The Giuliano style denotes a distinctive jewellery aesthetic developed in London from the 1860s onward by the Neapolitan goldsmith Carlo Giuliano (c. 1831–1895) and continued after his death by his sons Carlo Joseph and Arthur Alphonse Giuliano. Characterised by polychrome enamel of exceptional delicacy, archaeological-revival granulation, fine wirework, and figural or mythological subjects drawn from the Italian Renaissance, the style occupies a singular position in Victorian decorative arts. It is neither purely antiquarian nor straightforwardly historicist: at its finest, Giuliano's work achieves an integration of archaeological scholarship and living craft that distinguishes it from the more literal reproduction work of contemporaries. Pieces signed with the maker's mark C.G. — a cartouche used consistently by the workshop — are held in major public collections including the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and continue to command significant prices at auction.

Carlo Giuliano: Formation and Arrival in London

Carlo Giuliano was born in Naples at a moment when that city's goldsmiths were deeply engaged with the rediscovery of ancient technique. The excavations at Pompeii and Herculaneum had been proceeding for over a century, and the Castellani family — Fortunato Pio Castellani and his sons Alessandro and Augusto — had by the 1850s already pioneered the revival of Etruscan granulation and filigree. Giuliano trained within or in close proximity to this Neapolitan milieu, absorbing both the technical vocabulary of ancient goldsmithing and the scholarly attitude toward historical sources that distinguished the best revival work from mere pastiche.

He arrived in London around 1860, initially working as an agent and craftsman for the Castellani firm, which had established a commercial presence in the British capital. By the mid-1860s he had set up independently, first in Frith Street, Soho, and subsequently at 115 Piccadilly, where the workshop and retail premises became a destination for collectors, aesthetes, and members of the artistic intelligentsia. His clientele overlapped substantially with the circle around Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Edward Burne-Jones, and the broader Pre-Raphaelite and Aesthetic movements — a cultural alignment that gave the Giuliano style its particular resonance in late Victorian Britain.

Technical Vocabulary

The Giuliano style is defined by a cluster of techniques deployed in combination, each executed to a standard that contemporary critics and subsequent scholars have consistently praised.

• Polychrome enamel. Giuliano's enamel work is the most immediately recognisable element of his style. He employed émail en ronde bosse (enamel applied over three-dimensional sculptural forms), champlevé, and painted enamel, frequently combining several techniques within a single piece. The palette is characteristically rich but controlled: deep translucent blacks, opaque whites, warm reds, and clear blues and greens appear alongside flesh tones of considerable subtlety in figural subjects. The enamel surfaces are smooth and even, with a quality of finish that distinguishes workshop production from the more variable output of contemporaries working in the revival idiom.
• Granulation. Following the Castellani example, Giuliano revived the ancient technique of applying minute spheres of gold to a gold surface without visible solder. The precise mechanism by which ancient Etruscan smiths achieved this — now understood to involve a copper-salt bonding process — had been a subject of intense investigation in the mid-nineteenth century. Giuliano's granulation, while perhaps not as archaeologically precise as the Castellani firm's most rigorous pieces, is consistently fine and contributes a characteristic textural richness to borders, frames, and pendant drops.
• Wirework and filigree. Delicate twisted and plaited gold wire appears throughout Giuliano's production, used to construct cagework settings, decorative borders, and the structural armatures of pendant jewels. The wire gauge is typically fine, lending pieces an openwork lightness that contrasts with the visual weight of the enamel and gem-set elements.
• Gem setting. Giuliano favoured gem-set borders and accent stones chosen as much for colour harmony with the enamel as for intrinsic value. Pearls — both natural and, in later production, seed pearls — appear with great frequency as drops and border elements. Rubies, emeralds, sapphires, and demantoid garnets are set in simple collet or claw mounts that maintain the archaeological character of the overall design. Diamond use is restrained and typically subordinate to coloured stones and enamel.

Iconographic Sources and Design Language

The iconographic programme of Giuliano's jewellery is drawn from several overlapping historical sources, handled with a degree of scholarly fluency that reflects genuine engagement with the primary material.

The most important single source is the jewellery of the sixteenth-century Italian and Northern European Renaissance, particularly the pendant jewels depicted in portraits by Hans Holbein the Younger. Holbein's portrait drawings and paintings, widely reproduced in the nineteenth century through engraving and later photography, provided a repertoire of pendant forms — the so-called Holbeinesque pendant — characterised by a rectangular or arched frame of enamelled gold enclosing a central figural or gemstone element, with pendant drops below. Giuliano adapted this format with considerable freedom, producing pieces that evoke the period without mechanically reproducing specific historical examples.

Classical and Etruscan antiquity supply a second layer of reference. Bulla pendants, scarab settings, amphora-form drops, and meander or guilloche borders all derive from the archaeological revival vocabulary that Giuliano inherited from the Castellani circle. These elements are often combined with Renaissance figural subjects in ways that would have been historically impossible but are aesthetically coherent within the revival idiom.

Mythological and allegorical figural subjects — Cupid, Victory, the Muses, marine creatures, putti — appear frequently in enamel, either as the central subject of a pendant or as subsidiary decorative elements. The treatment is consistently refined rather than naïve, suggesting access to high-quality reproductive prints and possibly to original Renaissance and Mannerist goldsmith's work in museum collections.

Natural history motifs — insects, birds, flowers — appear in later production, reflecting the influence of the Aesthetic Movement and Japanese art on the workshop's design vocabulary. These pieces represent a departure from the strictly archaeological idiom of the early work and demonstrate the workshop's responsiveness to shifting taste in the 1880s and 1890s.

The Workshop and Its Organisation

Giuliano's Piccadilly premises functioned as both workshop and retail gallery, a model common among the leading jewellers of the period. The extent to which Carlo Giuliano himself executed the finest enamel and goldsmithing work, as opposed to directing a team of skilled craftsmen, is not fully documented, but the consistency of quality across a substantial body of production suggests a tightly controlled workshop practice. The C.G. mark was applied to pieces sold through the Piccadilly premises regardless of which hands had executed the work, in accordance with standard Victorian trade practice.

Following Carlo Giuliano's death in 1895, the business passed to his sons Carlo Joseph and Arthur Alphonse, who continued to use the C. & A. Giuliano mark until the firm closed in 1914. The sons' production maintained the technical standards of the father's workshop while showing a gradual accommodation to Edwardian taste: enamel remains prominent, but the archaeological severity of the early work gives way to a somewhat softer, more decorative character. Pieces from the sons' period are generally distinguishable from the father's work by the changed mark and by subtle shifts in design vocabulary, though the finest examples of the later period are fully worthy of the workshop's reputation.

Relationship to the Aesthetic Movement and Broader Context

The Giuliano style did not develop in isolation. It participated in a wider Victorian reassessment of historical goldsmithing that encompassed the Castellani firm in Rome and London, John Brogden's archaeological revival work, and the scholarly collecting activities of figures such as Sir Augustus Wollaston Franks at the British Museum. What distinguished Giuliano from most of his contemporaries was the degree to which archaeological and Renaissance sources were filtered through a living craft sensibility rather than reproduced as historical documentation.

The overlap between Giuliano's clientele and the Aesthetic Movement — the loose cultural tendency, centred in London in the 1870s and 1880s, that privileged beauty and artistic refinement over moral or narrative content — gave the workshop's production a particular cultural cachet. Aesthetic Movement jewellery, broadly conceived, favoured the handmade over the machine-produced, the historically resonant over the fashionably novel, and the subtly coloured over the ostentatiously brilliant. Giuliano's polychrome enamel and restrained gem use aligned naturally with these preferences. The workshop's pieces were worn by women who also collected blue-and-white Chinese porcelain, commissioned paintings from Burne-Jones, and dressed in the loose, historically informed gowns associated with the movement.

The Arts and Crafts movement, which gathered momentum in Britain through the 1880s, drew on some of the same historical sources as the Giuliano style but pursued a different ideological programme — emphasising the social dignity of craft labour and the rejection of industrial production. Giuliano's workshop, operating as a commercial enterprise with a wealthy clientele, was not part of the Arts and Crafts movement in any organisational sense, but the technical values it embodied — handwork, historical knowledge, material integrity — were consonant with Arts and Crafts principles and helped prepare the ground for the jewellery revival associated with figures such as Henry Wilson and John Paul Cooper in the 1890s and 1900s.

Notable Examples and Public Collections

The Victoria and Albert Museum holds the most significant public collection of Giuliano jewellery in the United Kingdom, including pendant jewels, brooches, necklaces, and parures that document the workshop's range across several decades. The collection includes pieces acquired directly from the workshop during its lifetime as well as later gifts and bequests, and is supplemented by archival material relating to the firm.

The Walters Art Museum in Baltimore holds a substantial group of Giuliano pieces assembled by Henry Walters, whose collecting activities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries encompassed Renaissance jewellery alongside the revival work that drew on it. The juxtaposition of historical and revival pieces in the Walters collection is instructive for understanding the relationship between Giuliano's sources and his interpretations.

At auction, signed Giuliano pieces have consistently attracted strong interest from specialist collectors. The combination of the C.G. or C. & A. Giuliano mark, documented provenance, and intact enamel — the most vulnerable element of these jewels — are the principal determinants of value. Pieces with chipped, restored, or replaced enamel are significantly discounted relative to examples in original condition, reflecting the centrality of the enamel surface to the aesthetic and technical integrity of the work.

Identification and Authentication

Giuliano's consistent use of the C.G. cartouche mark provides the primary basis for attribution, though the mark has been reproduced on later pieces of uncertain origin. Authentication therefore requires consideration of the mark in conjunction with technical examination of the enamel, granulation, and wirework. Genuine workshop pieces show a quality of enamel application and granulation density that is difficult to replicate, and the gold alloy used is typically consistent with high-carat Victorian practice.

A substantial body of unsigned work in the Giuliano idiom exists, produced both by the workshop itself — some production may have left the premises unmarked — and by contemporaries working in the same tradition. Attribution of unsigned pieces requires careful comparison with documented marked examples and should be approached with appropriate caution. The broader category of Giuliano-style jewellery, as distinct from pieces attributable to the workshop itself, encompasses a wide range of quality and period, from accomplished contemporary work to later twentieth-century reproductions.

Legacy and Influence

The Giuliano workshop's influence on subsequent British jewellery is difficult to overstate. Its demonstration that historical technique could be revived to produce work of genuine aesthetic distinction — rather than mere antiquarian curiosity — helped establish the conditions for the Arts and Crafts jewellery revival of the 1890s and for the broader reassessment of the jeweller's craft that continued through the Edwardian period and into the early twentieth century. The workshop's insistence on enamel as a primary medium, rather than a subsidiary decorative element, influenced a generation of British jewellers for whom colour and surface were as important as gemstone value.

In the longer view, the Giuliano style represents one of the most successful instances of the Victorian engagement with historical goldsmithing — an engagement that was simultaneously scholarly, commercial, and genuinely creative. The best pieces are not reproductions of Renaissance jewellery but independent works of art that use Renaissance and classical sources as a point of departure for something distinctively of their own moment.

Further Reading

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