Arthur Giuliano (1864–1914) was the elder of the two sons of Carlo Giuliano, the Neapolitan-born goldsmith whose London workshop had, from the 1860s onwards, become synonymous with the finest Renaissance-revival and archaeological-style jewellery produced in Victorian Britain. When Carlo died in 1895, Arthur and his younger brother Ferdinand assumed joint control of the firm, trading as Giuliano from their premises at 115 Mortimer Street, London. Under their stewardship the house continued to produce work of exceptional technical refinement — champlevé and plique-à-jour enamel, granulation, filigree, and polychrome gem-setting in the manner of sixteenth-century Italian goldsmiths — until the firm finally closed in 1914, the year of Arthur's own death. The pieces made during this second generation of the family's practice are today held in major public collections, most notably the Victoria and Albert Museum, and they remain benchmarks against which Victorian and Edwardian jewellery craftsmanship is measured.

Family Background and Formation

Carlo Giuliano had arrived in London around 1860, almost certainly at the invitation of the antiquarian jeweller Robert Phillips, and had rapidly established himself as the pre-eminent exponent of the Castellani school of archaeological revival goldwork in England. His workshop attracted the patronage of artists associated with the Aesthetic Movement, including Edward Burne-Jones and Frederic Leighton, and his clientele encompassed the highest levels of Victorian society. Arthur was born into this milieu and trained within the family workshop from boyhood. The education he received was therefore not that of a formal apprenticeship in the guild sense but rather an immersive, continuous transmission of craft knowledge — granulation techniques derived ultimately from the Etruscan revival pioneered by Fortunato Pio Castellani in Rome, enamelling methods drawn from both medieval and Renaissance sources, and a rigorous approach to the setting of coloured stones that prioritised the integrity of the gem over the ostentation of the mount.

Ferdinand, some years younger, received the same formation. The two brothers appear to have divided responsibilities along broadly complementary lines, though the historical record does not permit a precise delineation of their respective roles. What is clear is that the transition of 1895 was managed with sufficient continuity that the firm's aesthetic identity remained intact. Clients and critics of the period did not mark a rupture; the Giuliano name continued to carry the same associations of scholarly refinement and technical excellence that Carlo had established.

Aesthetic Programme and Technical Methods

The jewellery produced under Arthur and Ferdinand's direction belongs to a mature phase of the Renaissance-revival style. By the mid-1890s the more literal archaeological pastiche of the 1860s and 1870s — direct quotations from Hellenistic and Etruscan prototypes — had evolved into a freer synthesis, one in which Renaissance grotesques, en ronde bosse enamelled figures, and Mannerist pendant forms were combined with a sensitivity to surface colour that was entirely the Giuliano house's own. The palette of their enamel work is particularly distinctive: deep translucent greens and blues, opaque blacks used as grounds for delicate white and gold tracery, and the warm ivory tones of flesh-coloured enamel on figurative pendants.

Technically, the firm continued to employ several processes that were, by the late Victorian period, rare in commercial jewellery production:

• Granulation: The application of minute spheres of gold to a gold surface without visible solder, a technique recovered from Etruscan antiquity by the Castellani family and transmitted to Carlo Giuliano. Arthur's workshop maintained this practice at a level of fineness that few contemporaries could match.
• Champlevé enamel: Recessed cells carved or cast into the metal ground and filled with vitreous enamel, then fired and polished flush. The Giuliano house used this technique on both gold and, occasionally, silver grounds, achieving a depth of colour and precision of line characteristic of the best medieval and Renaissance enamellers.
• Plique-à-jour enamel: Translucent enamel suspended in an open metal framework without a backing, so that light passes through it as through a stained-glass window. This technically demanding process appears in some of the firm's later pieces and reflects the influence of contemporary French Art Nouveau enamelling, though the Giuliano interpretation remained closer to Renaissance sources than to the naturalistic idiom of Lalique or Fouquet.
• Polychrome gem-setting: The house favoured combinations of coloured stones — rubies, emeralds, sapphires, pearls, and occasionally opals — arranged for chromatic harmony rather than individual stone value. Settings were typically closed or semi-closed, in the Renaissance manner, with coloured foils sometimes used behind stones to intensify their colour, a practice documented in period workshop inventories.

The Mortimer Street Workshop and Trade Identity

The address at 115 Mortimer Street, in the Fitzrovia district of London, had been Carlo's base of operations and remained the firm's home throughout the sons' tenure. The street was, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a recognised centre of the London jewellery and silversmithing trade, distinct from the more commercially oriented Bond Street establishments. The Giuliano workshop occupied a position closer to that of a craft atelier than a retail jeweller in the modern sense: pieces were made to commission or in small series, and the firm's reputation rested on connoisseurship rather than volume.

Pieces from the Arthur and Ferdinand period are typically signed with the firm's mark — a monogram of the letters C & AG within an oval cartouche, the initials standing for Carlo and Arthur Giuliano — a mark that had been adopted during the transition period and that linked the sons' work explicitly to their father's legacy. This continuity of marking is significant for attribution purposes, as it means that pieces made between 1895 and 1914 bear a mark that references Carlo without having been made by him, a source of occasional confusion in the auction and museum literature.

Relationship to the Aesthetic and Arts and Crafts Movements

The Giuliano firm under Arthur's direction occupied an interesting position relative to the two dominant reform movements in British decorative arts of the period. The Aesthetic Movement, with its emphasis on beauty as an end in itself and its enthusiasm for Japanese and Renaissance sources, had been a natural context for Carlo's work, and Arthur's pieces continued to appeal to collectors formed by that sensibility. The Arts and Crafts Movement, by contrast, with its ideological commitment to the visibility of hand labour and its suspicion of luxury materials, was in some respects at odds with the Giuliano house's use of precious metals and gems; yet the firm's insistence on craft integrity, its rejection of machine production, and its scholarly approach to historical sources placed it in sympathy with Arts and Crafts values even where the aesthetic outcomes differed.

Arthur Giuliano does not appear to have been a polemicist or a theorist in the manner of Henry Wilson or C.R. Ashbee, whose Guild of Handicraft represented the more explicitly ideological wing of Arts and Crafts jewellery. The Giuliano position was quieter and more aristocratic: excellence demonstrated through objects rather than manifested through essays or exhibitions. This reticence has perhaps contributed to the relative underrepresentation of Arthur, as distinct from his father, in the historiography of Victorian and Edwardian jewellery.

Notable Works and Public Collections

The Victoria and Albert Museum, London, holds the most significant public collection of Giuliano jewellery, including pieces that span the Carlo and Arthur periods. The museum's holdings include enamelled gold pendants, necklaces in the Renaissance revival manner, and individual pieces that demonstrate the full range of the firm's technical vocabulary. Because the C & AG mark was used across the transition period, precise attribution of individual pieces to Arthur's direction requires careful cross-referencing of museum acquisition records, stylistic analysis, and, where available, provenance documentation.

Beyond the Victoria and Albert, Giuliano pieces — not always distinguished by generation in catalogue entries — appear in the collections of the British Museum, the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, and a number of private collections formed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The auction record for Giuliano jewellery is substantial, with pieces appearing regularly at Christie's, Sotheby's, and Bonhams; prices reflect both the quality of individual pieces and the premium attached to the Giuliano name as a whole, with the father's work generally commanding higher figures when attribution is secure.

Closure of the Firm and Legacy

The firm closed in 1914, the year of Arthur's death. Ferdinand does not appear to have continued independently. The closure coincided with the outbreak of the First World War, which disrupted the luxury trades across Europe, but it seems likely that the firm's end was primarily a consequence of Arthur's death rather than of broader economic forces alone. The workshop had been, in a meaningful sense, a family enterprise sustained by the transmission of specific craft knowledge and aesthetic values within a single lineage; without Arthur, that transmission ceased.

The legacy of the Giuliano firm — understood as the combined achievement of Carlo, Arthur, and Ferdinand — is one of the most coherent and technically distinguished in the history of Victorian jewellery. Arthur's particular contribution was one of conservation and refinement: he did not transform his father's aesthetic but deepened and extended it, maintaining standards of craftsmanship at a moment when the broader jewellery trade was moving rapidly towards mechanisation and the democratisation of ornament. In this sense his work represents a conscious act of resistance to the direction of the market, one that has been vindicated by the sustained critical and institutional regard in which Giuliano jewellery is held more than a century after the workshop's closure.

For scholars and collectors, the Arthur Giuliano period — roughly 1895 to 1914 — represents a final, autumnal flowering of the Renaissance-revival tradition in British jewellery, executed with a fidelity to craft process and a refinement of taste that place it among the finest achievements of the Edwardian decorative arts.

Further Reading

• Victoria and Albert Museum — Jewellery Collection
• GIA Gems & Gemology — Victorian Jewellery