Granulation

Granulation work began over 4,500 years ago and is consistent by fantastically detailed images like seed pods or lions heads made entirely out of tiny spheres of almost pure gold.

After the jewelry is decorated with these tiny spheres the entire piece is heated to a temperature high enough to form a permanent bond between the surface and the spheres.

The technique is so sophisticated that even with modern tools and knowledge, few goldsmiths today have sufficient skills to complete what was mastered from Etruscan and Greek goldsmiths thousands of years ago.

The oldest archaeological findings of this type of jewelry were found In the royal tombs of Ur, in Mesopotamia. The technique then spread to Anatolia, in Syria and to Troy and finally to Etruria at 8th Century BC and then slowly disappeared.

The ancient Greeks employed the craftsmanship at that time but it was the Etruscans that really became known for this work.

This technique slowly fell out of fashion around 600 CE, and the skills and knowledge to create such exquisite jewelry vanished for more than 1000 years.

In the mid-1800s several excavations that took place in Rome and southern Russia revealed Etruscan and Greek jewels all heavily decorated with granulation work which sparked an archaeological Jewelry revival circa 1850s.

From these jewels, Italian and Greek goldsmiths were able to study carefully the findings and slowly master the technique of granulation and create a number of these ecological revivals Jewelry objects which are now kept in important jewelry collections around the globe as well as in the Greek Byzantine museum which is one of the most significant museum in the world.