Interest in glyphic art, which reached its collecting apogee during the Grand Tour collecting, is resurgent once more, writes Frances Allitt.
Museum exhibitions, new collectors, new literature – and perhaps a sense that the market was undervalued – have prompted a spate of strong prices at auction topped in April when 40 cameos and intaglios formerly in the collection of Giorgio Sangiorgi (1887-1965) made $8.63m (£6.69m) at Christie’s New York. More than half were knocked down to the J Paul Getty Museum.
The return to form has been a slow burn. As Wartski’s Thomas Holman puts it, the once elevated status of glyphic art became “eroded by the proliferation of cheap reproductions – the poorer quality shell cameos and replicas in ceramic that became associated with old-fashioned Victorian taste”.