niello

The tradition & historical record

Niello is a black mixture, usually of sulphur, copper, silver, and lead, used as an inlay on engraved or etched metal, especially silver. It is added as a powder or paste, then fired until it melts or at least softens, and flows or is pushed into engraved lines in the metal. It hardens and blackens when cool, and the niello on the flat surface is polished off to show the filled lines in black, contrasting with the polished metal around it. It may also be used with other metalworking techniques to cover larger areas, as seen in the sky in the diptych illustrated here. The metal where niello is to be placed is often roughened to provide a key. In many cases, especially in objects that have been buried underground, where the niello is now lost, the roughened surface indicates that it was once there. Niello was used on a variety of objects including sword hilts, chalices, plates, horns, adornment for horses, jewellery such as bracelets, rings, pendants, and small fittings such as strap-ends, purse-bars, buttons, belt buckles and the like. It was also used to fill in the letters in inscriptions engraved on metal. Periods when engraving filled in with niello has been used to make full images with figures have been relatively few, but the practice has produced some significant achievements. ¹

There are a number of claimed uses of niello from the Mediterranean Bronze Age, all of which have been the subjects of disputes as to the actual composition of the materials used, that have not been conclusively settled, despite some decades of debate. The earliest claimed use of niello appears in late Bronze Age Byblos in Syria, around 1800 BC, in inscriptions in hieroglyphs on scimitars. In Ancient Egypt it appears a little later, in the tomb of Queen Ahhotep II, who lived about 1550 BC, on a dagger decorated with a lion chasing a calf in a rocky landscape in a style that shows Greek influence, or at least similarity to the roughly contemporary daggers from Mycenae, and perhaps other objects in the tomb. At about the same time of c.1550 BC it appears on several bronze daggers from shaft grave royal tombs at Mycenae (in Grave Circle A and Grave Circle B), especially in long thin scenes running along the centre of the blade. These show the violence typical of the art of Mycenaean Greece, as well as a sophistication in both technique and figurative imagery that is startlingly original in a Greek context. There are a number of scenes of lions hunting and being hunted, attacking men and being attacked; most are now in the National Archaeological Museum, Athens. These are in a mixed-media technique often called metalmalerei (German: "painting in metal"), which involves using gold and silver inlays or applied foils with black niello and the bronze, which would originally have been brightly polished. ¹

The Sassanid Persians enjoyed dining and drinking together, a social event that is visible through ceramic, glass, and silver vessels. Elite circles handled silver cups, plates, and bowls on which artisans hammered and chased intricate designs. Sasanian niello is a decorative technique used in metalworking during the Sasanian Empire (224-651 AD). This technique was particularly popular in Sasanian silverwork, adorning objects such as plates, bowls, ewers, and jewelry. The designs often featured scenes of hunting, courtly life, animals, and mythical creatures. Sasanian niello is notable for its fine craftsmanship and the skillful use of negative space to create detailed imagery. But in general, Niello was rarely used in Sasanian metalwork, which could use it inventively. The Metropolitan Museum of Art has Sasanian shallow bowls or dishes where in one case it forms the stripes on a tiger, and in another the horns and hoofs of goats in relief, as well as parts of the king's weapons. This relief use of niello seems to be paralleled from this period in only one piece of Byzantine silver. A silver oval bowl decorated with tigers and grapevines, attributed to the Sasanian period of Iran (3rd-7th centuries CE) and held in the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Department of Ancient Near Eastern Art, was examined using non-invasive analytical techniques to identify the composition of the silver alloy and the niello inlay used in its decoration. The study revealed that the bowl is made of a silver-copper alloy containing approximately 3 wt.% copper. The niello inlays were found to consist solely of silver sulfide (acanthite). ¹

Niello is then hardly found until the Roman period; or perhaps it first appears around this point. Pliny the Elder (AD 23–79) describes the technique as Egyptian, and remarks the oddness of decorating silver in this way. Some of the earliest uses, from 1–300 AD, seem to be small statuettes and brooches of big cats, where niello is used for the stripes of tigers and the spots on panthers; these were very common in Roman art, as creatures of Bacchus. The animal repertoire of Roman Britain was somewhat different, and provides brooches with niello stripes on a hare and a cat. From about the 4th century, it was used for ornamental details such as borders and for inscriptions in late Roman silver, such as a dish and bowl in the Mildenhall Treasure and pieces in the Hoxne Hoard, including Christian church plate. It was often used on spoons, which were often inscribed with the owner's name, or later crosses. This type of use continued in Byzantine metalwork, from where it passed to Russia. It is very common in Anglo-Saxon metalwork, with examples including the Tassilo Chalice, Strickland Brooch, and the Fuller Brooch, generally forming the background for motifs carried in the metal, but also used for rather crude geometric decoration of spots, triangles and stripes on small relatively everyday fittings such as strap-ends in base metal. There is similar use in Celtic, Viking, and other types of Early Medieval jewellery and metalwork, especially in northern Europe. Similar uses continued in the traditional styles of jewellery of the Middle East until at least the 20th century. ¹

Some Renaissance goldsmiths in Europe, such as Maso Finiguerra and Antonio del Pollaiuolo in Florence, decorated their works, usually in silver, by engraving the metal with a burin, after which they filled up the hollows produced by the burin with a black enamel-like compound made of silver, lead and sulphur. The resulting design, called a niello, was of much higher contrast and thus much more visible. Sometimes niello decoration was incidental to the objects, but some pieces such as paxes were effectively pictures in niello. A range of religious objects such as crucifixes and reliquaries might be decorated in this way, as well as secular objects such as knife handles, rings and other jewellery, and fittings such as buckles. ¹

During the 10th to 13th century AD, Kievan Rus craftsmen possessed a high degree of skill in jewellery making. ¹

The text above is adapted from the Wikipedia article “Niello”, available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 licence. ¹

niello is black mixture of copper, silver, and lead sulphides, according to the structured record cited below. This entry was generated automatically from that record and has not yet been reviewed by a person familiar with the tradition. ²

The source record links this tradition to 27 external registers, which can be verified through the citation. ²