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Filigree (formerly written filigrann or filigrane; also known as telkari, the name given in Anatolia, meaning \"wire work\", and cift-isi, pronounced chift-ishi, meaning \"tweezers work\") is a jewel work of a delicate kind made with twisted threads usually of gold and silver or stitching of the same curvy motif, to suggest lace, and is most popular in French fashion decoration from 1660 to the present. It is now exceedingly common for ajoure jewellery work to be mislabelled as filigree. While both have many open areas, filigree involves threads being soldered together to form an object and ajoure involves holes being punched, drilled, or cut through an existing piece of metal.

The word, which is usually derived from the Latin filum, thread, and granum, grain, is not found in Ducange, and is indeed of modern origin. According to Prof. Skeat it is derived from the Spanish filigrana, from \"filar\", to spin, and grano, the grain or principal fibre of the material.

Though filigree has become a special branch of jewel work in modern times, it was anciently part of the ordinary work of the jeweler. A. Castellani states, in his \"Memoir on the Jewellery of the Ancients\" (1861), that all the jewelry of the Etruscans and Greeks (other than that intended for the grave, and therefore of an unsubstantial character) was made by soldering together and so building up the gold rather than by chiselling or engraving the material.

The art may be said to consist in curling, twisting and plaiting fine pliable threads of metal, and uniting them at their points of contact with each other, and with the ground, by means of gold or silver solder and borax, by the help of the blowpipe. Small grains or beads of the same metals are often set in the eyes of volutes, on the junctions, or at intervals at which they will set off the wire-work effectively. The more delicate work is generally protected by framework of stouter wire.

Brooches, crosses, earrings and other personal ornaments of modern filigree are generally surrounded and subdivided by bands of square or flat metal, giving consistency to the filling up, which would not other-wise keep its proper shape. Some writers of repute have laid equal stress on the glum and the granuna, and have extended the use of the term filigree to include the granulated work of the ancients, even where the twisted wire-work is entirely wanting. Such a wide application of the term is not approved by current usage, according to which the presence of the twisted threads is the predominant fact.

The Egyptian jewelers employed wire, both to lay down on a background and to plait or otherwise arrange d jour. But, with the exception of chains, it cannot be said that filigree work was much practiced by them. Their strength lay rather in their cloisonnes work and their molded ornaments. Many examples, however, remain of round plaited gold chains of fine wire, such as are still made by the filigree workers of India, and known as irichinopoly chains. From some of these are hung smaller chains of finer wire with minute fishes and other pendants fastened to them.

Read more at Wikipedia.org