The art of Ancient Rus’ found a new interpretation in the jewelry fashion of the 19th and early 20th centuries and continues to inspire designers today.
Russian style is a special visual series determined by national traditions. Its origins should be sought in the art of Ancient Rus’.
Russian style jewelry. Origins
The first examples of high-quality jewelry date back to the 11th century. Those products were amulets. For example, it was believed that kolts, the forerunner of modern earrings, protect the ears, and barmas (proto-necklace) – the throat and neck. These were a kind of jewelry armor, decorated with various symbols, many of which are related to pagan traditions. The centers of crafts, including jewelry, were Kyiv, and then Veliky and Nizhny Novgorod, drawn into the orbit of the jewelry world during the Tatar yoke, when cultural life was preserved mainly in monasteries. Craftsmen worked mainly with metal: gold and silver items were decorated with engraving and more complex techniques, such as niello, filigree or granulation (soldering tiny metal balls onto a base). Since the main customer was the church, most of the items were of a religious nature. The subjects were already determined by the Christian tradition.
Flourishing
Historians are unanimous in the opinion that the Russian style took a lot from the Byzantine, be it fresco painting and icon painting or jewelry. In the 16th century, Moscow craftsmen who worked in the Armory came to the forefront, and the style became more lush and bright. Precious stones brought by merchants from the East are used in abundance. They are valued for their color, which determines the palette of the decoration, and their shine. Finally, the 17th century is marked by the art of enamel and ornamentation, which in combination with each other gives a stunningly beautiful decor, the so-called Russian pattern. Its techniques are used everywhere: from architectural elements to jewelry. The 17th century is considered the Golden Age of Russian style, which fully embodied all its artistic possibilities.
Neo-Russian style
At the instigation of Peter I, Russia turns to Western traditions, and interest in everything originally national fades into the background for almost a century and a half. It is revived only in the middle of the 19th century, when after the accession of Nicholas I, the Russian principle becomes part of state policy. The strategy of “Orthodoxy, autocracy and nationality” is introduced, turning the interests of society to the pre-Petrine tradition and the art of Ancient Rus’. Boyar-type outfits came into fashion: high society wore sarafans and kokoshniks stylized as Old Russian outfits. Russian-style carnivals were held at court, and paraphernalia with traditional motifs, based mainly on the artistic series of the 17th century, appeared in everything: from the design of restaurant menus to the decoration of diplomatic gifts.
This period is called either the neo-Russian or pseudo-Russian style. In the first case, it means the revival of the corpus of Old Russian motifs, in the second – its imitation, and not always skillful. Both terms have their supporters, but perhaps the neo-Russian style is still closer to the truth, because the masters did not so much copy the original as create a new artistic language, using the motifs of the past.
At first, Moscow was the center of the neo-Russian style, then St. Petersburg workshops began to play an important role. The style came into full force starting in the 1860s, and thanks to the flourishing of international art exhibitions, it became the country’s calling card on the world stage. In Moscow, the main workshops working in this style were the firms of Sazikov, Khlebnikov and Ovchinnikov, which had just appeared in those years, known, in particular, for their magnificent tableware in the style of Russian ornamentation, richly decorated with enamels. Bolin and Kekhli worked in St. Petersburg.
Subjects
Ancient Russian heroic subjects (like the victory at Kulikovo Field), subjects of modern painting, which then also turned to national motifs (remember Vasnetsov and Polenov), and folk motifs in the form of signs of peasant life came into fashion. At the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, the phenomenon of Faberge, the main Russian jewelry company, known in the West, flourished. It is Faberge products that are associated with everything Russian, since many of them were taken out during emigration and then sold in Europe. The company fully popularizes the neo-Russian style, because in its assortment, along with individual products for the imperial court, like the famous Easter eggs, there were also budget, mass-produced trinkets, as they were called then, like affordable brooches, cigarette cases or photo frames.
Soviet period
After the revolution and a series of wars, the country, and with it the jewelry industry, recovered only by the 1950s. Jewelry was developed by artistic products of large factories in Moscow, Leningrad, the Urals, and Kostroma, where their own schools of craftsmen were formed. Russian heritage was firmly established in the body of mandatory motifs: they took fairy tale plots, historical events glorifying the strength of the people, a generalized symbolic series such as the Sirin bird and other characters from the pagan history of Rus’.
1990s
In the 1990s, private enterprises working in the neo-Russian style flourished. For example, the Moscow firm “Sirin”, which inherited the stone-cutting and enamel traditions of Faberge. Many small firms, whose products could be found in mass sales, worked in the Urals and Kostroma. In the mid-2000s, a large collection of Les Saisons Russes jewelry in the neo-Russian style was released by the Tesoro brand.
Today
Nowadays, independent jewelry artists working with exclusive items, such as Yaroslav Argentov (ArgentoV), as well as brands hoping for wide recognition, turn to this style.
National style is the main component of Petr Aksyonov’s work. Under the Axenoff brand, the jeweler produces jewelry that interprets fairy-tale motifs, ancient Russian decor and court traditions of pre-revolutionary Russia. He can cross neo-Russian motifs, for example, with the ancient art of stone carving. Thus, at the beginning of last year, a brooch in the form of a cameo appeared, depicting… the mythical Sirin Bird. Eva Green and Dita von Teese wear neo-Russian jewelry from Axenoff.
We can recall the lace sets of Yana Raskovalova (Yana), a collection of jewelry in the form of precious matryoshka dolls from the Ural factory “Ringo”, a brilliant homage to the traditions of Faberge – the “1885” collection from the Chamovskikh brand, as well as original jewelry, stylizing the motifs of national costume, from the young Moscow brand Oxioma.