Carlo Joseph Giuliano (1865–1912) was the elder son of the celebrated Neapolitan-born goldsmith Carlo Giuliano, and one of the two brothers who inherited and continued the family's distinguished London jewellery workshop after their father's death in 1895. Working in close partnership with his younger brother Arthur Alphonse Giuliano, Carlo Joseph co-directed the firm through its final two decades of operation, maintaining — and in certain respects refining — the aesthetic and technical standards that had made the Giuliano name synonymous with the finest historicist jewellery produced in Victorian Britain. Pieces attributable to the brothers' period are signed C. & A. Giuliano, a mark that has become a reliable terminus post quem for collectors and auction specialists alike. The workshop closed definitively in 1914, two years after Carlo Joseph's death, leaving a body of work that is now represented in the collections of the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, and in significant private holdings worldwide.

Family Background and Formation

To understand Carlo Joseph's contribution, it is necessary to situate him within the broader Giuliano dynasty. His father, Carlo Giuliano, had arrived in London from Naples around 1860, initially working under the patronage of the antiquarian dealer Alessandro Castellani, whose family had pioneered the archaeological revival style in Rome. The elder Carlo established his own premises in Frith Street, Soho, before moving to the more prestigious address at 115 Piccadilly, where the firm would remain throughout its existence. By the time Carlo Joseph and Arthur Alphonse came of age, the workshop had already produced jewels for an aristocratic and upper-middle-class clientele that prized Renaissance and classical antiquity as sources of aesthetic inspiration.

Carlo Joseph was born in 1865, the year that his father's reputation in London was already well established. He and his brother were trained within the workshop itself — a common practice among the great jewellery dynasties of the period — absorbing not only the technical disciplines of goldsmithing, enamelling, and granulation, but also the deep visual literacy in Renaissance and antique sources that distinguished Giuliano work from the more mechanical historicism of larger commercial houses. By the 1880s both sons were active participants in the firm's production, and when their father died in 1895, the transition of management was seamless enough that the workshop's output continued without visible interruption.

The C. & A. Giuliano Period: Continuity and Refinement

The period between 1895 and 1912 — the years of Carlo Joseph's co-directorship — represents the final flowering of the Giuliano style. Scholars of Victorian and Edwardian jewellery have generally characterised this phase as one of faithful stewardship rather than radical innovation, which is not to diminish its achievement. The brothers inherited a workshop culture of exceptional rigour, and they sustained it under changed market conditions: the 1890s and 1900s saw the rise of Art Nouveau, a movement whose organic, asymmetric vocabulary was largely alien to the Giuliano aesthetic. That the firm continued to attract discerning clients during this period speaks to the enduring appeal of its particular vision.

Jewels produced under Carlo Joseph and Arthur Alphonse's direction retain the hallmarks established by their father: richly coloured translucent enamels applied in the plique-à-jour and champlevé techniques; finely wrought gold settings that draw on Hellenistic, Roman, and Renaissance prototypes; and the controlled use of granulation — the ancient technique of fusing minute gold spheres to a surface without visible solder — that had been central to the Castellani-influenced revival. Gemstones employed in C. & A. Giuliano pieces tend to be chosen for colour and historical resonance rather than for size or commercial weight: cabochon rubies, sapphires, and emeralds; pearls, both natural and baroque; garnets and amethysts cut in antique styles; and occasionally cameos and intaglios in hardstone or shell.

The colour palette of Giuliano enamel work is particularly distinctive. Blacks, whites, and muted Renaissance greens predominate, often combined with translucent ruby-red or sapphire-blue passages that allow the gold beneath to glow through. This restraint — unusual in an era that often favoured jewellery of considerable visual noise — is one reason Giuliano pieces read as immediately recognisable to trained eyes, even when the maker's mark is not immediately visible.

Workshop Practice and Signatures

The Giuliano workshop operated as a small, craft-oriented atelier rather than a large manufacturing house. This scale was a deliberate choice that preserved quality control and the kind of individual attention to each piece that characterised the best goldsmiths of the Renaissance — an era the family consciously emulated not only in style but in working method. The workforce was small, and the brothers are understood to have remained closely involved in design and execution throughout the period of their management.

The maker's mark C. & A. G. (sometimes rendered with a cartouche or without full stops depending on the piece) is the primary documentary evidence for dating a jewel to the post-1895 period. Works produced during the elder Carlo's lifetime are signed C.G. in a similar cartouche. The distinction matters considerably in the market, where pieces from the father's period have historically commanded a premium, though scholarly opinion has increasingly recognised the quality of the sons' work as fully commensurate with that of the founding generation. Auction catalogues from Christie's, Sotheby's, and Bonhams regularly note the signature distinction when offering Giuliano jewels, and the differentiation is well established in the specialist literature.

Aesthetic Sources and the Renaissance Revival Context

The Renaissance revival in jewellery — of which the Giuliano firm was among the most accomplished London exponents — drew on a broad range of historical sources: the goldsmith's manuals of Benvenuto Cellini, the painted jewels visible in portraits by Holbein and Clouet, the archaeological discoveries at Pompeii and Herculaneum, and the growing museum collections of antique jewellery that were being assembled and published during the second half of the nineteenth century. The South Kensington Museum (later the Victoria & Albert) was itself an important node in this network, acquiring historical jewels and commissioning scholarly publications that fed directly into the design vocabulary of revival goldsmiths.

Carlo Joseph and Arthur Alphonse would have grown up immersed in this intellectual and visual environment. Their father had been in direct contact with the Castellani family, who were not merely craftsmen but serious antiquarians, and the elder Carlo's circle in London included collectors, museum curators, and aesthetes associated with the broader Aesthetic Movement. The sons inherited these connections along with the workshop, and the firm's continued presence at 115 Piccadilly maintained its position within London's luxury trade network through the Edwardian period.

It is worth noting that the Giuliano aesthetic was never purely imitative. While the historical sources are always legible, the best pieces — whether from the father's or the sons' period — achieve a synthesis that is identifiably the firm's own: a particular quality of enamelled surface, a characteristic proportion in pendant and brooch design, and a gemstone selection that reflects genuine connoisseurship rather than commercial calculation.

Gemstones in the Giuliano Tradition

The Giuliano workshop's approach to gemstones merits specific attention in a gemmological context. Unlike the great diamond houses of the same period — Garrard, Hancock, or the emerging Paris firms — the Giulianos used coloured stones as elements within a broader compositional and chromatic scheme, subordinate to the overall design rather than the primary focus of value. This approach was historically authentic: Renaissance jewellery had indeed treated stones as colour elements within a goldsmith's composition, and the shift toward diamond-centred jewellery was largely a post-seventeenth-century development driven by advances in faceting technology.

Rubies and sapphires in Giuliano pieces are typically set as cabochons or in simple collet settings that allow the colour to read clearly without the distraction of elaborate faceting. Pearls — natural, in an era before cultured pearls had entered the market — appear frequently as pendant drops or as elements within composite designs, their organic irregularity valued rather than corrected. Garnets, particularly the deep red almandine and the rarer demantoid, appear in pieces that reference classical antiquity. Emeralds, when used, tend to be set in closed-back or semi-closed settings that deepen their colour in the Renaissance manner.

The overall effect is of jewellery in which the gemstone and the goldsmith's work are genuinely integrated — neither element merely serving the other — and this integration is as characteristic of the C. & A. Giuliano period as of the earlier work.

The Closure of 1914 and Legacy

Carlo Joseph Giuliano died in 1912, and Arthur Alphonse, apparently unwilling or unable to continue alone, closed the workshop in 1914. The timing coincided with the outbreak of the First World War, which disrupted the luxury trades across Europe, but the closure appears to have been primarily a consequence of Carlo Joseph's death rather than of the war itself. With both sons gone from active management — Arthur Alphonse survived his brother but did not reopen — the Giuliano name passed from active production into the realm of the collectible and the historical.

The legacy of the firm, and of Carlo Joseph's stewardship of it, is preserved most accessibly in the collection of the Victoria & Albert Museum, which holds a significant group of Giuliano jewels acquired over many decades. These pieces span the full history of the workshop, from the elder Carlo's earliest London work through the C. & A. Giuliano period, and they have been the subject of scholarly study and exhibition. The museum's holdings include examples of the firm's characteristic pendant designs, brooches, necklaces, and rings, and they serve as the primary reference point for attribution and quality assessment in the market.

At auction, C. & A. Giuliano pieces appear with regularity in the major London and New York sale rooms, typically within jewellery sales devoted to antique and period work. Prices reflect the firm's sustained reputation among specialist collectors, and the market distinguishes clearly between authenticated pieces with legible maker's marks and those where attribution rests on stylistic grounds alone. The scholarly literature — including catalogue entries from the V&A and specialist auction house notes — provides the most reliable framework for assessment.

Significance in the History of Jewellery

Carlo Joseph Giuliano occupies a specific and honourable position in the history of British jewellery. He was not an innovator in the sense that his father had been — the Renaissance revival style was already fully formed when he took over the workshop — but he was an exceptionally capable custodian of a tradition that demanded both technical mastery and aesthetic discrimination. In an era when the dominant currents of jewellery design were moving toward Art Nouveau and then toward the geometric austerity that would become Art Deco, the Giuliano workshop under Carlo Joseph and Arthur Alphonse maintained a commitment to historicist craft that was increasingly counter-cultural.

That commitment was not mere conservatism. It reflected a genuine belief — inherited from the elder Carlo and, behind him, from the Castellani circle — that the goldsmith's art had achieved a summit in the Renaissance that remained a valid and vital model. The best C. & A. Giuliano pieces argue that case persuasively, and they continue to do so in museum galleries and private collections more than a century after the workshop's closure.

Further Reading

• Victoria & Albert Museum — Jewellery Collection (vam.ac.uk)
• Gems & Gemology — GIA (gia.edu)