The Craft of Cameos
Since 1857
Every AMEDEO Cameo begins as a shell and ends as a face that will outlive us all. No machine touches it. No two are the same. This is how it is made — the way my family has made it for six generations.
— Amedeo Scognamiglio
01 — The Shell
It Starts in the Sea
We work in sardonyx and conch — shells chosen for the way their layers hold light: a pale face above, a warm ground below. A carver reads a shell the way a sculptor reads marble, searching for the single layer where the image will live.
02 — The Blank
Most of It Is Lost
The shell is marked by hand, then cut and ground against the wheel until only the usable heart remains — an oval no bigger than a coin. Most of the shell falls away. What survives is the canvas.
03 — The Tools
There Is No Undo
The tools have not changed in two hundred years: steel burins, or bulini, sharpened by the carver's own hand. Every line is final. This is why it takes a lifetime to learn — and a single moment to ruin.
04 — The Face
One of a Kind, Always
Then the carving begins — layer by layer, shadow by shadow, until a face rises out of the shell. A single Cameo can take days. When it is finished, it is signed. It is the only one of its kind, and it always will be.
The Hands Behind It
Amedeo Scognamiglio is a sixth-generation master carver from Torre del Greco, where his family has carved Cameos since 1857. He mastered the craft by fifteen and, in 2006, set out to make it dangerous again — tender, alive, worn by a new century. AMEDEO Cameos have been worn by Napoleon and Queen Victoria, by Sarah Jessica Parker, Rihanna and Spike Lee, and shown at Bergdorf Goodman, Barneys, Neiman Marcus, Dover Street Market, Harrods and LuisaViaRoma.
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