Fashionable and elegant devotional cross with beautiful enamel

Double-sided gold cross, the front with triangular cross-section has translucent green basse-taille enamel embedded with gold quatrefoils, a golden Christ on the cross with angular halo and INRI banner above in black enamel. Christ wears a white enamelled loin cloth and at his feet is a skull symbolising Golgotha. Knob-like cross ends with white email-en-ronde-bosse granules. On the flat reverse of the cross is a foliate design in green enamel with two red cherry fruits. The enamel on the reverse is missing in parts showing signs of wear and age, the cross though is in good wearable condition.   

On the flat, circular pendant loop are two Portuguese assay marks: the letter ‘i’ with a dot on top for the city official Joao Nunes de la Cruz registered at the Assay Office of Braga in Northwestern Portugal, c. 1754, see: Gonçalo de Vasconcelos e Sousa, A Joalharia em Portugal 1750-1825, pp. 37 and an unidentified mark, maybe ‘D’. 

Literature:

In Western Europe ornate crosses and crucifix pendants were worn as a sign of devotion in Catholic countries and were commonly fashionable on the Iberian Peninsula. Both the design of the cross and its color combination of translucent green and opaque white enamel are characteristic of Portuguese jewelry from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centurys.    

Variations of this cross type can be found in the National Museum of Ancient Art, Lisbon, see: Leonor d’Orey, Five Centuries of Jewellery, National Museum of Ancient Art, Lisbon, London 1995, pp. 26, 56-57, figs. 41, 42.

The symbolic cherry fruits, known as the fruit of Paradise, on the reverse of the cross, often found in paintings of the Virgin Mary, signify virtuousness and heaven.

J-35104