Italian goldsmiths use ancient artisanal craftsmanship to create fine jewellery

or the Italian goldsmiths at Buccellati, a 99-year-old, Milan-based jewellery house famed for its sheeny, Rigato-engraved cuffs and gold honeycomb rings, it has been a busy few months. Buccellati has been expanding in China since Shanghai-listed Gansu Gangtai Group bought 85 per cent of its stock in December 2016. 

There have been store openings in Shanghai, Beijing and last month in MGM Macau. Chinese actress and model Zhang Ziyi now fronts the brand’s spring campaign, and a larger flagship store is expected to open in Beijing, next autumn.

Buccellati’s designs attract rich Chinese. When the brand opened its first store in Beijing, a local guest was so impressed with Buccellati’s hand-engraving that she bought a £50,000 (HK$556,300) gold cuff without a moment’s hesitation.

“The clients’ biggest interest is understanding the detail of our workmanship,” explains Andrea Buccellati, grandson of the house’s founder, Mario Buccellati, and the house’s honorary president. His daughter, Lucrezia, continues the house’s high-jewellery tradition as its first female designer.

Italian jewellery is unique, thanks to its ancient artisanship in fine gold and colourful stones. Florence, Milan and Vicenza are all famed for their gold, while styles in Rome can be more flamboyant and colourful, as at Bulgari. Naples and the Amalfi Coast are the jewellery centres of southern Italy, with the sunny, radiant colour and exuberance of Chantecler on Capri.

Buccellati’s Rigato technique stands out in Italian jewellery, however. It employs a “burin” – a chisel-like tool – to make fine parallel lines of a silky appearance on the cuffs in the house’s Macri Collection. Buccellati also uses two more jewellery-making techniques that Italian artisans have used since the Renaissance: “telato”, which produces fine cross-hatched lines on bracelets, and “modellato”, which creates a bas-relief design on pendants.

Buccellati’s craftsmen are also precise in the delicate honeycombing of the house’s Tulle collection. Here it takes a goldsmith several weeks to pierce and shape hexagonal cells in gold plates, and then craft them into a Tulle Parigi ring or Ornato pendant earrings.

Italian goldsmiths have a well-earned reputation for their work, Andrea Buccellati says. The nation’s jewellery-making traditions have been developed and “kept alive” by artisan skills, he explains. 

Italian jeweller Marco Bicego agrees. “Italians are less constrained by formality and tradition,” he says, comparing compatriot jewellers with their French or Swiss counterparts. “We are more experimental in our approach, while still cherishing the traditional goldsmithing techniques of our forebears. It gives us a unique vision.”