Russia · Metalwork / Engraving
Златоустовская гравюра на стали (Zlatoustovskaya gravyura na stali)
A multi-stage decorative steel technique combining engraving, acid etching, gilding, nickel-plating, and bluing on sword and dagger blades, developed at the Imperial Arms Factory in the Ural city of Zlatoust after its 1815 founding — where German master engravers imported to teach the craft were, within three months, matched in skill by their young Russian pupils, who by 1818 were producing fully independent work, and whose most celebrated master, Ivan Bushuyev, abandoned the standard engraving needle for a brush loaded with cinnabar to build relief compositions unlike anything the technique's original teachers had shown him.
Risk level: Vulnerable · Not Listed
Two related but visually and historically distinct lacquer-miniature painting traditions, both descended, like Palekh (CRAFT-1871), from icon-painting centers whose masters turned to secular papier-mâché box painting after the 1917…
The weaving, carving, and openwork cutting of beresta, the bark of the birch tree, one of Russia's oldest and most widespread natural craft materials — used since antiquity as a writing surface (the Slavs' oldest surviving written…
A hand-molded clay whistle tradition of the village of Filimonovo, in Tula Oblast, whose distinctively elongated human and animal figures are a direct physical consequence of the local bluish-gray clay's own difficult behavior — it cracks…
The needlework tradition of Torzhok, on the Tvertsa River in Tver Oblast, in which women embroiderers work gold thread and, later, fine twisted gold wire (containing 5 to 8 percent actual gold) onto velvet, silk, morocco leather, and other…
The engraving, chasing, and niello decoration of silver in the mountain village of Kubachi, Dagestan, mentioned in historical annals since the 4th century, where roughly 300 of the village's approximately 2,500 residents work as…
The engraved, openwork, and relief carving of walrus ivory, seal bone, and, more rarely, mammoth and elephant ivory, developed in the 17th century in Kholmogory, a White Sea port town near Arkhangelsk in Russia's far north — a tradition…
The gold and silver jewelry tradition of Guimarães — distinct from the Gondomar filigree (CRAFT-1107) and Viana do Castelo goldsmithing (CRAFT-1115) documented elsewhere in the Portugal archive, in that the Guimarães tradition combines…
A shallow-engraving decorative silverwork technique historically centered in the Armenian city of Van, in which a design is cut into a silver surface and filled with niello, a black alloy of sulfur, copper, silver, and lead melted into the…
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A braided-cord embroidery technique originating in mid-18th-century French military and court costume decoration, in which flat, herringbone-woven soutache cord is hand-stitched with invisible stitches around beads and cabochon stones to…
Jewelry made from recycled silver set with native Uruguayan stones, chiefly amethyst quartz and agate, each piece produced and signed by an individual member artisan.
The drawing, coiling, twisting, and soldering of fine gold and silver threads into openwork jewelry — earrings, necklaces, rings, and bracelets — in Catacaos, Piura, in Peru's far north.