Cameo of a bust of Elizabeth I (1533-1603) in profile to the left. She wears an elaborate gown with a square neckline and a small, high ruff. Chains and a pendant hang around her neck and she appears to wear a beaded net over the back of her tightly curled hair. The small close-fitting ruff was fashionable in the 1570s.

This cameo was among the objects catalogued by Horace Walpole in 1763 and described as a ‘great numbers of cameos and intaglios, few good’. Walpole noted that this and another cameo of Elizabeth I (RCIN 65186) were of especial quality and attributed them to the Italian cutter Valerio Belli (c.1468-1553/5), or Vincentino as he was called in the eighteenth century. This attribution seems to have derived from John Evelyn, who in 1653 commented that he had seen a head of Elizabeth I, ‘in a rare sardonyx, cut by a famous Italian’, adding that Belli ‘had been in England at the time of Queen Elizabeth’ and had created the cameo for the musician, Jerome Laniere. Evelyn, who later commented that the cameo was ‘now in his Majesty’s cabinet’, had met Laniere who assured him that the image ‘was exceedingly like her’. The attribution is impossible - Belli died in 1553/5 - but it was retained by Walpole, perhaps because Belli was one of the few stone cutters whose career is treated in Vasari’s Lives.

The mount is a fragment and the cameo may originally have formed part of a locket or have been surrounded by a jewelled border, like many of the surviving portrait cameos of Elizabeth I.

Text adapted from Ancient and Modern Gems and Jewels in the Collection of Her Majesty The Queen, London, 2008 and The First Georgians; Art and Monarchy 1714 - 1720, London, 2014.