Star-shaped Buckle

In 1938 an excavation in via Gaetano Trezza, a street in Verona, brought to light a small treasure of the 14th century. There were pieces of two belts in gold and gilded silver, and this buckle, a star of gold set with precious stones and pearls. The museum compares its workmanship with Venetian goldsmiths' work of the same decades, such as the Pala d'Oro, the jewelled gold altarpiece of San Marco, which Venice had reset in a new Gothic frame in the 1340s. The star shape itself borrows a favourite Gothic form, the rose window of a church. How such pieces reached Verona is a matter of inference. The museum thinks they were probably among the gifts the Republic of Venice made to Mastino II della Scala, Cangrande's successor, with whom it formed political alliances.