“An extremely capacious handbag” is how Sir Roy Strong, former director of the Victoria & Albert Museum, described the London museum’s holdings. “City of Gold” is the nickname for Pforzheim, Germany, home of the Schmuckmuseum Pforzheim, the first public museum dedicated exclusively to jewelry. And the Musée des Arts Décoratifs (MAD) is in Paris, the city that waggish James Thurber deemed “a post-graduate course in Everything” and Ernest Hemingway called “a moveable feast.” For jewelry-besotted travelers heeding the call to culture, this trinity—the world’s three greatest permanent jewelry collections—offers a curated sanctuary of gems.
Combined holdings of some 8,000 gems and related works, from antiquity to the present, are reason enough for anyone to tour the permanent jewelry collections of the V&A and MAD, among the most comprehensive and superior in the world. There is no zooming through the V&A’s jewelry galleries; rather, it’s more of a zig and a zag from one jewelry-laden vitrine to another. Look for Etruscan Revival gold-and-enamel works by the hallowed firm of Castellani; ceremonial and royal regalia, diadems, and crowns; and not-to-be-missed works by the British upstarts of the 1960s, among them the undisputed leader, Andrew Grima, whose choice of stones and fresh ways of working gold earned him commissions from Queen Elizabeth and Princess Margaret.
