An abundance of bijou books made their debut this yr, all excellent for vacation presents, from outsized tomes celebrating pure diamonds, to a novel by which jewellery is central to the plot. (However my go-to learn will all the time be this homicide thriller set within the diamond district by JCK’s Rob Bates—till the subsequent one comes out in February!)
I actually lined the Aldo Cipullo monograph (a should) and this ode to British jewellery design is a good vacation reward for the intense collector/connoisseur.
Just a few new releases have popped up simply in time for vacation 2021, and all appear to be important new additions to the jewellery lover’s library—together with your personal.
Forward, a fast overview of every debut, beginning with the one up high. Bulgari Magnifica: The Energy Ladies Maintain, a brand new title from Rizzoli, is a lavish quantity that intersperses the Italian home’s most entrancing excessive jewellery with texts written solely by girls, from historic letters and modern essays and even emails and pocket book entries straight from the thoughts of the home’s inventive director, Lucia Silvestri. Trend stylist and author Tina Leung served as curator and writer of the e-book, and contributors embrace Amanda Nguyen, Mia Moretti, and Noor Tagouri, amongst others.
Subsequent, if there are September infants in your listing, Joanna Hardy’s Sapphire (Thames & Hudson, $125) is a powerful reward that can certainly make their hearts throb. It presents a scholarly historical past of the gem, from the early buying and selling routes on the Silk Highway to newer creations (i.e., Belperron, Bulgari, and extra). Showcasing 60 of the world’s most famous jewels and artifacts, it’s a showstopper from the within out and marks the third and closing entry in Hardy’s sequence of books on coloured gem stones, following Emerald (2014) and Ruby (2017). (Add these final two to make your reward the final word literary ménage à trois!)
“Mighty Nature has certainly bestowed upon us a formidable gem: sapphire,” writes gemologist and jewellery historian Joanna Hardy within the introduction to Sapphire
(picture: courtesy of Thames & Hudson).
OK, so it’s important to pre-order this one, out in January, and reward it slightly bit late, but it surely’s price ready for: Buccellati: A Century of Timeless Magnificence (Assouline, $125) is a nearly-300-page, in-depth examination of the celebrated Italian jeweler’s goldsmithing methods throughout 4 generations. Every engraving methodology is outlined and explored within the textual content, accompanied by dazzling examples of Buccellati’s singular stylistic identification. As famed writer and jewellery historian Vivienne Becker writes within the introduction, “It’s a story by which the goldsmith is the protagonist, on the very middle of the Renaissance world of artwork and connoisseurship.… A narrative of Italian refinement and of the wedding of artistry and craftsmanship, reinvigorated by [founder] Mario Buccellati, stored alive by his descendants and encapsulated by each Buccellati creation.”
Cowl of Buccellati: A Century of Timeless Magnificence
(picture courtesy of Assouline)
And at last, we have now The Soul of Jewelry (Flammarion, $75), printed in collaboration with Maison Chaumet. One other huge e-book, it presents distinctive perception into the world of bijou that includes a broad vary of creative and mental views. Masking each side of the subject at hand, from anthro-pology to philosophy to artwork, contributors embrace: perfumer Frédéric Malle, botanist Marc Jeanson, mineralogist Erik Gonthier, auctioneer Benoit Repellin, composer and pianist Karol Beffa, novelist Carole Martinez, journalist Virginie Mouzat, thinker Emanuele Coccia, and photographer Julia Hetta, amongst others. In the meantime, Chaumet’s inimitable jewels themselves act as a type of storytelling car, punctuating the textual content with so many jeweled tiaras and jabots.
Cowl of The Soul of Jewelry
(picture: (c) Flammarion, 2020)
High: Cowl of Bulgari Magnifica: The Energy Ladies Maintain (Rizzoli, $95). Picture: (c) Bulgari and courtesy of Rizzoli.
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