Niello

Niello was used on a variety of objects including sword hilts, chalices, plates, horns, adornment for horses, jewellery such as bracelets, rings, pendants, and small fittings such as strap-ends, purse-bars, buttons, belt buckles and the like.

[8] There are a number of claimed uses of niello from the Mediterranean Bronze Age, all of which have been the subjects of disputes as to the actual composition of the materials used, that have not been conclusively settled, despite some decades of debate.

The earliest claimed use of niello appears in late Bronze Age Byblos in Syria, around 1800 BC, in inscriptions in hieroglyphs on scimitars.

These show the violence typical of the art of Mycenaean Greece, as well as a sophistication in both technique and figurative imagery that is startlingly original in a Greek context.

[11] These are in a mixed-media technique often called metalmalerei (German: "painting in metal"), which involves using gold and silver inlays or applied foils with black niello and the bronze, which would originally have been brightly polished.

[14] It has been suggested that these artefacts, or at least the daggers, use in fact a technique of patinated metal that may be the same as the Corinthian bronze known from ancient literature, and is similar to the Japanese Shakudō.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art has Sasanian shallow bowls or dishes where in one case it forms the stripes on a tiger,[18] and in another the horns and hoofs of goats in relief, as well as parts of the king's weapons.

[19] A silver oval bowl decorated with tigers and grapevines, attributed to the Sasanian period of Iran (3rd-7th centuries CE) and held in the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Department of Ancient Near Eastern Art, was examined using non-invasive analytical techniques to identify the composition of the silver alloy and the niello inlay used in its decoration.

[22] Some of the earliest uses, from 1–300 AD, seem to be small statuettes and brooches of big cats, where niello is used for the stripes of tigers and the spots on panthers; these were very common in Roman art, as creatures of Bacchus.

[23] From about the 4th century, it was used for ornamental details such as borders and for inscriptions in late Roman silver, such as a dish and bowl in the Mildenhall Treasure and pieces in the Hoxne Hoard, including Christian church plate.

It is very common in Anglo-Saxon metalwork, with examples including the Tassilo Chalice, Strickland Brooch, and the Fuller Brooch,[8] generally forming the background for motifs carried in the metal, but also used for rather crude geometric decoration of spots, triangles and stripes on small relatively everyday fittings such as strap-ends in base metal.

The Late Roman buckle from Gaul illustrated here shows a relatively high quality early example of this sort of decoration.

[25] A group of high-quality pieces apparently originating in the Rhineland, which use both niello and enamel, include what may be the earliest reliquary with scenes of the murder and burial of Thomas Becket, probably from a few years after his death in 1170 (The Cloisters).

[8] Niello continued to be widely used for simple ornament on small pieces, though at the top end goldsmiths were more likely to use black enamel to fill inscriptions on rings and the like.

[29] By the late 16th century relatively little use was made of niello, especially to create pictures, and a different type of mastic that could be used in much the same way for contrasts in decoration was devised, so European pictorial use was largely restricted to Russia, except for some watches, guns, instruments and the like.

The Kievan Rus technique for niello application was first shaping silver or gold by repoussé work, embossing, and casting.

They would raise objects in high relief and fill the background with niello using a mixture of red copper, lead, silver, potash, borax, sulphur which was liquefied and poured into concave surfaces before being fired in a furnace.

The Ukrainian Museum of Historic Treasures, located in Kiev, has a large collection of nielloed items mostly recovered from tombs found throughout Ukraine.

[30] Later, Veliky Ustyug in North Russia, Tula and Moscow produced high quality pictorial niello pieces such as snuff boxes in contemporary styles such as Rococo and Neoclassicism in the late 18th and early 19th centuries; by then Russia was virtually the only part of Europe regularly using niello in fashionable styles.

Instead, vessels of the copper alloys bronze and brass included inlays of silver and gold in their often elaborate decoration, leaving less of a place for niello.

It is common in the decoration of the scabbards and hilts of the large daggers called khanjali and qama traditionally carried by all males in the Caucasus region (whether Muslim or Christian).

In early periods, niello seems to have been made with a single sulphide, that of the main metal of the piece, even if it was gold (which would be difficult to handle).