To see perfection: Fabergé

Yes­ter­day morn­ing I had the oppor­tu­nity to inspect a piece of gen­uine Fabergé from the late Impe­r­ial period, in prepa­ra­tion for a future exhi­bi­tion on which I have the priv­i­lege of work­ing. The cura­tor first showed me a piece that is claimed to be Fabergé; it was inter­est­ing, though not par­tic­u­larly well made, and I was a lit­tle dis­ap­pointed. As I told him, I could have made that! He saved the best for last, how­ever, and when he pulled out an amaz­ing lit­tle jade let­ter opener my brain shot through the back of my roof. (Of course that doesn’t make sense. It didn’t to me, either.)

Not the one I saw.

There aren’t many times in a life that your eyes land on some­thing and have instant com­pre­hen­sion that you are look­ing at some­thing spe­cial. This tiny piece of per­fec­tion, a lit­tle bun­dle of rocks and met­als and minis­cule mol­lusk secre­tions, was like that.

It prob­a­bly wouldn’t have been like that a few years ago, before I started jewelry-work. Now I know what it takes to cast and braze and engrave and repoussé, and I’m not very good at it. I’ve seen a lot of jew­elry from peo­ple bet­ter than me, too. But it’s a lit­tle like a magic trick: when you know the trick, it’s not so magical.

I don’t know Fabergé’s tricks, though, and the result is sim­ply mag­i­cal. I’m amazed and a lit­tle dumb­founded, which is why it took me more than 24 hours just to sput­ter out a post about it. A few things are clear: he hired the best in each branch of the busi­ness, and divided the work among each expert. So the guil­loché was done by the best guilloché-man he could find, and the sub­se­quent enamel by the best enam­eler, and so on. With the bud­get to hire the best in the world, hire as many of them as he needed, and take as much time as required to cre­ate per­fec­tion, the result is some­thing that no sin­gle mas­ter could create.

The letter-opener is quite sim­i­lar to the probable-Fabergé let­ter opener listed at All That Glit­ters and pic­tured left. Sorry I don’t have a pic­ture of the one I saw, but their piece is rep­re­sen­ta­tive. Unlike the one I saw their opener has a bust at the top, which appears awk­ward in com­par­i­son. But a few char­ac­ter­is­tics are extremely close: the jade blade is vir­tu­ally iden­ti­cal, the orna­men­ta­tion on the blade, the sig­na­ture guil­loché and over­laid metal. My ver­sion was more finely detailed, with strands of seed pearls and twisted wire, more carved appliqué, and flawlessly-implemented cus­tom alloyed gold to cre­ate a range of col­ors. Then very care­fully added pati­nas — just a lit­tle, just here and not there, per­fect control.

That orna­men­ta­tion on the blade, shown far right, demon­strates one ele­ment that intrigued me. Fabergé used tube set­tings for many of his pre­cious stones, bezels for oth­ers; few of his stones are in prong set­tings. That makes me feel bet­ter, since I love tube set­tings and use them far too much. Now I can sim­ple raise my nose a lit­tle higher and say, in a stuffy and slightly British voice, that my work is in a finer tra­di­tion. But I’m get­ting off track.

I’m left with ques­tions. How did they do that? How did they mount the han­dle to the blade yet retain strength? How did they mount roughly four zil­lion seed pearls? How did they get the enamel to not rise up where it met an edge?

And even more amazed when I think I might have fig­ured out one of the magic tricks. For exam­ple, that ques­tion of mount­ing the han­dle … it also relates to another ques­tion, that being how they attached the orna­men­ta­tion to the blade. Could it be that they have drilled through the jade, and the front and back orna­men­ta­tion are con­nected? And if so, how on earth would you sol­der that con­nec­tion with­out the heat snap­ping the jade, already ground impossibly-thin? And why is there no vis­i­ble indi­ca­tion that they did what I just sug­gested? I might be mak­ing it all up.

I can only imag­ine what impact an object like this must have had on a per­son of the time. We are accus­tomed to machined per­fec­tion; we get to see and han­dle objects that have been cut and formed by com­put­ers, with lev­els of pre­ci­sion that humans sim­ply can­not do. We are a lit­tle jaded our­selves, for­give the pun. For a Russ­ian in the 19th cen­tury, how­ever, see­ing a piece like this would have been an expe­ri­ence in see­ing the impos­si­ble. The magic trick is more pow­er­ful when you remove CAD design and CNC rout­ing out of the equation.

Finally, I’m reminded that tech­ni­cal pre­ci­sion and an artis­tic eye are com­pletely dif­fer­ent things. With all that com­put­er­ized per­fec­tion going on, you would think that our lives would be sur­rounded by ever-more-beautiful objects. But it cer­tainly isn’t so. What Fabergé brought to the table was the ideal com­bi­na­tion: the best tech­nique in the world, guided by artis­tic sen­si­bil­ity. Even in some­thing as mun­dane as a lit­tle letter-opener, the result is breathtaking.

The Fabergé “Empress Josephine” tiara was pur­chased in 2007 for £1.05 mil­lion. Not by me.

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