Skip to main content

Coveting Cartier Necklaces and Celtic Torques at the Met

View of “Jewelry: The Body Transformed,” 2018, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Image copyright The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

When I walk through museum galleries, stocked with the bravest of human efforts suspended luminescent on canvas or rising in harmonious stone, I feel covetous. And though I am awed by the aesthetic achievements before me, I also diminish them to what I would collect. I would hang that Veronese. I would like to wake to that celadon moon jar from the Joseon dynasty.

“Jewelry: The Body Transformed,” a new show at The Metropolitan Museum of Art (on view through February 24), indulges this covetousness. After all, every piece of art here is wearable. The exhibition displays more than two hundred pieces of jewelry from the Met’s own collection. The thoughtful curation and liner notes make a point I mused on while uptown: jewelry is as ancient an art form as we have. The metals and stones valued by humans often endure. Diamonds, as we know, are among the hardest substances in nature, and any silver seam is as old as the earth. Their endurance is part of their value, and because they are valued, they have been sacked and stolen again and again but less often destroyed. The serpentine logic spirals like a pair of Hellenistic armbands.

I stood beside gold Egyptian sandals meant to be worn to the afterlife, and I admired their “toe stalls,” intricate gold caps intended to preserve digits for use in the next life. Each nail is represented down to cuticles of gold, the simplicity of which is as stunning as the complexity of royal earrings from first-century Andhra Pradesh. Though aesthetics have changed since the first century, I was surprised by how little. Only the fussy parure sets left me cold, while every fiber of my avarice called out for an 1860 Italian diadem from the firm of Castellani, and combs with inlaid flowers from the so-called cemetery at Ur (in modern-day Iraq), circa 2600–2500 B.C. 

Gold ear ornaments from Indonesia, hoops studded with the curling petals of blossoming flowers with stamens stinging the centers, will haunt my dreams. Here, the global north doesn’t shine particularly brighter than anywhere else, and the Celtic torque from first-century Brussels has a fascinating kinship with the ear spools of Calima (present-day Colombia), also from the first century.

The curators have displayed a tempting selection. Organized as clearly as any history essay, the exhibition and the accompanying catalogue are sifted into categories of use. The breathtaking first room, however, steals the show, suspending a collection of splendid adornments in ghostly glass displays, secured surely by all the powers of modern surveillance and lit so that the specters of the viewers appear bedecked by the jewelry displayed. This mirage is revived occasionally throughout the exhibition: a Cartier pearl necklace is positioned just so a person of approximately five foot six can appear to be wearing it. Those are the pieces that lingered best in my memory, armbands that have changed hands umpteen times, betrothal rings that have known countless fingers, each having been mine for a moment.

 

Necklace of lentoid beads, string of lentoid beads, and heart scarab of Manuwai. New Kingdom, Dynasty 18, reign of Thutmose III, ca. 1479–1425 B.C.. From Egypt, Upper Egypt, Thebes, Wadi Gabbanat el-Qurud, Wadi D, Tomb of the 3 Foreign Wives of Thutmose III. Necklace and string of beads: Egyptian blue; scarab: green stone, gold. Necklace: L. 16 1/8″; string of beads: L. 8 1/4″; scarab: 2 5/8″ x 1 7/8″ x 5/8″; L. (scarab with wire) 29 1/4″. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Fletcher Fund, 1920 (26.8.66, .91, .67).

 

A pair of royal earrings, ca. first century B.C. India (probably Andhra Pradesh). Gold. Overall (each): 1 1/2″ x 3″ x 1 9/16″. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, gift of John and Evelyn Kossak, The Kronos Collections, 1981. (1981.398.3–.4).

 

View of “Jewelry: The Body Transformed,” 2018, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Image copyright The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

 

Gold sandals and toe stalls, New Kingdom, Dynasty 18, reign of Thutmose III, ca. 1479–1425 B.C. From Egypt, Upper Egypt, Thebes, Wadi Gabbanat el-Qurud, Wadi D, Tomb of the 3 Foreign Wives of Thutmose III. Gold sandals: 10 3/8″ x 3 15/16″; width at heel: 2 3/4″. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Fletcher Fund, 1922 (26.8.148a, b), and Fletcher Fund, 1921–22 (26.8.185-189, .193–194, .198–199).

 

View of “Jewelry: The Body Transformed,” 2018, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Image copyright The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

 

Pair of gold earrings with Ganymede and the eagle. Hellenistic, ca. 330–300 B.C. Gold, rock crystal, emerald. Height: 2 3/8″. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1937 (37.11.9, .10).

 

View of “Jewelry: The Body Transformed,” 2018, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Image copyright The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

 

Julia Berick is a writer who lives in New York. She works at The Paris Review.

 



from The Paris Review https://ift.tt/2ALKJeA

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Sphere

Photograph by Elena Saavedra Buckley. Once when I was about twelve I was walking down the dead-end road in Albuquerque where I grew up, around twilight with a friend. Far beyond the end of the road was a mountain range, and at that time of evening it flattened into a matte indigo wash, like a mural. While kicking down the asphalt we saw a small bright light appear at the top of the peaks, near where we knew radio towers to occasionally emit flashes of red. But this glare, blinding and colorless, grew at an alarming rate. It looked like a single floodlight and then a tight swarm beginning to leak over the edge of the summit. My friend and I became frightened, and as the light poured from the crest, our murmurs turned into screams. We stood there, clutching our heads, screaming. I knew this was the thing that was going to come and get me. It was finally going to show me the horrifying wiring that lay just behind the visible universe and that was inside of me too. And then, a couple se...
Post a Comment
Read more

DEMOCRACY DAY SPEECH BY PMB; MAY 29 2016

www.naijaloaded.com My compatriots, It is one year today since our administration came into office. It has been a year of triumph, consolidation, pains and achievements. By age, instinct and experience, my preference is to look forward, to prepare for the challenges that lie ahead and rededicate the administration to the task of fixing Nigeria. But I believe we can also learn from the obstacles we have overcome and the progress we made thus far, to help strengthen the plans that we have in place to put Nigeria back on the path of progress. We affirm our belief in democracy as the form of government that best assures the active participation and actual benefit of the people. Despite the many years of hardship and disappointment the people of this nation have proved inherently good, industrious tolerant, patient and generous. The past years have witnessed huge flows of oil revenues. From 2010 average oil prices were $100 per barrel. But economic and security co...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Private Life: On James Baldwin

JAMES BALDWIN IN HYDE PARK, LONDON. PHOTOGRAPH BY ALLAN WARREN. Via Wikimedia Commons , licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 .   In his review of James Baldwin’s third novel, Another Country , Lionel Trilling asked: “How, in the extravagant publicness in which Mr. Baldwin lives, is he to find the inwardness which we take to be the condition of truth in the writer?” But Baldwin’s sense of inwardness had been nourished as much as it had been damaged by the excitement and danger that came from what was public and urgent. Go Tell It on the Mountain and Giovanni’s Room dramatized the conflict between a longing for a private life, even a spiritual life, and the ways in which history and politics intrude most insidiously into the very rooms we try hardest to shut them out of. Baldwin had, early in his career, elements of what T. S. Eliot attributed to Henry James, “a mind so fine that it could not be penetrated by an idea.” The rest of the time, however, he did not have this luxury, as pub...
Post a Comment
Read more