Stories Enhance Allure Of Gems
America’s Ali Baba’s cave reopened recently, bigger and brighter than ever.
The National Museum of Natural History’s treasure trove of jewels has been two years in the remaking and now is called the Janet Annenberg Hooker Hall of Geology, Gems and Minerals, in honor of the major donor to the $13 million renovation.
Its centerpiece, as always, is the Hope Diamond, said to have been seen by more people than any other single artifact on the planet.
Because 85 to 90 percent of the museum’s visitors make a beeline for the storied 45.52-carat blue stone, it has been placed front and center.
No longer recessed in a wall vault, the Hope now turns regally on a velvet spindle in a four-sided, free-standing case that allows many more visitors at a time to see every sparkling detail of jeweler Harry Winston’s 1958 gift to the nation.
The Smithsonian’s gem collection, which ranks with any in the world, includes jewels that once adorned dozens of crowned heads. With many of them go legends and stories that Winston, a shy man but a gifted publicist, planted and/or cultivated to increase the allure of his goods and jack up their prices.
The Spanish Inquisition Necklace, for instance, a double-strand cascade of 374 diamonds and 15 choice emeralds, has no documented relation to the bloody Catholic campaign against heretics, but the name adds shiver to the shine.
And diamond earrings that are magnificent in themselves glitter all the more because it’s alleged that they were snatched from the ears of Marie Antoinette by French revolutionaries who overtook her fleeing carriage and turned her back toward Paris and the guillotine.
Similar stories, all too good to check out, go with most of the scores of major gems on display, and small wonder; rare jewels have always been to kill and die for.
From pirates, princes and potentates the gems have passed to captains of industry and queens of celebrity and finally to the Smithsonian, largely to avoid inheritance taxes.
Natural History’s vast new jewel case will allay the fears of veteran visitors that the museum was fixing something that wasn’t broke. While the old hall was far from shabby, the new one, doubled to 20,000 square feet and with more space to come next year, is a creation of great style and even-greater substance.
Dotted throughout the hall are please-touch minerals and crystals that enhance the visitor’s sense of the stuff of which the planet’s made.
Because the museum’s main purpose is to recruit young people to science, the largest single chamber in the labyrinthine hall is a discovery room. Beside specimens of various rocks and minerals are interactive computers on which one can view animations of the processes by which those particular rocks were formed, with touch-screen choices branching into the subatomic microsphere and the planetary macrosphere. The animations and explanations are clear and interesting but not dumbed down.
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