What is the history behind the cameo pendant? I mean the pendant that has a lady's portrait?

Question

What is the history behind the cameo pendant? I mean the pendant that has a lady's portrait?

Answer 1

hmm oh you mean the one we can imprint our picture on ?? I fugure some guy was obssesed with her and he did that like a love story

Answer 2

Here is a clipping from the website I found.

A prized souvenir for a Victorian woman was a cameo with her likeness by an Italian carver. While commissioned portraits were the vogue, another kind of portrait appeared with the anonymous woman. Cameo carvers could fashion such images quickly in shell or lava, and tourists created a demand for them.

By the 1850s, the features of the women depicted on cameos had changed. In previous years, carvers had created images of Romanesque women with classical features such as long, straight noses and Roman dress. Women wanted a likeness more similar to their own. Modified images on cameos showed women with upturned noses, jewelry, and upswept hairstyles.

As the likeness of the anonymous Victorian women shown with jewelry became commonplace, cameo designers took the idea one step further with the cameo habillé. The cameo habille´depicted the portrait of an idealized woman adorned with jewelry, and tiny diamonds on the cameo represented jewelry such as earrings and a necklace. This type of cameo has found great popularity and continues to be produced in the present day.

The industrialization of the Victorian Era made mass production of jewelry possible. As portraiture became the mainstay of cameo carvers, the anonymous woman became a common subject for cameos. Detractors saw this motif as the beginning of the decline in cameo design. Carvers could produce these cameos in quick assembly line fashion on shell or a variety of other materials. The anonymous woman was molded into cameos from manmade materials such as glass or celluloid.