Antique jewelry glossary

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Square setting

A style of setting a small gemstone (or several) in a finger ring by securing it (or them) with tiny grains or round metal chips worked up from the surrounding metal. A variation, to make a stone appear larger, was to make sloping cuts in the square toward the stone from the framing edges, which sometimes were impressed with millegrain decoration by use of a knurling tool.

From: An Illustrated Dictionary of Jewelry, autor: Harold Newman, publishers: Thames and Hudson