Clasp

Clasps are mainly button-shaped jewels, with their height in the sixteenth century, used to decorate typically Hungarian dresses. Because of their delicacy and thinness, they were not buttoned, but sewed, using the lugs on their back. These jewels were closely related to finds uncovered during excavations in Hungary and Transylvania. From the three female graves of the crypt discovered during the 1897 renovation of the Küküllővár (now Cetatea de Baltă, Romania) reformed church 95 various clasps were uncovered. Based on mortality data, they must have been made before 1604. Some of them were acquired by the Museum of Applied Arts through exchanges. A few years later, in the 1930s similar clasps were found in the crypt of the Csenger reformed church and from the grave of the daughter of Mihnea, grand prince of Wallachia. It is likely that they were made in one of the goldsmith centres of Transylvania, in Kolozsvár (now Cluj-Napoca, Romania), in Nagyszeben (now Sibiu, Romania) or Brassó (now Braşov, Romania) between 1550 and 1620. Some of the clasps are marked.
The exhibited clasps can be classified into several groups based on their shape, colour, ornament and manufacturing techniques: the thin gold plate, decorated with pearls, diamonds and ruby stones, the blue, white and black enamel, decorated with punched small dots and gold plates. Their specialty is the spiral ornament made of very thin gold threads, framed with a prefabricated compartment made only for this purpose.