When Antoine Legouy first saw the Torque de Montans — a complex necklace made of solid 24-karat gold and more than 2,500 years old — he thought “Wow.”
It is a “trés, trés, trés beautiful example” of what craftspeople could do in the Second Iron Age, said Mr. Legouy, who has been recognized by the French government as one of the country’s top goldsmiths and chasers, specialists who decorate metals with relief patterns. “I realized how good they were.”
His effort to reproduce the ancient necklace — in collaboration with the National Archaeological Museum of France, Van Cleef & Arpels and L’École School of Jewelry Arts — is the subject of “Recreating Gesture,” an exhibition at L’École in Paris through Sept. 21.
The necklace is technically a torque, a rigid neck ring that, in this case, was 11 centimeters (4.3 inches) in diameter and was worn by Gauls, the Celtic people who lived in what is now France. Unearthed in 1843 in the southern French town of Montans, it has been recognized as a rare and complex example of what archaeologists call the “vegetal style,” with each end of the open-front circlet formed to resemble blossoms that would sit comfortably on either side of its wearer’s clavicle.
Researchers did not know how the piece of jewelry was made, said Fany Maury, the director of the Archaeological Center of Montans. So a decade ago the Montans center and National Center for Scientific Research (C.N.R.S.) in Paris began trying to replicate it to answer that question.
After a pause, the project was resumed in 2022 by L’École as an effort in experimental archaeology: reconstructing ancient work by using the same techniques and tools originally involved in it.
“The purpose was to think, and to act, in actually the same way as the Gallic goldsmiths,” Mr. Legouy said. While they knew the torque had been made of gold sheets hammered on a counter-form, in Mr. Legouy’s trials, when silver and copper was used, the sheets rapidly tore.
A breakthrough came when one of the C.N.R.S. archaeologists told Mr. Legouy about the grave of an Iron Age goldsmith that had been excavated in Spain. The artisan had been buried with his tools, including a tar-like material “comparable to the chaser’s pitch that goldsmiths use today,” Mr. Legouy said. It would have acted as a buffer between the gold and the counter form and held the gold in place.
Mr. Legouy initially spent 1.5 years in preparation and experimentation, but once he had determined the process, he made two 24-karat gold reproductions of the torque in just four months. “In terms of shape and weight, we are really close to the original,” he said.
One of the reproductions is in L’École’s exhibition, which has free admission by reserved tickets that may be obtained through the school’s website. From Nov. 24 to 30, the display is scheduled to be part of Van Cleef & Arpels’ “De Mains en Mains” (“From Hands to Hands”) event in Lyon, France.
Emmanuelle Amiot, L’École’s head of research and the exhibition’s curator, referred to the entire reproduction project as a model for collaborations between archaeologists and craftspeople. “And I really love that it took another goldsmith separated by so much time to do this,” she said.
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