The Italian Renaissance started earlier than and outshone the English. The great jewel collections of ancient times, of the Emperors Julius Caesar and Hadrian of Maecenas were dwarfed by the collections of the Medici and the Borgias. The styles favored in those days are still vivid in the portraits of the period. Many of the painters and sculptors, indeed—Donatello (1386-1466), Pollaiuolo (1429-1498), Botticelli (1444-1510), Cellini, to name but four—began their careers as goldsmiths and jewelers. They fashioned works with painstaking devotion and venturesome skill for their generous but exacting patrons. Lorenzo de Medici collected the antique cameos and intaglios freshly unearthed in Italian soil; under the spur of his interest, intaglio jewels achieved a new delicacy. Metal was worked with greater deftness, flat, chased, or répoussé. Faience, the art of painting and glazing ceramics, was added to the colorful arts of enameling. _Enseignes_ became popular, badges of dignity in the form of a gold adornment on a man’s hat, with the nobleman’s crest or other identification caught into the design. All over the continent, and even among the Italianate Englishmen of Elizabeth’s court and James’, the enseigne was worn as a clasp to hold the plume, while from one ear beneath dangled a golden ring or a pear-shaped pearl. Rings of all sorts were again in demand, especially signet rings, _fede_ (clasped hands) friendship rings, gimmals or gemmels (twin rings that could be separated for two lovers to wear)—and poison rings. Particularly popular was the pendant, in many forms and positions. Pendant earrings again grew, until almost too large to wear. Even larger pendants, many opening on cameos, dangled upon the breast. Pendants of all sorts hung from the girdles, utilitarian in the shape of golden keys or scissors, religious in the shape of a crucifix or the relic of a saint, along with purely aesthetic medallions of animals or flowers, or golden spheres—so many as to make a tinkling when one walked. A new fashion in the pendant was introduced, a jewel on the forehead, hung from a hair band or adornment; in India, similar pendants had for centuries hung from the veil. This new pendant was called the _ferronière_, from La Ferrionière (“the ironmonger’s wife”) whose portrait survives, probably painted by Leonardo da Vinci when she was mistress of Francis I of France. _The Renaissance Across Europe_