Daniela Mascetti is one of the most influential jewellery historians and auction specialists of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. As a senior figure at Sotheby's — where she served for many years as chairman of the jewellery department in Europe — she brought scholarly rigour to the commercial evaluation of antique and signed jewellery at a moment when the auction market for such pieces was expanding rapidly and the academic literature was comparatively thin. Her name is most widely known through Understanding Jewellery, the comprehensive reference volume she co-authored with David Bennett, which has remained in continuous use as a standard text since its first publication in 1989 and has been revised and reprinted in multiple editions. Mascetti's career exemplifies the productive intersection of connoisseurship, historical scholarship, and market expertise that characterises the best of the auction-house tradition.

Career at Sotheby's

Mascetti built her professional life within Sotheby's jewellery department at a time when the major auction houses were consolidating their positions as the primary price-discovery mechanism for important jewels. Her role encompassed the cataloguing, valuation, and presentation of jewellery consigned for sale across Sotheby's European operations, with Geneva and London serving as the principal venues for the most significant pieces. The Geneva salesroom in particular had, from the 1960s and 1970s onwards, established itself as the global centre for the auction of important coloured gemstones and signed jewels, and Mascetti's expertise was deployed in that competitive environment.

Her responsibilities as chairman of the European jewellery department meant that she oversaw the authentication and description of pieces spanning several centuries and virtually every major jewellery-producing tradition: Renaissance and Baroque jewels, Georgian parures, Victorian mourning jewellery, Belle Époque garlands, and the full range of twentieth-century signed work from the great Parisian and Italian maisons. The depth of knowledge required to catalogue such a range authoritatively — distinguishing period pieces from later reproductions, identifying the signatures and workshop practices of individual houses, assessing the quality and provenance of gemstones — is considerable, and Mascetti's scholarship was applied consistently across that breadth.

Among the categories of jewellery with which she became particularly associated were historic tiaras and diadems, objects that sit at the junction of dynastic history, goldsmiths' craft, and gemstone quality. Tiaras present unusual cataloguing challenges: many were altered, dismounted, or converted across generations, and their provenance frequently intersects with the histories of European royal and aristocratic families. Mascetti's ability to trace such histories and to situate individual pieces within broader decorative-arts contexts was a defining feature of her work at Sotheby's.

Understanding Jewellery: The Standard Reference

Understanding Jewellery, written jointly with David Bennett, was first published by Antique Collectors' Club in 1989. The book addressed a genuine gap in the available literature: while specialist studies of individual periods or makers existed, there was no single comprehensive English-language reference that took the reader from the materials and techniques of jewellery-making through the full sweep of Western jewellery history to the signed pieces of the twentieth century, with sufficient attention to both the aesthetic and the commercial dimensions of the subject. Mascetti and Bennett supplied that synthesis.

The volume is organised to serve multiple audiences simultaneously. It functions as a historical survey, tracing the development of jewellery styles from antiquity through the Renaissance, the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the great Victorian revival movements, the Art Nouveau and Arts and Crafts responses to industrialisation, the geometric rigour of Art Deco, and the exuberant post-war period. It also functions as a technical primer, explaining the properties of the principal gemstones used in jewellery — diamonds, rubies, sapphires, emeralds, pearls, and a range of coloured stones — with sufficient gemmological detail to allow readers to understand why certain stones commanded premiums and how quality was assessed. And it functions as a guide to the signed jewellery market, providing detailed coverage of the major houses: Cartier, Van Cleef and Arpels, Bulgari, Boucheron, Chaumet, Fabergé, and others, with attention to the distinctive design vocabularies, hallmarking practices, and archival resources associated with each.

Subsequent editions expanded and updated the text to reflect new scholarship and market developments. The book's longevity as a reference — it remains cited by auction cataloguers, dealers, and collectors decades after its initial publication — reflects the quality of the original research and the clarity of its organisation. For many practitioners entering the jewellery trade in the 1990s and 2000s, Understanding Jewellery served as the primary self-education text, filling a role analogous to that played by standard gemmological manuals in the scientific side of the discipline.

Scholarly Contributions and Methodology

Mascetti's approach to jewellery history is grounded in primary-source research: archive consultation with the maisons themselves, examination of pattern books and design drawings, study of period photographs and portraits, and close physical analysis of the objects. This methodology, standard in art-historical scholarship but not always rigorously applied in the trade literature, gives her published work a reliability that distinguishes it from more impressionistic surveys.

Her treatment of signed jewellery in particular reflects an understanding that the attribution of a piece to a specific house, period, or designer requires evidence beyond the presence of a signature or stamp. Signatures can be added, removed, or misread; workshop practices changed over time; and the same design might be executed in different qualities for different markets. Mascetti's cataloguing work at Sotheby's required the application of these critical standards under commercial pressure, and her published writing reflects the same discipline.

The coverage of gemstones in Understanding Jewellery is notable for treating stones not merely as commodities but as materials with their own histories of discovery, mining, trade, and cultural meaning. The book's sections on pearls, for instance, address both the natural-pearl trade before the advent of cultured pearls and the transformation of the market following Mikimoto's commercial success — a transformation that affected the value of antique pearl jewellery in ways that collectors and cataloguers needed to understand. Similarly, the treatment of coloured gemstones engages with the question of origin and treatment, topics that had become increasingly important to the auction market by the late 1980s as laboratory testing became more widely available.

The Signed Jewellery Market and Mascetti's Role in Its Development

The market for signed jewellery by the great twentieth-century maisons underwent a substantial transformation during the decades of Mascetti's active career. In the 1970s and early 1980s, the premium commanded by a Cartier or Van Cleef and Arpels signature over an unsigned piece of comparable gemstone quality and workmanship was real but relatively modest. By the 1990s and into the 2000s, that premium had grown substantially, driven by a combination of factors: the globalisation of the auction market and the entry of new collectors from Asia and the Middle East, the increasing sophistication of provenance research, the publication of house histories and exhibition catalogues that established canonical examples of each maison's output, and the general rise of the luxury brand as a cultural and commercial phenomenon.

Mascetti's scholarship contributed to this development in a direct way. By providing collectors and the trade with reliable tools for identifying, dating, and contextualising signed pieces, she helped to create the conditions under which such pieces could be traded with confidence. The auction catalogue — a form in which she was expert — is not merely a commercial document but a piece of scholarship that establishes the record for a given object: its description, its provenance, its condition, and the interpretive framework within which it should be understood. The quality of that scholarship affects not only the individual sale but the long-term market for the category.

Her work at Sotheby's also involved the handling of pieces with royal and aristocratic provenance, objects whose histories intersected with the political and social upheavals of the twentieth century. The dispersal of European aristocratic collections through the auction market — a process that accelerated after the First World War and continued intermittently throughout the century — brought to the saleroom jewels that had been made for specific occasions, worn at specific courts, and documented in specific portraits and inventories. Cataloguing such pieces required historical research that went well beyond gemmological assessment, and Mascetti's broad cultural formation made her well suited to that work.

Influence on Jewellery Scholarship and Education

The influence of Mascetti's work extends beyond the auction room and the reference shelf. Understanding Jewellery has been used as a teaching text in gemmological and decorative-arts programmes, and its framework — integrating technical, historical, and market perspectives — has shaped the way subsequent writers have approached the subject. The book demonstrated that jewellery could be treated with the same seriousness as other decorative arts, and that doing so required both the material knowledge of the gemmologist and the contextual knowledge of the art historian.

This integrative approach has become more common in the field since the book's publication, reflected in the growth of academic programmes in jewellery history, the expansion of museum collections and exhibition programmes devoted to jewellery, and the increasing sophistication of auction-house scholarship. Mascetti's career, and the body of work she produced, stands as an early and influential example of what that integration could achieve.

Within the trade, her name carries the weight of a trusted authority. Dealers and collectors who cite Understanding Jewellery are invoking not merely a convenient reference but a standard of scholarly practice — the expectation that claims about attribution, dating, and significance will be grounded in evidence and subjected to critical scrutiny. That standard, consistently maintained across a long career, is perhaps the most durable element of her contribution to the field.

Legacy

Daniela Mascetti's legacy is threefold. As an auction specialist, she helped to shape the market for antique and signed jewellery during a formative period in its development, bringing scholarly standards to a commercial environment and contributing to the establishment of reliable price benchmarks for categories that had previously been evaluated more impressionistically. As a co-author of Understanding Jewellery, she produced a reference work of enduring utility that has educated several generations of collectors, dealers, and students. And as a practitioner who demonstrated the value of integrating gemmological, art-historical, and market knowledge, she helped to define what serious jewellery scholarship looks like.

In a field where the boundary between connoisseurship and commerce is often blurred, and where the temptation to subordinate accuracy to enthusiasm is ever present, Mascetti's career represents a model of disciplined, evidence-based expertise applied consistently in the service of both the market and the historical record.

Further Reading

• Bennett, David, and Mascetti, Daniela. Understanding Jewellery. Woodbridge: Antique Collectors' Club, multiple editions from 1989.
• Gems & Gemology — GIA's peer-reviewed journal, gia.edu
• Sotheby's Jewels Department — sothebys.com