Through the Pages of a Precious Book

The new book by Skira, "Jewels from Art Nouveau to 3D Printing", written by Alba Cappellieri - professor of Design of Jewelry and Accessory at the Milan Polytechnic, director of the Jewelry Museum of Vicenza - is a journey without borders. From France to Asia, from the United States to Italy, from England to Germany, from Holland to the countries of the North. A great jewelry "door" that welcomes the masterpieces of Art Nouveau of Lalique, Vever and Fouquet, the elegance of Art Déco with the wonders of Cartier, Boucheron, Tiffany & Co., Mario Buccellati and Fabergé. A journey that explores the creations of Van Cleef & Arpels and Bulgari in the Fifties, the Dutch avant-gardes and all the innovations by art jewellers during the Sixties. To then proceed till the contemporary designers and to reach the new millennium, with the introduction of digital manufacturing such as 3D printing, the wearable technologies, but also a new creative, productive, distributive and communicative process which is defining the scenarios of the jewel of the future.

We met the author to get her point of view, with a focus on jewelry as the point of contact between fashion, art, craftmanship and industry.  «As Umberto Eco once said, “any factor becomes important if it is connected to another. Connection changes the perspective,” I am firmly convinced that this idea is the modus operandi of contemporaneity, applied to all disciplines and all skills. Jewelry included, even more so if we consider the points of contact between worlds that, although distant, are complementary, such as fashion, art, craftsmanship and industry. The history of jewelry does not exist. There are instead, stories of jewelry. My contribution to contemporary jewelry focuses on the very pluralistic vocation of jewelry and I therefore strongly deny the conception of a universal and unique jewel, where the different contexts, values and contents that make the jewel into a marvelous item, one that interweaves times, values, hands and arts, should be valorized instead. Traditionally, jewelry represented an item made of precious metals and gems and this material preciousness has been an inviolable and indisputable dividing line in history. The same cannot be said in modern times because the status of ‘jewelry’, as Walter Benjamin said, has lost its ‘aura’ and the value of material has been flanked by intangible values, like creativity, research, innovation or sustainability. This has significantly widened the contexts of jewelry so that precious jewelry is now accompanied by artistic, fashion and avant-garde jewelry, designer experimentation with research into materials and sustainable technologies. We are experiencing a season of enormous vitality and compelling challenges in which jewelry can, for the first time, approach and intersect ideas, people, knowledge and cultures. Hurrah!»