In the gift shop of the Frick Collection, the New York City museum that reopened last year after a five-year restoration, there is a display case that shows enlarged reproductions of two of the portraits in the museum.
In the oil painting “Genoese Noblewoman” by the Flemish artist Anthony van Dyck, the sitter is fingering a gold chain draped across her bodice. In “Thomas Cromwell,” the portrait by the German painter Hans Holbein the Younger, the Tudor statesman is wearing a gold ring set with a large green stone.
Next to the images is jewelry that seems to have jumped right off the canvases. It looks exactly like what was painted — and thanks to the goldsmith Donna Distefano, it very nearly is. Not just in how it looks, or in the materials used. But in the very way it was made.
“I work as a classical goldsmith, preserving ancient metalsmithing techniques,” Ms. Distefano, 63, explained, sitting in her workshop in the Flatiron district where she creates the Frick’s Off the Canvas collection. “The jewelry is created with the same technique as the original,” techniques that can date as far back as the Etruscans.
The process starts with Ms. Distefano essentially making her own gold, as the jewelers of centuries gone by would have done.
“We alloy our own gold in-house, starting with pure 24-karat gold and small amounts of silver and copper to create 22-karat gold,” she said. “We keep a studio book of formulas which contains our technical instructions and custom alloy recipes for different shades of gold — warm yellows, soft greens, and apricot tones. The gold is then alloyed into an ingot and rolled into sheets and wires” — the materials she needs to make each piece entirely by hand.
Each link, for instance, is looped by hand, whether they be the larger ovals to replicate a noblewoman’s chain, or the hundreds of tiny links seen in the four-strand gold bracelet of Anthony van Dyck’s painting “Margareta de Vos.” Margareta, the daughter of a distiller, was painted also wearing a delicate diamond ring in a square gold setting, which Ms. Distefano has painstakingly recreated for the Frick.
“There are 26 pieces in the collection,” said Kate Gerlough, the museum’s associate director of retail and product development. Some are silver, but the majority are in 22-karat gold with precious and semiprecious gemstones. Prices range from $150 for sterling silver earring jackets to $150,000 for a 22-karat gold chain inspired by “Genoese Noblewoman.”
She was inspired to bring Off the Canvas to the Frick after visiting Ms. Distefano in her workshop. “I was thrilled,” she said. “It was love at first sight.”
What sparked Ms. Gerlough’s enthusiasm, she said, was seeing all the materials, from pliers to blowtorches, files to mallets, that Ms. Distefano uses to create jewelry with historical accuracy.
Some of the Off the Canvas pieces were based on other elements in a painting: The intricate border of pearls, rubies and aquamarines on the hem of a tunic in “Saint John the Evangelist” by Piero della Francesca inspired earrings, for example.
Ms. Distefano described her Gemma and Renaissance Dream earrings as “rare, colorful gemstones set in four-prong, quatrefoil-like gold settings, with sapphires, aquamarines, rhodolite and hand wire-wrapped pearls placed between each stone.”
She also reinterpreted the rose that Sarah Hodges (later Lady Innes) is clutching in a Thomas Gainsborough portrait, into a brooch of 22-karat yellow gold, 22-karat apricot gold and 18-karat green gold.
Ms. Distefano was always drawn to ancient worlds. One of her favorite haunts as a child growing up in Bridgeport, Conn., was the public library. “I would take out books on Stonehenge or Ancient Egypt,” she said. But she credits her Italian heritage as her biggest influence: Her maternal grandparents came from the Lazio region; her paternal grandparents from Sicily.
“Growing up, Enrico Caruso would be playing on the record player, there were art books and books on the Vatican,” she recalled. “I was blown away.”
While still in high school, she took jewelry making classes at the University of Bridgeport, learning how to solder and hammer metal and to set stones, making her first ring using sterling silver and a moonstone in a bezel setting.
She graduated in 1982 from the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York with an associate of applied science degree in jewelry design, followed by stints apprenticing with jewelers and working at the jewelry counter at the Lord & Taylor department store.
A pivotal experience was studying with the goldsmith Cecelia Bauer in New York in the late 1980s. “From Cecelia I learned the classical goldsmithing methods of the ancient Egyptians, Etruscans, Greeks and Romans,” Ms. Distefano said. “She taught me ancient techniques like how to alloy gold, how to make chains.”
Ms. Distefano’s skills and knowledge got her what she called her “dream job”: working in the reconstruction studio of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a department which no longer exists. The job involved remaking jewelry as originally crafted.
“Working together with two other Met goldsmiths who had similar training, and looking at original artifacts,” she said, “we were able to conclude how the pieces were made through trial and error in our workshop.”
After more than four years with the Met, she set up her own brand in 1994. She took with her not only her experience, but the services of Sean Younger Thomas, the Met’s display supervisor until he retired in 2023. Mr. Thomas is now her husband and creates the displays for Donna Distefano Ltd.
Although the jeweler feels “drawn to antiquity,” she’s also involved in some present-day projects. Joe Perry, lead guitarist of the rock band Aerosmith, collects gold jewelry, she said, and contacted her after seeing her work in a magazine. He has owned several of the brand’s gold and silver pieces and collaborated on a jewelry collection with her, Aerosmith x Distefano.
Mr. Perry is also a member of the band Hollywood Vampires, which collaborated on the collection Hollywood Vampires x Donna Distefano. One band member, the actor Johnny Depp, has been photographed wearing one of their pieces. “It’s a ring called ‘The Last Vampire,’ a poison ring in sterling silver with diamond accents and the Hollywood Vampires’ bat logo on the top,” Ms. Distefano said.
But history is the focus in her work for the Frick.
“I help tell the story of the jewelry in the paintings,” Ms. Distefano said. “What jewels they are wearing, and why, how they behaved.” In the end, she said, “jewelry history tells the story of world history.”
The post At the Frick Collection, a Modern Maker of Centuries-Old Designs appeared first on New York Times.
