By
AFP
Revealed
November 13, 2024
A mysterious necklace laden with some 500 diamonds and with attainable hyperlinks to a scandal that contributed to the downfall of Marie Antoinette, bought for $4.8 million at an public sale in Geneva Wednesday.
The 18th century jewel containing round 300 carats of diamonds had been estimated to go below the hammer on the Sotheby’s Royal and Noble Jewels sale for $1.8-2.8 million.
However after energetic bidding, the hammer worth ticked in at 3.55 million Swiss francs ($4 million), and Sotheby’s listed the ultimate worth after taxes and commissions at 4.26 million francs ($4.81 million).
Among the diamonds are believed to stem from a chunk on the centre of the “Diamond Necklace Affair” — a scandal within the 1780s that additional tarnished the status of France’s final queen, Marie Antoinette, and boosted help for the approaching French Revolution.
The public sale home hailed that the necklace, composed of three rows of diamonds completed with a diamond tassel at every finish, had emerged “miraculously intact” from a non-public Asian assortment to make its first public look in 50 years.
“This spectacular antique jewel is an incredible survivor of history,” it stated in a press release previous to the sale.
Describing the large Georgian-era piece as “rare and highly important”, Sotheby’s stated it had possible been created within the decade previous the French Revolution.
“The jewel has passed from families to families. We can start at the early 20th century when it was part of the collection of the Marquesses of Anglesey,” Andres White Correal, chairman of the Sotheby’s jewellery division, instructed AFP when the necklace went on show in London in September.
Members of this aristocratic household are believed to have worn the necklace twice in public: as soon as on the 1937 coronation of King George VI and as soon as at his daughter Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation in 1953.
Past that, little is understood of the necklace, together with who designed it and for whom it was commissioned, though the public sale home believes that such a formidable vintage jewel may solely have been created for a royal household.
Sotheby’s stated it was possible that a few of the diamonds featured within the piece got here from the well-known necklace from the scandal that engulfed Marie Antoinette only a few years earlier than she was guillotined.
That scandal concerned a hard-up nobel girl named Jeanne de la Motte who pretended to be a confidante of the queen, and managed to accumulate a lavish diamond-studded necklace in her title, towards a promise of a later cost.
Whereas the queen was later discovered to be innocent within the affair, the scandal nonetheless deepened the notion of her careless extravagance, including to the anger that might unleash the revolution.
Sotheby’s stated the diamonds within the necklace bought Wednesday have been possible sourced from “the legendary Golconda mines in India” — thought of to provide the purest and most dazzling diamonds.
