La Peregrina

Aucun joyau n’a captivé l’imagination comme la Perle Pérégrine, avec sa frappante histoire de trésor de la couronne espagnole et sa disparition spectaculaire du Palais Royal de Madrid. Sa dernière propriétaire, Dame Elizabeth Taylor, l’appelait « la perle la plus parfaite au monde ». The Peregrina was fished from the Gulf of Panama in 1577 by a young enslaved African and quickly became the most celebrated natural pearl of the Renaissance. Its extraordinary beauty, size and perfect pear shape inspired the Milanese court jeweller and lapidary Jacopo da Trezzo to christen it La Perla Peregrina –“the rare one”. Rudolf II of Prague coveted it; King Philip II of Spain secured it in 1586 for the astonishing sum of 9,000 ducats, three times what Michelangelo was paid to paint the Sistine Chapel ceiling. Before his death in 1598, Philip II decreed that the Peregrina remain an inalienable jewel of the Spanish Crown Treasury. For more than two centuries, successive Spanish queens, infantas and kings wore the Peregrina as a symbol of global rule and imperial power. It appears in countless court portraits by leading artists including Alonso Sánchez Coello, Juan Pantoja de la Cruz, Bartolomé González, Diego Velázquez, Francisco Goya, the miniaturist Guillermo Ducker and, later, Sir Edwin Henry Landseer. After Joseph Bonaparte seized the pearl in 1813, rival claimants emerged throughout the nineteenth century. Prince Felix Yusupov – Rasputin’s assassin – owned a large pearl nicknamed La Pelegrina, marketed by his family since 1826 as the ‘true’ Peregrina. Richard Burton, captivated by the pearl’s tangled history, purchased the authentic ‘Abercorn Pearl’ at auction in 1969 as a Valentine’s gift for Elizabeth Taylor. This book – one Burton himself hoped to research and write – retraces the Peregrina’s many journeys and misinterpretations. It revisits its famous and infamous owners, dismantling centuries of myth, misinformation and embellished lore. Drawing on decades of archival work in Austria, Italy, Portugal, Spain and France, Jordan assembles royal inventories, diaries, accounts and correspondence to publish, for the first time, the pearl’s full documentary history, which began in the New World in the late sixteenth century. Her research establishes conclusively that Elizabeth Taylor’s revered La Peregrina is the genuine royal pearl – one that, at its origin, granted freedom to an unnamed enslaved African.