Antique gem carving art is known as Glyptics, and it is the art of carving on multicoloured or precious stones. Glyptic works are called engraved gems. The activity is called gem carving, and the artists – gem-cutters. References to antique gems, and intaglios in a jewellery context, will almost always mean carved gems. Gems with embedded images (intaglio), and with bas-relief images of convex (cameo) are distinguished. They were born of the classical art of antiquity, an art which poeticized and proclaimed as aesthetically pleasing all that was best and most worthy in the ideal of harmonious and perfect man. A craftsman could spend months and even years on the creation of a single cameo. E. Babelon, the French scholar of the early twentieth century and one of the most eminent connoisseurs of glyptics, remarked that it took as long to make a large cameo as to build a whole cathedral.
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