The surprise is a platinum basket full of anemones and flowers made of gold and demantoid garnets, and studded with 1,378 diamonds. Embellished with engraving and ornamented with platinum and diamonds to resemble frost, the egg rests on a rock crystal base designed to look like a block of melting ice. It was smaller than I expected, but the quality of its craftsmanship was overwhelming.” The egg is made of rock crystal carved as thin as glass. “I had the pleasure of holding it in my hands and studying it at very close quarters. Which one is his favorite? “Definitely the Winter Egg,” he said recently of the egg designed by Alma Theresia Pihl and given by Tsar Nicholas II to his mother, the dowager empress Maria Feodorovna in 1913. He is Fabergé’s curatorial director, and he can list off endless facts and make passionate arguments about each egg’s relative merits. Over the years the eggs have inspired a unique scholarship all their own, and one of the most knowledgeable experts is 80-year-old Géza Von Habsburg. Today they sell for tens of millions of dollars. From that moment, each piece has gone on its own journey: In the early years the eggs weren’t particularly sought after-the market was flooded with Romanov art and objets-but gradually collectors became more keen, most famously the media magnate Malcolm Forbes, whose art collection at one point included nine eggs. Petersburg, they seized the eggs, selling some of them and holding on to others. Although the eggs were made from precious materials, their value lay not in the cost of the particular jewels or metals used (some eggs were comparatively modest in that regard) but in the inventiveness and skill the artists brought to each one. Hulton Deutsch // Getty Imagesįabergé oversaw production, but the eggs were crafted by teams of metalsmiths, jewelers, designers, and other specialists who in turn were given wide artistic latitude. Tsar Alexander II and Empress Maria Feodorovna with their family (the future tsar, Nicholas II, is standing in back).
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