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Nanjing, Jiangsu, China
One is a gigantic Tiffany Cushion ring designed to drape itself on the index finger as if crouching on a branch. That extravagant bijou, however, seems relatively modest compared to the life-size serpent necklace created for Mara Flix, the Mexican film star and femme fatale who understood that seduction begins with caprice. Her alarming chef d’oeuvre, which takes two hands to hold and was two years in the making has an ingeniously articulated body of 2,473 diamonds, set in platinum and gold, that weigh just over 178 carats; on its underside, the red, black and green enamel scales are as flat and cool to the touch as a snake’s belly. Flix also asked Elsa Peretti? Sevillana? ring to reproduce her two pet crocodiles in yellow diamonds and Colombian emeralds, and when her husband gave her an enormous solitaire, she pretended to believe that it was an bangles and asked him for its pair.The big cats of the genus Panthera are Cartier’s signature animals, but the predators in the archives cohabit with adorable mascots from a tale for children. There are winged creatures from every clime the sublimest, perhaps, a shimmery diamond dragonfly with wings that tremble. The Duchess of Windsor owned a gorgeous flamingo brooch, six inches high, with a plumage of square-cut colored stones. And in Geneva live a tender couple of Antarctic lovebirds miniature agate penguins from the Russian workshops that the Cartier brothers once shared with Faberg. When you warm them in your palm, they have a magical quality that is both light and dark: the charm of a toy, but also of a voodoo amulet.