Every jewel begins long before it is cast in gold.
Our essays trace the histories, objects, and ideas that sharpen our eye and shape our choices. Some narratives lead directly to a material collection. Others begin with a painting, an ancient civilisation, a rare gemstone, a forgotten goddess, or a question that refuses to disappear.
Each essay is written by Dr Renilde Vervoort, art historian, gemmologist and co-founder of Sassi Fine Jewellery. Together, they reveal the intellectual landscape from which Sassi Fine Jewellery is created.
But… where is the gold?
For centuries, millennia even, jewellery celebrated colour in three dimensions. Across cultures and continents, from the earliest civilisations to the courts of Europe, gold and coloured gemstones were prized for their warmth, depth and singular presence.
The rich radiance of gold met the natural colour and depth of emeralds, rubies, sapphires and other gemstones, creating jewels of extraordinary presence, as in the seventeenth-century Atocha Cross shown here. Made in 22-carat yellow gold and set with emeralds, the cross was recovered from the wreck of the Nuestra Señora de Atocha, the Spanish treasure ship lost off Florida in 1622 while carrying riches from the Americas.
This essay traces the profound shift that began in the eighteenth century, when colourless stones increasingly displaced coloured gems and gold began to vanish from sight.
The Price of Scarcity
Building on our previous essay, in which the once genuinely rare diamond, mined exclusively in India, became progressively less rare, we now turn to the discovery of the vast South African deposits. Their sheer scale threatened both the price of diamonds and the prestige attached to them.
By the end of the nineteenth century, De Beers had created a near-monopoly and set about fiercely protecting the idea of rarity on which diamond value depended. At the same time, the European courts, and above all the British court, had elevated the diamond to the very summit of wealth, rank and magnificence.
This essay examines what happened when geological abundance collided with a culture still determined to believe in rarity.
