Anglo-Saxon Disc Brooch
The Men of the North
The Dark Ages: Age of Light
Unfired Brooch
Back in Bolton, Shaun Greenhalgh has engraved the symbols of the four evangelists round the edges of his silver brooch. And he’s now ready for the really difficult bit in the middle, the Anglo-Saxon king, created so carefully, with cloisonné enamels.
Shaun Greenhalgh “The cloisonné enamel technique is a very old technique, practised by the Romans, and the Celts even, before them. It’s just powdered
glass, ground up, and mixed in with water and just fired in the kiln.
The Anglo-Saxons and other people in the dark ages, and into the middle ages, we’d use of Roman Glass tesseras, ground up, the kind of thing you see in wall mosaics in Ravenna and such places, Constantinople, and suchlike, because although they had the technology to make the glass, they didn’t have the oxides to get the various colours, as you can see, of the yellows and greens and blues.”
The first stage is to lay down their kings outlines in a delicate framework of itsy-bitsy bits of pure gold. Then the really tough work begins. Getting the powdered glass into this labyrinth of gold cells.
