Modellato is the most sculpturally ambitious of the engraving techniques practised by the Milanese jewellery house Buccellati, producing three-dimensional relief forms in gold through the combined application of repoussé — the hammering of metal from its reverse face — and chasing, the refined surface detailing carried out from the front with hardened steel punches. The result is goldwork of genuine volumetric depth: leaves that curl at their edges, petals that rise from the surface, animal forms that appear almost to breathe within the metal. Among all the specialised techniques that distinguish Buccellati from its contemporaries, modellato stands as the most labour-intensive and the most unambiguously allied to the Renaissance and Baroque goldsmithing traditions that Mario Buccellati consciously revived in the early twentieth century.

Historical and Artistic Context

When Mario Buccellati opened his first shop in Milan in 1919, he did so with a declared ambition to recover the aesthetic and technical standards of Italian Renaissance goldsmiths — craftsmen such as Benvenuto Cellini, whose Trattato dell'Oreficeria (1568) described precisely the kind of hammered, chased, and engraved metalwork that would become Buccellati's signature. The Renaissance goldsmith's workshop was organised around the idea that precious metal was a medium for sculpture as much as for adornment; a finished object was expected to demonstrate mastery of form, texture, and narrative in the same way that a bronze or marble would. Mario Buccellati absorbed this tradition through his apprenticeship under Beltrami in Milan and translated it into jewellery and objects of vertu that were immediately recognised as categorically different from the prevailing Art Nouveau and early Art Deco idioms of his contemporaries.

Modellato engraving is the technique most directly descended from this Renaissance inheritance. Unlike flat or low-relief surface decoration, it requires the goldsmith to think in three dimensions from the outset, planning the distribution of volume across the metal sheet before a single blow is struck. The technique's closest historical analogues are the embossed silver altar frontals and reliquary caskets of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italian workshops, objects in which the metal surface is transformed into a landscape of raised forms that cast their own shadows.

Technical Process

The creation of a modellato piece begins with the selection of an appropriate gauge of gold — typically yellow gold of eighteen carats, though the house has worked in other alloys — which must be thick enough to sustain repeated working without tearing, yet responsive enough to be raised without cracking. The sheet is annealed repeatedly throughout the process to restore malleability lost through work-hardening.

The first stage is repoussé proper. The metal is embedded in a yielding support — traditionally a bowl of pitch or a sandbag — and the goldsmith works from the reverse, driving the metal outward with rounded punches and a chasing hammer. This establishes the primary volumes: the broad dome of a flower head, the swelling body of a leaf, the rounded haunch of an animal. The work proceeds from large forms to progressively smaller ones, the goldsmith alternating between working the reverse and the front face, annealing between sessions to prevent fracture.

Once the primary relief is established, the piece moves to the chasing stage, in which the goldsmith works exclusively from the front. Chasing punches — each ground to a specific profile, from broad flat-faced tools to fine liners and matting punches — are used to define surface detail: the veining of a leaf, the texture of bark, the feathering of a bird's wing, the stamens at the centre of a blossom. This is the stage that most directly parallels drawing or sculpture, and it is here that the goldsmith's artistic judgement is most fully engaged. The finest modellato work achieves a quality of observed naturalism — a sense that the craftsman has studied the living plant or creature and translated its essential character into metal — that distinguishes it from merely competent embossing.

In many Buccellati pieces, modellato is not deployed in isolation. It is frequently combined with rigato, the house's signature technique of closely spaced parallel engraved lines that create a silky, light-diffusing texture across flat or gently curved surfaces, and with ornato, a more complex engraved patterning used for foliate and architectural motifs. The interplay of these techniques — raised sculptural forms emerging from finely lined or patterned grounds — is characteristic of the house's most elaborate pieces and accounts for much of their visual richness.

Characteristic Motifs

The subject matter of modellato work is drawn almost entirely from the natural world, filtered through the lens of Renaissance and Baroque decorative art. Recurring motifs include:

• Botanical forms: roses, lilies, ivy, vine leaves, wheat ears, and acanthus — the last a direct quotation from classical and Renaissance architectural ornament. Buccellati's botanical rendering is notable for its specificity; the leaves of a rose are not generic foliage but identifiably Rosa leaves, with their characteristic serration and asymmetric leaflets.
• Fauna: birds (particularly eagles, doves, and songbirds), insects (bees and butterflies appear with particular frequency), fish, and occasionally larger animals. The house's bee motif, rendered in modellato gold with wings of fine mesh or enamel, has become one of its most recognisable emblems.
• Fruit: bunches of grapes, pomegranates, and berries, often used as pendant elements in necklaces and earrings, where the three-dimensional quality of the modellato work is most dramatically displayed.
• Architectural and heraldic elements: cartouches, strapwork, and shield forms that situate the naturalistic motifs within a Renaissance decorative framework.

These motifs are not merely decorative choices; they carry the iconographic weight of the Italian Renaissance tradition, in which natural forms were understood as emblems of divine order, abundance, and the civilising power of art over raw nature.

Labour, Skill, and the Workshop Tradition

Buccellati has consistently maintained that modellato work cannot be mechanised or significantly accelerated without loss of quality. Each piece is the product of many hours — in complex cases, many days — of skilled handwork, and the goldsmiths who execute it serve long apprenticeships in which the manipulation of pitch, the selection and grinding of punches, and the development of a sensitive hammer hand are acquired through practice rather than instruction alone. The house's workshops, historically centred in Milan and later expanded to include Florence, have preserved this craft continuity across four generations of the Buccellati family and into the current ownership period.

The rarity of craftsmen capable of executing modellato work to the standard the house demands is itself a significant factor in the market positioning of Buccellati jewellery. Unlike techniques that can be partially replicated by casting from a hand-carved model — a common shortcut in the broader industry — authentic modellato work retains the subtle irregularities and surface qualities of direct metalworking that distinguish it from cast reproductions. Collectors and auction specialists have noted that these qualities are perceptible under magnification and contribute to the premium that major Buccellati pieces command at auction.

Relationship to Other Buccellati Techniques

To understand modellato fully, it is useful to situate it within the broader vocabulary of Buccellati's engraving and surface-working techniques. The house employs at least three principal engraving methods, each producing a distinct visual and tactile effect:

• Rigato: closely spaced parallel lines engraved across the surface, producing a fine, directional texture that scatters light softly and gives flat gold a fabric-like quality — the technique most often compared to the weave of silk or linen.
• Ornato: a more complex engraved pattern, typically foliate or geometric, used for borders, grounds, and architectural framing elements.
• Modellato: the three-dimensional relief technique described throughout this article, which operates in a fundamentally different register from the other two — adding actual physical depth rather than the optical illusion of texture.

In the house's most ambitious pieces, all three techniques appear together, each assigned to the area of the composition it serves best: rigato for broad ground areas, ornato for transitional zones, and modellato for the principal figurative or botanical elements that carry the visual weight of the design. The orchestration of these techniques across a single object — a large brooch, a parure centrepiece, a presentation box — is itself a form of compositional skill that distinguishes the work of Buccellati's senior designers and goldsmiths.

Notable Examples and Auction Record

Some of the most celebrated examples of modellato work in the Buccellati canon are the large floral brooches and corsage ornaments produced from the 1920s through the 1960s, in which roses, peonies, or mixed bouquets are rendered in raised gold with a naturalism that invites comparison with botanical illustration. These pieces, when they appear at auction — at Christie's, Sotheby's, or Bonhams — regularly attract significant premiums over estimate, reflecting both the intrinsic labour content and the strong collector following the house commands.

The house's grape-cluster earrings and pendants, in which individual berries are formed by modellato repoussé and the leaves are chased with vein detail, are among the most widely illustrated examples of the technique in the jewellery literature and serve as a standard reference point for discussions of Buccellati's craft identity. Similarly, the bee brooches — in which the body is raised in modellato gold and the wings are formed from fine gold mesh or set with diamonds — have become emblematic of the house's ability to combine sculptural metalwork with gem-setting in a unified naturalistic composition.

Legacy and Influence

The influence of Buccellati's modellato technique on twentieth-century jewellery design has been considerable, if not always acknowledged. The house's demonstration that Renaissance goldsmithing methods could be adapted to modern jewellery — that repoussé and chasing were not merely historical curiosities but living techniques capable of producing objects of the highest contemporary relevance — encouraged a broader reassessment of handcraft within an industry increasingly dominated by casting and mechanical production. Several Italian and French houses adopted elements of the Buccellati vocabulary in the mid-twentieth century, though rarely with the same depth of technical commitment.

Within the house itself, modellato remains a defining technique and a point of identity. It appears in current collections alongside the same rigato and ornato grounds that characterised Mario Buccellati's earliest work, and it continues to be executed by hand in the traditional manner. For collectors and students of jewellery history alike, modellato engraving represents one of the clearest surviving examples of an unbroken craft lineage connecting contemporary goldsmithing to the workshops of Renaissance Italy.

Further Reading

• GIA Gems & Gemology — Buccellati Jewellery coverage
• GIA: Jewellery History and Art