Russian niello silver box

Late eighteenth century gilt silver snuff box with niello decoration. Unmarked Russia ca 1770. Some of the best of these silver boxes with niello decoration came from Velikij Ustyug Russia.

Measurements of box : 80 x 45 x 35

Weight : 162 gram

History of NIELLO

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 the 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. Niello is then hardly found until the Roman period; or perhaps it first appears around this point.[21]  Pliny the Elder (AD 23–79) describes the technique as Egyptian, and remarks the oddness of decorating silver in this way.[22] 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.[23] 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.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. It appears that niello-work was probably a specialist activity of some goldsmiths, not practiced by others, and most work came from Florence or Bologna.[27]
Niellists were important in the history of art because they had developed skills and techniques that transferred easily to engraving plates for printmaking on paper, and nearly all the earliest engravers were trained as goldsmiths, enabling the new art medium to develop very quickly. At least in Italy, some of the very earliest engraved prints were in fact made by treating a silver object intended for niello as a printing plate with ink, before the niello was added. These are known as "niello prints", or in the cautious words of modern curators, "printed from a plate engraved in the niello manner";[28] in later centuries, after a collector's market grew up, many were forgeries. The genuine Renaissance prints were probably made mainly as a record of his work by the goldsmith, and perhaps as independent art objects.[29]

By the late 16th century relatively little use was made of niello, especially to create pictures, and a different type of mastic that could be used in much the same way for contrasts in decoration was devised, so European pictorial use was largely restricted to Russia, except for some watches, guns, instruments and the like.