Before a diamond sits in a Cartier ring or a ruby catches the light inside a Van Cleef bracelet, someone has spent hours or even days working with tools no wider than a matchstick. Stone setters coax metal around stone with a pressure measured not in any standard unit but in feel. Stone setting is among the oldest techniques in jewelry making. No machine sets stones as precisely as a skilled human hand, not even CAD software, 3D printing, laser welding.

Pier Paolo Gerardi, an experienced setter from Italy, believes every stone, every mounting, every combination of technique is a different process.

At the heart of his high jewelry school studio’s mission that his father Salvatore Gerardi opened in 1983, is the transmission of knowledge, ensuring that the craft can continue and be shared with future generations.

A Craft That Has Always Guarded Itself

Medieval goldsmiths worked under guild structures that guarded their techniques, transmitting knowledge only through rigorous apprenticeships. The knowledge belonged to the guild.

The industrial revolution starting in the late eighteenth century disrupted this model as machines took over some parts of production. Jewelry became more affordable but masters kept a good deal of control over the know-how within their studios.

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In Rome, in the jewelry districts of Arezzo and Vicenza, when an artist (painter) named Salvatore Gerardi (Pier Paolo’s and his brother Alessandro’s father) in the 1970s was commissioned to design a line of jewelry and went looking for someone to teach him how pieces were actually made, no one would show him. Salvatore’s response was to pay masters simply to let him observe, he traveled around to find the best of them and learned the craft so well that in 1983 opened a studio that today calls itself Italy’s first jewelry school.

Sons Pier Paolo and Alessandro have since taken that institution further, launching the Gerardi Setting School in 2022, the first Italian jewelry school devoted entirely to stone setting.

Stone setting involves a wide range of techniques. Each student needs to find what works best for their creative goals.

Pier Paolo and Alessandro agree that a true setter must be able to solve any puzzle they find in front of them. It is important to master not one technique but all of them, and understanding when a piece calls for one over another, or for a combination that does not appear in any textbook.

Major luxury jewelry houses expect a level of absolute precision and attention to detail that is out of the ordinary. And increasingly, that standard is not just technical but technological: deep knowledge of the most advanced instruments is now required alongside the craft itself.

“Modern high jewelry,” the brothers say, “lives precisely in the union between tradition, innovation, and executional perfection.”

The Hand Cannot Be Replaced But Technology and Knowledge Transfer Are Key Parts Of The Story

The twenty-first century has not dissolved the tension between craft tradition and industrial pressure. The question that institutions like the Gerardi Setting School are answering in practice is which parts of the process require a human hand and which do not. However, for Pier Paolo and Alessandro, like it was for their parents who both managed the family business for decades before succession, the hand is not optional.

When the brothers launched their dedicated school, the central pedagogical innovation was a trinocular microscope with a screen at every student’s workbench. The technology changed the learning dynamic at its most fundamental level. Before it, a master observed what a student was doing with the naked eye, squinting at work measured in fractions of a millimeter, and a student watched the master the same way. With a shared screen, the master can see the micro-level detail in real time and correct a mistake before it becomes permanent.

“We’re talking about very, very tiny things,” Pier Paolo said. “If you watch a jewel, yes, it’s beautiful, but you don’t know the micro things inside the jewel.”

Seven masters circulate among roughly twenty-five to thirty students at any given time in Rome’s studio. Each student is followed individually, exposed to multiple masters and perspectives.

Pier Paolo Gerardi is direct about what he sees:

Today everything has to be produced more quickly, and this sometimes leads to simplifying certain artisanal processes. That’s why we believe it’s fundamental to continue training highly specialized professionals, capable of keeping alive the quality and excellence of Italian high jewelry

Stone setting will not be automated for the same reason it has not been automated yet: the tolerance for error at the level of haute joaillerie is essentially zero, the variability between stones and mountings is essentially infinite, and the judgment required to navigate that variability is learned in the hands, not the head.

The guild system that once hoarded this knowledge is gone. But the knowledge itself still lives in the quiet, irreplaceable work of a human hand.