Giansante jewels is a high jewellery brand based in Valenza, Italy, the cradle of goldsmithery. This small city in the Region of Piedmont boasts the highest number of artisan gold and jewellery businesses in the country, as well as a solid high-quality artisan tradition and significant advancement in the way of technical, stylistic and material innovation. I discovered Giansante Gioielli when I was struck by their amazing flower rings in motion. Perfect movement fascinates me: I have always loved animated things and carousel boxes spinning around. But it was the first time I got to wear a flower ring with a mechanism that could open the petals to reveal a marvellous gem and then close them as to protect this precious stone inside. I was lucky enough to admire such beauties in person when I invited Mr Marcello Giansante to my home. Marcello has a background as a mechanic: no wonder he can create complicated jewels with perfect technique.
I asked Marcello to tell me something about the beginning of his career: “I attended a professional training school to become a mechanic and I have been working in this field for seven years. It was only by chance that I interrupted a career path that seemed to have been already traced for me because my hands developed an allergy that put an end to my job”. Thanks to this incident, Marcello turned to goldsmithery because he lived in Valenza and it seemed to him the more logical choice. Therefore, step by step Mr Giansante became an outstanding jeweller, treasuring his past experience as a mechanic. The revolutionary jewels in motion were born.
This ring belongs to the starflower line and hides a mystery. What does it keep inside? In which vortex will we get lost? The ring creates an unexpected tourbillon: thanks to its innovative mechanism, the petals can open or close. I asked Mr Marcello to explain how this passion for jewels in motion was born: “Since I was a young man, I have studied all the best artisan techniques existing in the field of jewellery, became very passionate about them and succeeded very well in their application. But there were two episodes that marked my life as a jeweller.
The first one was at the beginning of my career: I showed the wax model of my first original creation to a well-known jeweller in Valenza. He observed the ring carefully and abruptly told me: I don’t want to offend you, but seeing this ring, I can honestly tell you that you will never become a good goldsmith; I appreciate your goodwill but I advise you to let it go, maybe this profession is not for you. Of course, instead of making me give up, these words gave me the strength to try to become a great goldsmith. The other episode happened when I met a jewellery expert and expressed to him my intention to create something that had never been done before. He was even more discouraging: he warned me that everything had been already done in the field of jewellery and there was no way I could create something new”.
It was this challenge that animated Mr Marcello and brought him to conceive marvellous living jewels. Like a modern futurist, Marcello had a visionary idea: to transfer movement and dynamism to jewellery. His work immediately reminded me of Boccioni’s dream: to revolutionize aesthetics with his works in motion such as Unique forms of continuity in Space.
Anello Lumière reminds us a peacock.
The ring above is called Kaleido: the six petals reproduce a kaleidoscope’s movement, thanks to a mechanism that gives the jewel a dynamic form that is both a surprise and a dream. The ring is made from yellow gold set with rubies and diamonds. New artistic frontiers have been crossed by Giansante Gioielli. Two years ago, Mr Marcello met the only artisan in the world capable of handweaving a fabric from pure gold and fell in love with the idea of making a golden fabric.
In the meantime, he met Gabriele Maquignaz, a very good painter and sculptor from Valle d’Aosta, whose outstanding work of art was “THE GATE OF THE AFTERLIFE”. With this work of art, the artist tried to go beyond the Space / Time dimension by creating a form that spiritually allows Man to overcome matter and reach spirituality afterlife. As a collaboration with Mr Maquignaz, Mr Giansante created “The Pharaoh’s tie”.
A tie made of a fantastic gold fabric that shows in the centre the “Door to the afterlife”. After the great success of this incredible piece of art, Giansante created in a limited edition of a few pieces, the bowtie, the pocket-handkerchief and the golden mask. This last one is very useful in Covid times, with an internal fabric made of washable antibacterial cotton.
The masterpiece of this collection is the real veil that I had the chance to wear and that unfortunately is not part of the line, since there is no more golden fabric available.
I wish to end this excursus about Giansante’s art and its spiritual meaning with the words of the famous Persian Sufi poet Jalaluddin Rumi: “There is a life force within your soul, seek that life. There is a gem in the mountain of your body, seek that mine. O traveller, if you are in search of that, don’t look outside, look inside yourself and seek it”.
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Credit: celebreMagazine World
Edit by Laura Astrologo Porché
