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RED CARPET JEWELRY

Nick Welsh photo for Cartier

Diamond, platinum and onyx belt buckle purchased from Cartier by a maharajah in 1928

Diamond Jewelry at the ROM

Exhibit proves diamonds are a museum's best friend

(Oct. 24, 2008) The Royal Ontario Museum had its biggest turnout ever for an exhibition preview this week. And no wonder. The Nature of Diamonds is a wonderfully comprehensive look at the world’s most enchanting gem.

The exhibition opens with an explanation of the diamond’s geologic origins and how it is extracted from the earth. The points are illustrated with a number of hands-on models and interactive displays. The cutting and polishing process is also well depicted with a stone in various stages from amorphous rough to a glittering gem.

The diamond’s cultural signficance in art and literature and its uses in modern science and technology are also addressed.

But the most dazzling part of the exhibit is the jewelry design. American decorative arts consultant Janet Zapata helped amass the 500-plus piece collection, which includes The Incomparable Diamond, the third largest cut diamond ever at 407.48 carats. The golden kite-shaped stone sits in the center of a walk-in gem vault, which also houses a fist-sized diamond corsage belonging to Princess Mathilde, niece of Napolean Bonaparte. A few feet away sits the Milky Way necklace, a tubular grid set with 2,000 diamonds and created by Toronto’s Dieter Huebner. “If you have that around your neck, you immediately feel like a queen,” remarked Huebner at the media preview. “I tested it myself and thought, this is how Henry VIII must have felt." Huebner won a De Beers Diamonds International Award for the design in 2000.

Among Zapata’s favourite pieces are contemporary diamond lace cuffs by Michelle Ong. Zapata is also fond of a Daniel Brush black panther brooch made of a space-age material and speckled with coloured diamonds. Rather than being secured with a pin, the panther is held with magnets so it can be worn on leather without piercing the skin. Earrings by James de Givenchy for Taffin are another favourite. Each drop is a slice of diamond rough, which looks remarkably like a sliver of truffle.

A celebrity section includes a tiny tiara by Cynthia Bach that was worn by Salma Hayek to a White House dinner with the Clintons. A bracelet worn by Mae West is accompanied by an amusing quote: “I hadn’t started out to collect diamonds, but somehow they piled up on me.”

The Nature of Diamonds was organized by the American Museum of Natural History in New York, in collaboration with the Royal Ontario Museum, the Houston Museum of Natural Science and The Field Museum of Chicago. The Toronto exhibit runs from Oct. 25 to March 22, 2009 and is sponsored by DeBeers Canada.