Guilloche

Mar 5, 2018
Issue 2904

About a week ago we pictured an exhibit from the Reifschlager Gallery at the Rockwell Museum featuring late 1920s decorated Blue and Gold Aurene with related markings on the picture of of leaf and vine decoration. Two (the two on the right) of the pictures decoration is not leaf and vine, but Guilloche.

from Wikipedia

Guilloché (/ajÈloŠƒ/),(or guilloche) is a decorative technique in which a very precise, intricate and repetitive pattern is mechanically engraved into an underlying material via engine turning, which uses a machine of the same name, also called a rose engine lathe. This mechanical technique improved on more time-consuming designs achieved by hand and allowed for greater delicacy, precision, and closeness of line, as well as greater speed.

The term “guilloche” is also used more generally for repetitive architectural patterns of intersecting or overlapping spirals or other shapes, as used in the Ancient Near East, classical Greece and Rome and neo-classical architecture, and Early Medieval interlace decoration in Anglo-Saxon artand elsewhere. Medieval Cosmatesque stone inlay designs with two ribbons winding around a series of regular central points are very often called guilloche. These central points are often blank, but may contain a figure, such as a rose.[1] These senses are a back-formation from the engraving guilloché, so called because the architectural motifs resemble the designs produced by later guilloché techniques.

Symposium 2025
Carder Steuben Glass Association
19-20 September 2025
© Carder Steuben Glass Association Inc.