Resumen de Bijoux et costume à la cour de France
Despite the omnipresence of jewelry in court portraits, the question of the relation between jewelry and costume has often been eclipsed because of the difficulty encountered by historians in making a synthesis between documentary sources (archives and narrative sources) and the presented iconography (portraits and ornament drawings and engravings). However, the exercise would appear to be the truly means for naming and defining Renaissance jewelry in all its diversity. Once this essential point is laid out, several questions arise. They concern the typology of a jewel -- how was it worn? Whether it is suitable to masculine or feminine costumes -- is it tied to one sex or the other? Does it have an eventual national characteristic - how is it "French" in the manner of the costume? The study of jewelry should also reveal its evolution, determined by political and economic conditions. Thus the massive immigration to Paris of Flemish cutters and engravers, at the end of the 16th century, was accompanied by an unequaled appetite for diamonds, which, by consequence, caused the clientele to lose interest in the mountings, and brought them to appreciate jewels with more abstract forms.
