It is the desire for harmony and beauty of execution, rather than for display of wealth, that characterises the best productions of the Renaissance, whose true value lies not in their intrinsic, but in their real artistic worth. The whole of every jewel, back as well as front, is finished and enamelled with the same exquisite care. What little material value these jewels possessed when their form and design was destroyed and their beautiful devices obliterated is well illustrated by Brantôme's story of the jewels of the Countess of Châteaubriand. This lady had been supplanted in the affections of Francis I by another--the future Duchess of Estampes--who persuaded the King to claim all the fine jewels he had bestowed on his former mistress. The value of these lay chiefly in their beautiful designs and devices, so on receiving the demand, she melted them all down, and returned them to him converted into golden ingots. The splendid love of life which finds expression in every production of Renaissance art exercises a pervading influence over its jewellery, and determines the subjects to be represented. All the larger objects, and indeed every object which is not of a purely decorative pattern, is given to the depicting of a subject. Throughout the finest period of jewellery, goldsmith's work was closely associated with sculpture; and the human figure, or figures of animals either real or imaginary, wrought in relief or executed in the round, find a place on almost every jewelled composition. The subjects, largely chosen from among the new circle of ideas opened up by the literature of the Renaissance, reveal wide knowledge of classical mythology, romance, and poetic legends, as well as remarkable adaptive genius. Nor are subjects from the Old and New Testaments excluded; though fanciful groups--in one case a representation of some theological virtue, and in another some sacred allegory--are more popular. The symbolical figures of the Middle Ages, as the unicorn and the "pelican in her piety," with sea monsters and fantastic men and beasts, are of frequent occurrence. Subjects such as these, and many others suggested by the fertile mind of the Renaissance jeweller and the artist who drew his designs, are so numerous that space would fail were one to attempt to enumerate even a tithe of those met with on jewels of the Cinquecento. Notwithstanding its subjects, we find in the jewellery of the Renaissance, beyond what tradition had preserved, no direct influence resulting from the study of the ornaments of the ancients, though the awakened interest of Italy in the antique cannot but have been accompanied by some acquaintance with the productions of her early goldsmiths. There appears, however, to have been no attempt to base the jewels of the period on the forms of ancient ornaments, to imitate the beaded work of the Etruscans or the goldwork of ancient Greece or Rome.