But… where is the gold?
On the morning of Sunday 19 October 2025, just as the Louvre opened its doors, four audacious thieves disguised as construction workers pulled up to the building. Instead of trying to slip past security at the entrance, they used a vehicle-mounted mechanical cherry picker to scale the exterior facade, rising directly to the level of the Galerie d’Apollon. In less than eight minutes, spending barely four minutes inside the gallery itself, they shattered the glass and vanished with eight irreplaceable pieces of the French Crown Jewels. The loot, stolen in broad daylight during regular opening hours, has been valued at approximately €88 million.
As an art historian, looking at the archival records of these missing nineteenth-century, post-revolutionary jewels, I am struck by something more structural than the audacity of the robbery itself. Gold seems absent, an astonishing displacement in royal jewellery. One can only wonder: where is the gold?
Fear of Colour
Let us look closely at the centrepiece of that stolen haul: the emerald necklace of Empress Marie-Louise, commissioned by Napoleon Bonaparte in 1810.
The thirty-two emeralds anchoring the necklace are extraordinary. They were sourced from the legendary Muzo mines in Colombia, an ancient site famed for yielding the prized “Muzo green”: an intense, pure grass-green with the depth and transparency that made these stones among the most coveted emeralds in the world. Ten were given elongated cuts, an exceptionally daring lapidary choice for the period, since emeralds are notoriously vulnerable to internal fissures.
Two centuries earlier, emeralds from the same Colombian Muzo mines had travelled aboard the Nuestra Señora de Atocha. In the seventeenth-century Atocha Cross, cabochon and pear-shaped emeralds are set in 22-carat yellow gold. Green and gold intensify one another. The stones retain their warmth, depth and individual presence; the gold gives them weight, structure and radiance.
Seen beside the Atocha Cross, Marie-Louise’s necklace is deeply dispiriting. Its thirty-two emeralds, regarded as exceptionally fine by contemporary standards and alive with a deeply saturated green, are visually corralled. They are surrounded and overpowered by a staggering 1,138 diamonds: 874 brilliant cuts and 264 rose cuts. The white brilliance cools their colour, flattens their presence and denies them the space to breathe. Instead of commanding the jewel, the emeralds seem trapped within it.
There was an optical logic behind this glittering army. In the low, flickering light of candles, diamonds respond with flashes of brilliance, while the colour of a deeply saturated emerald can appear darker. The diamonds were intended to animate the necklace in the evening. Instead of supporting the colour, the diamonds overwhelmed it. What may have been conceived as enhancement resulted in subordination: emeralds of extraordinary character reduced to green punctuation within a field of white light.
Emerald necklace of Empress Marie-Louise, 1810. Musée du Louvre; stolen on 19 October 2025 and still missing.
The Secret of Berenice, Sassi Fine Jewellery. Peridot and amethyst set in 18-carat gold, inspired by the ancient green stone of Zabargad and Pliny the Elder’s account of Queen Berenice.
This optical behaviour of emeralds was understood in the ancient world. Researchers have suggested that some of Cleopatra’s legendary “emeralds” may in fact have been peridots, whose vivid green remains remarkably alive in low light. In his Naturalis Historia, Pliny the Elder records how a green stone from the Red Sea island of Topazos, generally associated with peridot from Zabargad, was presented to the Egyptian Queen Berenice, who preceded Cleopatra. This intersection of ancient history, royal patronage and gemmological observation inspired our own Sassi collection, The Secret of Berenice.
When the Rare Diamond Becomes Common
To counteract the evening darkening of the Muzo emeralds, Napoleon’s court jeweller, Nitot, used diamonds to force a sense of blinding brilliance. Napoleon sought to legitimise his rule through spectacle, investing in fine jewellery and gemstones as instruments of imperial authority.
To understand this shift, one must first return to the diamond’s own history. For nearly three thousand years, dating back to roughly 800 BCE, India held an absolute global monopoly on the diamond trade. To ancient Mediterranean cultures like Greece and Rome, these stones were rare anomalies, valued as protective amulets or for their indestructible hardness for industrial applications. In their natural, uncut state, they were viewed as aesthetically unappealing and dull, entirely eclipsed by the vivid saturation of coloured gems.
This view continued well into the Middle Ages. In the highly influential lapidaries of the era, such as the eleventh-century texts of Marbode of Rennes, the diamond remained outside the principal language of visual beauty. It was described as a small, iron-coloured stone, valued for its hardness, its protective virtues and its ability to cut or engrave other gems. The diamond was still the servant of colour.
The surviving objects of the period make this hierarchy unmistakable. The ninth-century St Stephen’s Purse, now in the Imperial Treasury in Vienna, is a reliquary formed around a wooden core and covered in gold, pearls and coloured stones. Its cabochons are arranged in bands of varying height that form a jewelled cross across the front. The effect is rich, architectural and intensely symbolic. Gold provides the radiant field; colour gives the object its depth; the stones retain their individuality.
Consider, too, Jan van Eyck’s masterpiece, The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb, completed in 1432. In this celestial landscape, angels, saints, holy figures and God himself are draped in heavy, warm yellow gold, enriched with magnificent cabochon-cut coloured gemstones. More telling still are the gems Van Eyck painted in the overflowing waters of the Fountain of Life. Resting in the stream are smooth rubies, emeralds and sapphires.
Van Eyck was drawing on a highly codified medieval tradition. Christian lapidaries defined coloured stones as fragments of Paradise, washed down from the rivers of Eden as a gift from God. High-carat yellow gold, incorruptible and resistant to decay, carried its own associations with divine light and eternity. Heavenly beauty was synonymous with warm gold and cabochon-cut gemstones.
The entire aesthetic shifted in the second half of the 15th century when Lodewyk van Berken in Bruges perfected the scaif, a mechanical polishing wheel that allowed lapidaries to systematically facet the diamond. Suddenly, the stone began to sparkle, catching the eye of European nobility. Think of Louis XIV, who spent a fortune purchasing exceptional Indian diamonds from the merchant-traveller Jean-Baptiste Tavernier in 1668. Yet the Sun King was not collecting anonymous particles of white brilliance. Louis XIV purchased singular stones: large, rare, characterful, and, in the most famous case, intensely coloured, among them the prized, deep violet-blue Tavernier Blue, which would later be recut into the French Blue and, ultimately, the Hope Diamond.
By the time we reach 1810, the economic reality of the stone had completely changed. The discovery of diamonds in Minas Gerais, Brazil, during the 1720s broke the Indian monopoly and flooded the European market with diamonds. When the Brazilian flood hit, European diamond prices plummeted by a staggering 75 per cent between 1730 and 1735. The market panic was so severe that merchants launched smear campaigns claiming Brazilian stones were “softer” and inferior, and the Portuguese Crown temporarily banned mining entirely just to artificially rescue the diamond’s value. But ultimately, the stones had become significantly more abundant and also cheaper.
The 1,138 diamonds surrounding Marie-Louise’s emeralds were no longer ultra-rare stones, but the lingering illusion of the diamond’s aura of rarity still played a role in executing Napoleon’s political theatre.
St Stephen’s Purse, ninth century. Gold, pearls and cabochon-cut coloured gemstones over a wooden core. Imperial Treasury, Vienna.
The Queen’s Necklace, modern reconstruction of the necklace commissioned by Louis XV from Boehmer and Bassenge for Madame du Barry, Château de Breteuil.
The Frontal Assault
For millennia, royal jewellery celebrated vibrant, saturated coloured gemstones set in gold. The aesthetic result was magnificent: the dialogue between rich, high-carat yellow gold and grass-green emerald is, quite simply, a perfect colour combination.
The aesthetic consequences were already visible at the court of Louis XV. In 1772, the king commissioned the Parisian jewellers Boehmer and Bassenge to create an immense diamond necklace for Madame du Barry. The design gathered diamonds into festoons, clusters and pendants until almost no line, metal or compositional restraint remained visible. After Louis XV’s death, the jewellers attempted to sell the necklace to Marie Antoinette. She refused it.
The necklace was conceived to demonstrate abundance rather than to honour the character of a material. Diamonds no longer punctuate the jewel; they consume it. What had begun as a technical preference for silver fronting became an aesthetic of accumulation, slowly displacing yellow gold from view.
Napoleon’s court took this developing pre-revolutionary excess and institutionalised it with imperial rigidity. To ensure that the white brilliance of the abundant Brazilian diamonds was not disturbed by a warm gold background, Nitot fronted the 1810 necklace in silver. The rich yellow gold was driven completely to the reverse. It was demoted to a hidden, utilitarian chassis, used solely to provide structural strength and to protect the Empress’s silk bodices from silver tarnish.
The Marie-Louise necklace crystallises a profound rupture in jewellery history that had begun at the court of Louis XV. As Brazilian diamonds entered Europe in unprecedented quantities, accumulation increasingly replaced composition, and the old alliance between yellow gold and coloured gemstones began to break apart. Under Napoleon, that emerging aesthetic was given imperial authority: colour was made to submit to the white brilliance of diamonds, while gold was driven from view. This was the historical pivot from which our modern chromatic poverty emerged. It established the damaging precedent that gold must apologise for its own existence and hide behind the high-frequency noise of colourless sparkle. The result is deeply sad: one of humanity’s oldest expressive arts reduced to a uniform monoculture of colourless sparkle..