. In Europe the first rank is taken by the collections of the British Museum, of the Cabinet des Medailles (Bibliotheque Nationale), Paris, and of the Imperial Museum in Vienna, to which must be added the Royal Collection at Windsor Castle, and those of the Uffizi Gal lery at Florence, of the National Museum at Naples, of the Hermitage in Petrograd and of the Antiquarium, Berlin.
In the course of the centuries, almost all precious stones, as well as some other sub stances, have been utilized by the gem-engravers. It has already been noted that some of the oldest Babylonian cylinders, engraved from 5,000 to 5,5N years ago, were of shell. Of the stones, the earliest to be used was soft serpen tine, but soon the harder serpentines, aragonite, lapis-lazuli, chalcedony, the jaspers, quartz crystal, anhydrite, marble and hematite, as well as, rarely, jade were utilized. To these must be added, for cylinders of later date, cer tain other materials, such as micaceous ' iron, gneiss and blue and green glass. Among the Hittite, Assyrian, Cypriote, Syro-Hittite. Sa bean, Phoenician, Early Persian and Sassanian cylinders, appear, in addition to the materials already mentioned, red and pink sard, rose quartz, carnelian, matrix-emerald, the blue chalcedony called saphirine, and steatite, besides basalt, iron ore and iridescent glass. The J. Pierpont Morgan collection contains exam ples of all these materials. In the collection of Babylonian and Assyrian cylinders gathered together by the present writer for the Morgan collection of the American Museum of Natural History in New York are to be found the following materials: Ruin agate, amazon-stone, serpentine, hematite, aragonite, lapis-lazuli, jasper, shell, rock crystal, steatite, anhydrite. the translucent chalcedony with round red spots that has been called ((Saint Stephen's Stone," jaspery agate, marble and amethyst. For their engraved scarabs the ancient tians especially favored lapis-lazuli, hematite, red and green jasper, garnet, amethyst, and green feldspar, as well as red porphyry and basalt.