A jewel in a portrait is rarely there by chance. Someone chose it to be seen, and a few of the pieces painted here still exist. Between the 1470s and 1907, the stone at a sitter's throat or ear often says what the face keeps quiet, from a marriage vow to a scandal at the Paris Salon.
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How These Were Chosen
A jewel in a portrait does two jobs at once. For the sitter, it is a message worn where everyone will see it: a rank, a marriage, a faith. For the painter, it is hard to render, because a small, shiny object has to read as gold, stone or pearl from a handful of strokes.
That double job gave this list its rule. A portrait made it only when its jewel does more than finish the costume, either because it tells something about the sitter or because the painter made something remarkable of it.
One stone keeps coming back. Pearls appear in half of the twelve, and their meaning shifts from picture to picture: a promise of fidelity, a claim of chastity, a keepsake said to come from a scaffold, and finally an illusion made of white paint.
12. Raphael, Portrait of Maddalena Doni (about 1504 to 1507)
At the base of Maddalena Doni's neck hangs a gold pendant shaped like a unicorn, set with a ruby, an emerald and a sapphire, and ending in a single pearl. The portrait is by Raphael, made in Florence between about 1504 and 1507, and the pendant makes sense only once the reason for it is clear.
That reason was a marriage. Maddalena, born a Strozzi, married the cloth merchant Agnolo Doni on January 31, 1504. Raphael painted the husband as well, and the two portraits were made as a pair.
A new wife was expected to display two virtues, purity before the wedding and fidelity after it. The pearl is read as standing for exactly those two, and Raphael hangs it in plain view, one small white point just below her face.
At a Glance
Artist: Raphael (1483 to 1520)
Painted: About 1504 to 1507
Medium: Oil on lime wood panel
Size: 63.5 × 45 cm (25 × 17.7 in)
Where to see it: Uffizi Gallery, Florence (Room 41)
11. Hans Holbein the Younger, The Ambassadors (1533)
Jean de Dinteville wears a gold chain across his chest, and from it hangs an oval medallion. He was the French ambassador to England when Hans Holbein the Younger painted him in 1533, beside his friend Georges de Selve, bishop of Lavaur, on either side of a shelf crowded with instruments. To anyone in that room who knew the code, the small medallion said more about him than his face or his fur.