71. Toledo Damascene Steel and Gold Dress Cane-Ca. 1880-Toledo damascene handle fashioned in an elongated and slightly tapering plain shape with a round top and encrusted with dense 24 karat gold wire inlay accordingly arranged in three horizontal registers with various panels of swirling floral trellises and trailing patterns including three characterizing chimeras within multiple framing borders. The top is adorned by a round panel en suite. The artistic bravura and technical virtuosity manifested here is breathtaking and let us safely assume that it was made by the grand master Placido Zuloaga from Eibar himself. Ebony shaft and a gilt metal ferrule. The cane was obviously used only at festive occasions and survived in mint condition.-H. 4 ¾” x 1”, O.L. 36 ½”--The Victorians’ fascination with techniques. their reverence for the crafts as well as the art and architecture of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, and above all their passion for holding industrial art exhibitions provided quite exceptional conditions for craftsmen, who were able to develop and display their skills in a way that had hitherto been readily available on to painters and sculptors. Preeminent among such craftsmen in contemporary eyes were the art-metalworkers who produced decorative objects, usually in pseudo-medieval or Renaissance style, in both precious and base metals; and preeminent among these were the virtuoso exponents of embossed and chiseled ornament with whom the Zuloagas are to be ranked, though they are now best known for their gold and silver damascened work on iron. -The adulation that the leading figures in this field received from contemporary critics now seems extraordinary.-The preservation of damascening in Spain was almost entirely due to the genius of a single family, the Zuloagas. The town of Eibar, remote in the mountains of the Basque country, became, through their efforts, the center of European damascening in the 19th century. Interestingly, the impact of the Zuloagas was, for a brief period, even greater in England than in Spain itself.