PAVE

 History

Pavé (pronounced pah-vay) derives its name originally from the French word meaning paved or cobblestones. It is a style of setting small diamonds in a single row or slightly offset in multiple rows. It is used to showcase the fire of diamonds and other gem quality stones. Very little metal is seen in the finished piece of jewelry when the stones are set by an experienced and skilled master setter. In the majority of pavé settings, a very small hole is drilled in the metal for the stone to sit in, and small beads of metal are pushed and raised around each stone one by one, to serve as prongs and hold each stone securely in place.[1]

Tiny faceted brilliant cut stones are used in a pave setting. The stone can range from 0.5 mm to 2 mm. This request advanced stonecutting technique has been refined over centuries. The story of the flat lap is essentially the story of faceting. Before the invention of the horizontally spinning flat wheel, all stones were cut on round water-wheel powered cutting mills or rubbed against a flat, stationary abrasive surface and were almost always cut as domed cabochons. This all changed in the early 1400s, when the artistic revolution of the Renaissance kicked off in Europe and technology and its associated ideas started to transform and faceted cutting invented.

The horizontal diamond wheel was invited in Germany around the 1440, and this is the point when stones started to have facets. “it requires three polishing disks, the first is lead, the second is tin, the third is copper.” (CLM 197, 1430, pg. 48) This introduced the technique of absolute symmetry in the disposition of facets using the machine called the scaif.  

We can see the development of stonecutting following the development stone cutting of  Diamonds The first "improvements" on nature's design involved a simple polishing of the octahedral crystal faces to create even and unblemished facets. This was called the point cut and dates from the mid 14th century.

 By the mid 15th century, the point cut began to be improved upon: the top of the octahedron would be polished or ground off, creating the table cut.  A table-cut diamond would appear black to the eye, as they do in paintings of the era. The importance of a culet was also realised, and some table-cut stones may possess one. The addition of four corner facets created the old single cut (or old eight cut).

About the middle of the 16th century, the rose or rosette was introduced in Antwerp: it also consisted of triangular facets arranged in a symmetrical radiating pattern, but with the bottom of the stone left flat—essentially a crown without a pavilion. The rose cut continued to evolve, with its depth, number and arrangements of facets being tweaked.

The first brilliant cuts were introduced in the middle of the 17th century. Known as Mazarins, they had 17 facets on the crown (upper half). They are also called double-cut brilliants as they are seen as a step up from old single cuts. Vincent Peruzzi, a Venetian polisher, later increased the number of crown facets from 17 to 33 (triple-cut or Peruzzi brilliants), thereby significantly increasing the fire and brilliance of the cut gem, properties that in the Mazarin were already incomparably better than in the rose.

The coming of the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution brought a lot of changes for the lapidary trade and for lapidary technology. We see a lot of improvements in the cutting machines and in the cuts off gems. We can see that a lot has changed between the 1600s and the 1800s. We must also consider that modern crystallography studies really bloomed in the late 1700s and early 1800s, so this new understanding of crystal growth and crystal systems would have helped cutters to improve their craft and increase their ability to cut stones.

Yet Peruzzi-cut diamonds, when seen nowadays, seem exceedingly dull compared to modern-cut brilliants. Because the practice of bruting had not yet been developed, these early brilliants were all rounded squares or rectangles in cross-section (rather than circular). Given the general name of cushion—what are known today as old mine cuts—these were common by the early 18th century. Sometime later the old European cut was developed, which had a shallower pavilion, more rounded shape, and different arrangement of facets. The old European cut was the forerunner of modern brilliants and was the most advanced in use during the 19th century.

Around 1900, the development of diamond saws and good jewelry lathes enabled the development of modern diamond cutting and diamond cuts, chief among them the round brilliant cut. In 1919, Marcel Tolkowsky analyzed this cut: his calculations took both brilliance (the amount of white light reflected) and fire into consideration, creating a delicate balance between the two.[2] Tolkowsky's calculations would serve as the basis for all future brilliant cut modifications and standards.

Tolkowsky's model of the "ideal" cut is not perfect. The original model served as a general guideline, and did not explore or account for several aspects of diamond cut:[3]

original from National museum collection

Photo credit: Nationalmuseum

This necklace was made by an unknown goldsmith has rose cut diamond set in a in formations that resembles pace settings. It feels like the pieces has bigger stones and this aesthetic illusion is created by combining a lot of smaller stones that are set in a row formation.

The piece is made in the Aesthetic period during the Victorian era, which emphasized a return to refined artistic taste and visually appealing designs. Fewer jewelry pieces where worn and jewelry was overall smaller and lighter. Common motifs of the Aesthetic Movement included flowers, insects and Japanese-inspired forms.[4]

re-designed Necklace

RE-DESIGN

In this piece I wanted to focus on the development of stonecutting so I have chosen to have rose cut, and brilliant cut stones.

I have taken the original shape of the pendant and used cad-design to extract a grid like structure. This specific technique has allowed me to design a complex light weight shape that would have been impossible to carve in wax or accomplish by fusing wax threads together. It is hard to achieve the precision and geometry that is attained by using Cad design by manual labor had work.

With today’s development of resin printers give todays jewelers the possibility to experiment with different designs and print them in a on home resin printer with an accuracy of 25 mil. This development of the resin home printer gives jewelers to possibility to evaluate mockups and tryouts in a matter of hours, something that use to take weeks some years ago when home printers was too expensive and a CAD-model had to be sent to a 3d-printer service company.

process picture

3d-model of redesign

Footnotes

[1] https://www.danielprince.co.uk/2016/08/the-art-of-pave-and-micropave-explained/  
[2] Marcel Tolkowsky (1919). Jasper Paulsen (ed.). Diamond Design. Spon & Chamberlain.

[3] Barak Green, Al Gilbertson, Ilene Reinitz, Mary Johnson and James Shigley (14 September 2001). "What did Marcel Tolkowsky really say?". Gemological Institute of America Inc. Archived from the original on 2006-08-27.

[4] https://www.truefacet.com/guide/jewelry-style-periods/

This project was made possible with the support of