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THE ART OF THE CUTTER
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shape
and employed for minute stones set in conjunction with large colored
stones in rings. The table represented more work, one corner of a
regular octahedron being ground until the artificial facet produced was
half the stone in width, while the opposite corner was only slightly
ground, the sides being adjusted until they were at right angles to one
another. Often the lower part below the girdle was eliminated.
The
rose, cut soon became popular although there is no definite record of
when it first appeared. Some Credit Cardinal Jules Mazarin (1602-1661)
with having invented it, but other authorities are convinced it
originated in India, passed on to Constantinople and then to Venice,
and finally appeared in northern Europe. Today the rose cut, so far as
diamonds are concerned, is rare. In modern cutting factories it is
virtually extinct as a style, having been replaced by the brilliant or
round cut, the emerald, the baguette, the marquise, and the pendeloque,
the latter generally covering the pear and heart shapes.
Some
six or seven variants of the rose form were used, but all were alike in
the flatness of the base and the hexagonal symmetry of the arrangement
of the facets abov It was not until late in the seventeenth century
that the most popular of modern forms, the brilliant, was perfected.
The inventor was Vincenti Peruzzi, also known as Vin-cenzio Peruggio, a
Venetian lapidary. It soon became evident to owners of jewelry that
this new cut brought out fire in the diamond that never had been
suspected. Many owners of rose-cut diamonds began to have their stones
recut into the brilliant shape, even though they realized it meant a
considerable loss in the weight of the stone. Actually, the shape of
the brilliant does not differ so much from the old table cut, the importance being the
(79)
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