Hustler Jewelry

One of the most popular sites for Hustler Jewelry sell a variety of licensed products, such as belly rings, necklaces, rings and bracelets. This Belt Buckle site has an Official Hustler Jewelry collection which includes Hustler Flaming Dice Ring, Hustler Double Skull Ring, Hustler Cross Ring, 18" Hustler Heart & Lips Link Necklace, Hustler Heart & Lips Link Bracelet, Hustler Coat of Arms Ring with Star, Hustler Heart Bracelet, 36" Hustler Heart Necklace, 18" Hustler Gothic Necklace, Hustler Gothic Cross Necklace, Hustler Red Cherries Necklace, Hustler Heart Necklace, 36" Old English Hustler Necklace, Hustler Honey Belly Ring and Star Dangle Hustler Belly Ring.  

Background:

Jewelry, or ornaments made of precious metals, often set with gemstones, have been worn since ancient times by people of all cultures for personal adornment, as badges of social or official rank, and as emblems of religious, social, or political affiliation. In its widest sense the term jewelry encompasses objects made of many kinds of organic and inorganic materials such as hair, feathers, leather, scales, bones, shells, wood, ceramics, metals, and minerals. However, the term jewelry properly refers to mounted precious or semiprecious stones and to objects made of valuable or attractive metals such as gold, silver, platinum, copper, and brass. Jewelry has been worn on the head in the form of crowns, diadems, tiaras, aigrettes, hairpins, hat ornaments, earrings, nose rings, earplugs, and lip rings; on the neck in the form of collars, necklaces, and pendants; on the breast in the form of pectorals, brooches, clasps, and buttons; on the limbs in the form of rings, bracelets, armlets, and anklets; and at the waist in the form of belts and girdles, with pendants such as chatelaines, scent cases, and rosaries. Current knowledge of ancient jewelry is derived largely from the preservation of personal objects in tombs. Information about the jewelry of cultures that did not bury valuables with the dead comes from portraits in surviving paintings and sculpture.

II. Egyptian Jewelry

The ancient Egyptians were familiar with most of the processes of ornamenting metal that are still employed today. They produced skillfully chased, engraved, soldered, repouss י , and inlaid jewelry. They commonly worked in gold and silver and inlaid these metals with semiprecious stones such as carnelian, jasper, amethyst, turquoise, and lapis lazuli and with enamel and glass. Their jewelry included diadems; wide bead necklaces or collars; square pectorals; hoop, hinged, or bead bracelets; and rings. Many Egyptians wore two bracelets on each arm, one on the wrist and one above the elbow. An especially popular ornament was the signet ring. Jewelry motifs—the scarab (beetle), lotus, falcon, serpent, and eye, for example—were derived from religious symbols. Vast quantities of jewelry have been found in tombs. Especially notable are ornaments from the tomb of Tutankhamun (reigned 1333-1323 BCbc), of the 18th Dynasty, now in the Egyptian Museum, Cairo.

III. Middle Eastern Jewelry

Sumerian, Babylonian, and Assyrian tombs of the 3rd and 2nd millennia BC have yielded a great quantity of headdresses, necklaces, earrings, and animal amulet figures in gold, silver, and gems. A well-known example is a royal diadem from Ur made in the shape of thin gold beech leaves (British Museum, London).

Fine gold and silver jewelry was also made in ancient Anatolia, Persia, and Phoenicia. Techniques included granulation (in which surfaces are decorated with clusters of tiny grains of gold), filigree, inlaid gems, and cloisonn י and champlev י enamel. Evidence of Egyptian influence on Phoenician work and of Mesopotamian styles on Persian work suggests widespread trade or other contact.

IV. Greek and Roman Jewelry

Trojan and Cretan artisans of the Minoan period, although working at opposite ends of the Aegean region, executed earrings, bracelets, and necklaces of a common type that persisted from about 2500 BC to the beginning of the Classical period of Greek art (479-323 BC). Typical work consisted of thin coils and chains of linked and plaited wire, and thin foil formed into petals and rosettes. Stamping and enameling were common. Free use was also made of gold granulation and filigree. Stone inlay was rare. Prevailing motifs were spirals and naturalistic patterns drawn from cuttlefish, starfish, and butterflies. Jewelry found at Mycenae and Crete, and now in the National Museum in Athens, includes a great number of small gold disks, perforated so that they could be attached to clothing, and gold diadems made of long oval plates covered with repouss י rosettes.

Archaic Greek jewelry and Etruscan and other Italian jewelry made in the period between 700 and 500 BC was almost entirely inspired by Egyptian and Assyrian examples imported by Phoenician merchants. The techniques remained fundamentally the same as in the preceding period; embossed or stamped plates were the basic element in the work; granulation continued to be employed and was refined by Etruscan artists to an extraordinary degree. Representative of the period is a handsome Greek necklace from Rhodes that consists of seven rectangular gold plaques bearing winged figures in relief and edged with gold balls (7th century BC, British Museum).

In the Classical period of Greek art, granulation fell out of use, enamel reappeared, and filigree was widely employed. The style was characterized by delicacy and refinement. Plaited gold necklaces were decorated with flowers and tassels; hoop earrings with filigree disks and rosettes became popular. In the succeeding Hellenistic period (323-31 BC), pendant vases, winged victories, cupids, and doves became common motifs. At the same time, an important innovation was the introduction of large colored stones, especially garnets, at the center of designs. This scheme was further elaborated by the Romans, who used a variety of stones and set them in rows bordered with pearls. In Rome, enameling was common, and the art of cameo cutting reached its peak of virtuosity. Cameos, often of great size, were produced in large numbers. A fashionable form of jewelry was the fibula, a brooch resembling a safety pin. Rings were extremely popular, and at the height of the empire they were often worn on all ten fingers. Exotic ornaments made of amber were also in great demand. Toward the end of the Roman Empire, beginning in the 3rd century AD, necklaces and bracelets were formed of gold coins set in elaborate mountings of arcaded patterns; the classical style died out.

V. Scythian Jewelry

The excavations of royal burial sites have provided the most complete record of the jewelry of the Scythians, a nomadic people of the Eurasian steppes who absorbed Middle Eastern and Classical Greek influences. Typical art objects of the 1st millennium BC were plaques in the form of stags or other animals, hammered or stamped out of gold and often inlaid with colored stones or glass. Large plaques were mounted on bridles or quivers; small ones were attached to clothing. Plaques, bowls, and personal jewelry of the 5th and 4th centuries BC were often made by Greek artisans and combined the richness of Greek composition and technique with Scythian motifs. The largest collection of Scythian jewelry is in the Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg.

VI. Byzantine Jewelry From Gold, Bronze, and Enamel

The Byzantine nobility wore jewelry in lavish profusion. This practice is evident in the 6th-century mosaic portrait of Empress Theodora in the Church of San Vitale in Ravenna, Italy. The dress is stiff with gold and set with jewels; pearls, rubies, and emeralds mounted in gold are worn at the neck and shoulders and hang in festoons from the temples to the breast.

A common type of Byzantine earring had a crescent shape executed in gold repouss י openwork with a central cross in a circle flanked by peacocks. The favorite breast pendant was the cross; another type was a jeweled pendant. Most finger rings bore Christian symbols, and the extant examples are more often made of gilded bronze than of gold. Enamel work, especially cloisonn י enamel, was refined to a high degree in Byzantine culture and had a strong influence on European jewelry of succeeding periods. A fine example is the jeweled crown of Constance of Arag ףn (13th century, Palermo Cathedral, Sicily).

VII. Medieval Jewelry

After the fall of Rome, Roman jewelry forms and techniques remained in general use. Barbarian tribes from eastern Europe, who were skilled at metalwork, combined such elements of the Roman artistic tradition as gold filigree and the fibula form with the Byzantine cloisonn י tradition. They also introduced their own regional variations. For example, the fibular, pinlike brooch style became a circular one; these revised-style brooches have been found in Gaul (France) and Scandinavia. Penannular brooches, in the form of a ring with a pin held in place by the weight of the cloth it pierced, were common in Ireland and Scotland. A famous example is the Tara brooch (National Museum, Dublin). The principal motifs were stylized animals and intricate interlacing.

An important technique in medieval jewelry was the use of garnet slices set, like enamel, into metal cells. Examples are garnet-inlaid buckles and clasps from the 7th-century Sutton Hoo ship burial in Suffolk (British Museum) and a crown inlaid with garnets and cabochon (rounded) gems (Real Amer םa, Madrid), which belonged to the Visigothic king Recceswinth. The famous Alfred jewel (9th century, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford) is an example of cloisonn י . Quite different are Celtic gold torques, rigid bands that encircled the neck or arm of the wearer.

Beginning in the 11th century, brooches continued to be one of the chief forms of jewelry. They were usually penannular, such as the 12th-century Eagle brooch (Mainz Museum). Chased or enameled pendants of a crucifix or other religious emblem and pendants containing a holy relic were another characteristic adornment, as were rings. By the 14th and 15th centuries, jewelry increasingly became an integral part of dress and was worn in the form of necklaces and girdles, on hairnets, and sewn onto clothes.

VIII. Renaissance Jewelry

During the Renaissance (15th century to 17th century), jewelry became an even more important part of fashionable costume. Rich velvet and silk robes of both men and women were embroidered with pearls and sparkling gems. Separate pieces of jewelry demonstrated the close alliance between the decorative arts and those of painting, architecture, and sculpture. Renaissance jewelry is characterized by rich color and by sculptural or architectural design. Religious subjects were gradually replaced by classical and naturalistic themes. Typical of the period is the sculptural pendant in which irregular pearls, enameling, and colored gems were combined. Also popular were brooches or pendants containing a miniature portrait. Necklaces, chains, and girdles continued in fashion. Designs for jewels, some by such famous painters as Hans Holbein the Younger and Albrecht Drer, were printed and circulated throughout Europe, creating an international style. Among artisans, the best known today is Benvenuto Cellini, but none of his jewels is believed to have survived. Notable examples of Renaissance jeweled pendants of the 16th century include the Phoenix jewel (British Museum) and the Canning jewel (Victoria and Albert Museum, London).

IX. Jewelry in the 17th and 18th Centuries

Jewelry of later periods falls into two main groups: diamond jewelry, which was usually conservative in design, and jewelry that reflected changing fashions in clothes and the arts. With the introduction in the 17th century of new methods of faceting gems to give them greater brilliance, the diamond became the preferred stone for precious jewelry, a reference that remains. At the same time, in the 18th and 19th centuries, industrial development brought mass production of more popular jewelry in cheaper materials. In addition to diamond tiaras, rings, and brooches of naturalistic design, there was less costly jewelry in the neoclassical style inspired by originals excavated at Pompeii, and in revivals of Gothic, Renaissance, and Egyptian styles (see Neoclassical Art and Architecture). The materials utilized, in addition to gold and semiprecious stones, included base-metal alloys, paste (for imitation gemstones), steel, and cast iron. Techniques included mechanical processes for stamping and cutting out patterns and settings.