NIELLO. - A name derived from the Latin nigellum, which denotes a particular kind of goldsmith's work in which a black paste composed of copper, silver, sulfur and lead (according to some, of silver and lead alone) is inserted into the recesses cut into a plate of gold or silver and sometimes of copper. Because of the similar technique it was often confused with agemina or damascening.
This technique, known in classical antiquity, was used from the first centuries of the Christian era for ecclesiastical furnishings. Few examples of medieval works nevertheless survive. The production of the 14th and 15th centuries was instead abundant, especially through the work of Florentine goldsmiths and engravers, among whom Maso Finiguerra stands foremost. For this reason, and because artists, before finishing the work, often used to make a cast of the plate, whose engravings were filled with lampblack and oil, afterwards pulling proofs from it on damp paper, Vasari holds that from the niello, in Florence, around 1460, engraving on copper originated, through the merit of Maso Finiguerra. This is false, since there is record of engravings earlier than that date, even beyond the Alps.
Although less intensively, the technique of the niello also developed outside Florence with Turino, Caradosso, Tagliacarne, Porta, Francia and his pupil Raimondi, who may be considered the last of the group, continuing to work until the beginning of the 16th century, when elsewhere it had definitively fallen into disuse; so much so that not even Cellini had succeeded in reviving it.
The already mentioned unique printing proofs obtained from plates prepared for niello, and which themselves took the name of niello, were the object of collecting, and various examples exist in public and private collections, besides those of Finiguerra, Pollaiolo, Dei and others. Nielloed plates are found in the Museo Sacro Vaticano, which possesses one of the oldest examples, a gold cross probably of the 6th century, as well as some paxes of the 15th century; at the Bargello in Florence, in Rome, in Venice others are preserved. At Monza there is a Byzantine cross of St. Gregory, earlier than the 8th century; in the Museo Civico of Bologna a medieval gold ring of transalpine workmanship. Among the works from beyond the Alps, the portable altar of Roger of Helmarhausen, at Paderborn, and a cross at Burtscheid (Aachen) are notable.
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Maria Donati