The Mazarin cut: the first brilliant

Two hundred years later

The old single cut was still in use in the 1600s, but cutters had tried new things. The question had changed: not only how to save weight, but how to make the stone come alive.

The first popular answer was not a brilliant at all.

The rose: lots of facets, no fire

From the middle of the 1500s, the rose cut spread fast. It is a dome of triangular facets with a flat base: all crown, no pavilion. It suited flat pieces of rough, and it lost very little weight. For about a century it was the fashion.

Tolkowsky, in 1919, explained why it had to fail. In a rose, light enters through one sloping facet and leaves through another, and it meets both at the same angle. Every color bends by the same amount on the way in and on the way out. So the colors leave parallel and recombine into white. A rose can be bright, but it has almost no fire.

To make fire, light must enter through the top, reflect off a back, and leave again at a different angle. For that you need a crown on top of a pavilion: a brilliant.

The technology: still just the wheel

The tools hadn't changed since the old single: diamond powder on a wheel, set by hand. What was missing was a way to make a stone round. Rounding a diamond is called bruting: you grind its outline against another diamond. Nobody could yet do it well enough to make a true circle. So the early brilliants were all cushions, rounded squares, and so were the Peruzzi and the old mine that followed.

The Mazarin, or double cut

In the middle of the 1600s, the first brilliants appeared, by tradition under the influence of Cardinal Mazarin of France. They were called Mazarins, or double-cut brilliants:

• 16 facets above the girdle, plus the table, twice the old single's eight.
• 34 facets in all: table, 16 crown facets, 16 pavilion facets and a culet. Our model adds 8 small girdle facets, for 42.
• A wide, open culet at the bottom and a cushion outline.

It is the step between the single cut and the Peruzzi. We rebuilt our model from the drawing in Tolkowsky's Diamond Design.

Try it yourself

1. Open Cut Performance Wheel with ?cut=mazarin&stone=diamond. Set the comparison cut to the old single. Read the three scores for both.
2. Set the comparison cut back to the T73, our modern benchmark.
3. Open 3D Gemstone Simulator with ?cut=mazarin&stone=diamond, Turn on Slow, lighting Sunny day. Then change to the old single. Which one twinkles more as it turns? Which one looks brighter in the middle?

What the Wheel shows

More sparkle. Scintillation goes from 44 to 61. That's the facet count at work: 42 facets instead of 26.

Less light, less fire. Brilliance drops from 72 to 65, and fire from 84 to 63. Twice the facets, and the stone got darker and less colorful. Against the T73 (93 / 78 / 80), the Mazarin is behind on all three.

Why? Smaller facets break the light into smaller beams. Each beam has less room to spread into color, so fire falls. And nobody calculated the angles. They were whatever worked on a cushion of rough. Our model has a shallow crown (31.4°), a steep pavilion (44.3°) and a deep stone (68.8% of its width), and 17% of the light leaks out. More facets change the pattern of light. They don't fix where the light goes.

Still a big step. Tolkowsky calls the Mazarin's fire and brilliance incomparably better than the rose's. The brilliant plan had arrived; the proportions hadn't.

Key points

• The rose cut (mid-1500s) saved weight but showed almost no fire. Light leaves at the same angle it enters, so the colors recombine.
• The Mazarin, or double cut (mid-1600s), was the first brilliant: 16 facets above the girdle, 34 in all, on a cushion outline.
• Brilliants stayed square because nobody could yet round a diamond accurately.
• On our Wheel, the Mazarin gains scintillation over the old single (61 vs 44) but loses brilliance (65 vs 72) and fire (63 vs 84).
• More facets change the sparkle. Only better angles change how much light comes back.

Go further: the Mazarin cut page has the diagram rebuilt from Tolkowsky's book.