I would think that shooting this would be like shooting a piece of jewelry. When I have photographed jewelry in the past, I used a DIY light tent. Google that and you should get some good ideas. That way you don't need a bunch of lights to make it work. I used a constant light underneath and then used the flash shot through some kind of diffusion, like an umbrella, before it went through the light tent diffusion. I went to home depot and purchased a heat lamp, then purchased a 200 watt CFL bulb with color correction to 5500k. The hot light color was a little cooler than the flash, but it wasn't noticeable once your send the light through the bottom diffusion. I used a large piece of glass out of a 16x22 picture frame on the bottom propped up with some wood blocks on the side out of frame. Then shot the flash from above and adjusted as needed (whether flash strength or position of the actual light) to get rid of reflections and burning out the background too much. If you use the glass and want, you can get a neat shadow/reflection of the piece if the camera is positioned correctly. I don't have an example of that handy at the moment, but its pretty cool. If you want to make a gradient for the background, shifting the middle from bright white to a lighter gray, get another hot lamp and position it behind the light tent behind the piece.

Hope that helps.

This shot is directly on the glass sitting on the white material. I did this since the reflection detracted from the actual piece