Before Lodewyk van Berquem, diamonds were valued for their natural form — polished to a lustre but not cut in any systematic way. The hardest known natural material could not be shaped by conventional abrasives. What changed, around 1458 in the Flemish city of Bruges, was van Berquem's introduction of a horizontal scaif — a polishing wheel impregnated with a mixture of oil and diamond dust. Diamond, he discovered, could cut diamond.
This was not merely a technical advancement. It was the conceptual foundation of everything that followed. Once a flat, polished facet could be produced on a diamond's surface at a precise angle, the entire science of gemstone optics became applicable. Van Berquem is also credited with establishing the principle of absolute symmetry in facet placement — the understanding that facets on opposite sides of a stone should be mirror images of each other. This principle, held as the standard for more than five centuries, is what modern symmetry grading still measures.
The historical record on van Berquem is thinner than on later cutters — the primary source is a 1867 biography of his patron Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, written by historian Jean Baptiste Laborde. Van Berquem is credited in this account with developing the scaif and with cutting three large stones for Charles the Bold, including the Sancy diamond, though some historians dispute the specifics. What is not disputed is that Bruges became the center of the diamond cutting world in the 15th century, and that the techniques developed there — including the use of diamond dust as an abrasive, and the principle of absolute facet symmetry — became the foundation on which all subsequent cutting was built.
The cutting center eventually moved from Bruges to Antwerp, and from Antwerp to Amsterdam, as political and economic conditions shifted across Europe. But the knowledge van Berquem's workshop produced traveled with the craftsmen who carried it. When Tolkowsky published Diamond Design in 1919, he was working within a tradition that had been building for 460 years.
Van Berquem's contribution was not a specific cut style — it was the enabling technology and the organizing principle. The polishing wheel and the symmetry axiom are the infrastructure on which every faceted gemstone ever produced since 1458 depends. When you read a symmetry grade on a GIA report, you are reading a measurement of how faithfully a stone adheres to a principle that is more than five centuries old.