The State Hermitage Museum: Exhibitions

Carved "cameos"

For large shaped objects (bottle-coolers, ice-cream dishes) and the sugar-bowls carved "cameos" were created separately.

In the winter of 1777 copies in hard porcelain of small cameos, the originals of which were made from agate, were shown to Louis XVI. The King supported the idea of producing copies of his collection of ancient cameos, which was the largest in Europe, for the Russian service. A building with a lapidary workshop was specially equipped to produce them.

Each cameo contains layers of brown and white paste. For the brown they used the recently-discovered kaolin, for the white biscuit (unglazed porcelain) from which the copies of the ancient originals. After firing the "cameos" became original works of art in their own right that were then set into specially prepared sockets and attached using a gilded fillet.