In the early Middle Ages, most jewelry was functional. Dress fashions did not allow for a great display of jewelry. The long, high-necked, sleeved under-dress, and shorter-sleeved over-tunic that were worn by both sexes, though they might themselves be richly adorned with embroidery, left little scope for jewels. The belt that was worn by men and married women, and the brooch that fastened the tunic at the neck, were the only jewels that naturally formed a part of dress, though a coronet or other head ornament might also be worn.
However, these few pieces of jewelry that were used were monumental and possessed an imperial and hieratic beauty that made them as stately and as noble as any ornaments designed for church use.
Round fibulae or brooches that closed the neck slit of the undergarment, for example, were continuously used from the Carolingian period onwards. Brooches were usually circular or of some other type of centrally symmetrical shape. A special type, called the ring brooch, was circular and richly decorated with stones and pearls or worked in repoussee. Ring brooches were universal in the thirteenth century. In the fourteenth century, also cluster brooches and wheel brooches came into fashion.
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The upper garment was fastened at the breast with a larger and usually round brooch or clasp. From the thirteenth century, double robe clasps came to be used as well, attached to each end of a ribbon holding the front parts of a cloak together. Ecclesiastical morses—clasps to hold the priest’s cope together—also evolved from the type of the traditional cloak-clasp. These were often based on a cruciform or multi-lobed (often quatrefoil) shape.
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Brooches and clasps were also often decorated with common heraldic motifs, such as a twelfth-century Rhenish eagle-shaped gold fibula created with repoussee technique and decorated with coloured pastes and garnets.
From the later Middle Ages we have numerous brooches executed in form of personal coats of arms. Fourteenth-century French inventories, for example, include many references to brooches with fleur-de-lis motifs. Such a large lozenge-shaped brooch from the early fourteenth century, once part of French royal regalia, is in the collection of the Louvre. The large golden lily in its centre is decorated both by traditional gems en cabochon and a large table-cut stone—a very early occurrence of the latter technique.
Figural brooches often had religious imagery as well. A beautiful silver-gilt brooch from the late fourteenth century was, for instance, prepared in the form of a letter M (letter-brooch), standing for the initial letter of Mary, and represents the Annunciation (New College, Oxford). The two figures, the Archangel Gabriel and the Virgin, stand in the double arch of the letter. At the top of the letter M there is a small crown symbolising the status of the Virgin as Queen of Heaven. The central
shaft of the letter is decorated with a large vase with the lily, standing for the purity of the Virgin, whose three buds signify the moment when the Trinity comes into being.
Many brooches were set with antique cameos representing profile portraits.
Brooches were also used for affixing the rim of hats, and men’s headpieces were also embellished with badges or pendants (enseigne) that had a decorative function only. Such hat decorations were enormously popular in the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance, and often conveyed some message about their wearer: they were decorated with initials, short mottoes, coats of arms, mythological, allegorical or secular themes, etc. Some hat badges were worn as pilgrims’ badges, others imparted moral messages. A Franco-Flemish hat medallion from c. 1520-30 (Metropolitan Museum, New York), for instance, portrays a buxom young woman with two men. On her right there is a luxuriously dressed old man with a large money-bag into which she reaches. Her other hand, with a hardly concealed erotic gesture, holds the handle of the dagger of a young man on her left. The French inscription leaves no doubt as to the meaning of the scene: “Love does much but money does everything.”
