La Peregrina, a stunning pear-shaped pearl that goes on display at the Field Museum Friday, has such beauty that when it was discovered by a slave in the Gulf of Panama 500 years ago, his grateful Spanish masters freed him.
Balboa, the reigning conquistador of Panama, took charge of the lustrously white 1 1/2-inch-long pearl and presented it to King Ferdinand V.
In 1969 Richard Burton bought La Peregrina as a Valentine gift for his wife, Elizabeth Taylor. In the centuries before then, the pearl had graced jewel boxes of Spanish, French and English royalty and millionaires.
The famous gem, still owned by Taylor, is one of nearly half a million pearls that will go on display at the museum Friday. It is the biggest, most comprehensive exhibit of pearls, the only biologically produced gems, ever mounted. The exhibit is a joint creation of the Field Museum and New York’s American Museum of Natural History.
“It is a jewelry and art show,” said Rudiger Bieler, the Field Museum’s zoology chairman and an organizing curator of the exhibit. “Some of the key pearl objects we display are some of the world’s most beautiful gems. But it is also a biology and history of technology lesson.”
La Peregrina is just one of dozens of significant pearls and great artworks borrowed from museums and collectors around the world for the show.
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Among the other “celebrity” gems being showcased are royal pearl necklaces, brooches and pins belonging to Mary Queen of Scots, Queen Victoria, Empress Josephine and the kings of Poland and Kuwait. The string of pearls Joe DiMaggio bought for Marilyn Monroe on their honeymoon in Japan is in there too, as well as priceless pieces from China, Japan, India and the Middle East.
One of the oldest jewelry pieces on display will be a Greek pin dating to 300 B.C., excavated from the Temple of Aphrodite in Cyprus. A fossilized 50 million-year-old pearl is in the show, as is the world’s biggest clam specimen, 4 feet across, with a model of a record 14 1/2-pound pearl that one of its species produced.
Long history
“Most people … can tell you a little bit about pearls: They are white, they are spherical, they are formed around a grain of sand, and most of the cultured pearls come out of Japan,” Bieler said. “That’s the basic information people know about pearls. None of it is correct.”
Pearls, with their mysterious, radiant iridescence, were the most prized gems in the world through much of human history. Mineral gems such as diamonds and rubies were less highly regarded until about 1700, when people began to understand the crystal structures of stone, enabling jewelers to cut gemstones to brilliantly reflect and refract light.
In ancient times, pearls were even more valuable than they are today, baubles for only the most elite and wealthy. Only one in 10,000 pearl oysters harvested from wild oyster beds yields a gem-quality pearl.
Lengthy formation
Most pearls come from pearl oysters and clams. Pearl formation happens when an irritant such as a small parasite or a piece of food (never a grain of sand) becomes lodged in the internal tissue of the animal. As a defense, the animal secretes the same substance that lines its shell, nacre or mother-of-pearl, around the object.
In nature the process can take years or decades. Different animals create pearls in different sizes, most often in oblong shapes. The beautiful round pearls most people are familiar with largely come from cultured pearls, induced by irritant “seeds” implanted in farmed pearl oysters.
Natural and cultured pearls come in an array of colors–white, gray, green, brown, black, purple, gold, pink and flaming red–some with surfaces so iridescent they appear to glow from deep within.
Ancient Chinese and perhaps Indians were the first to use pearls as displays of wealth, but Europe was using them too, in the Greek and Roman eras.
Julius Caesar forbade all but women belonging to the most elite ruling classes to wear pearls and sent his legions to conquer Britain to get control of its pearl-producing rivers. More than 1,500 years after Caesar, Spain’s royalty were more eager for Columbus to ship back pearls than gold or silver.
The Americas used pearls before Columbus arrived, and the exhibition takes a long look at the surprisingly prominent place the Midwest has in pearl history, both before Columbus and in more recent times.
`Pearls by the bucketful’
The Field Museum’s permanent collection includes the world’s biggest holding of Hopewell artifacts, items from a culture that thrived in the Ohio River valley about the same time the Roman Empire was at its zenith: 200 B.C. to A.D. 500.
“The Hopewells had pearls by the bucketful, hundreds of thousands of them,” museum anthropologist and exhibit co-curator Ben Bronson said.
Small tribal units had more pearls than the richest European courts.
“The Hopewell culture made more lavish use of pearls than any culture before or since,” Bronson said.
Carl von Linne, the 18th Century Swedish naturalist who devised the system for scientifically naming and ordering biological species, was the first person to successfully culture pearls.
His first pearls are in the exhibition, but his method was not well-known until Japanese pearlers hit on the idea on their own early in the 20th Century.
The Japanese method has pearl farmers placing “seeds”–perfectly round pieces of nacre carved from the thick shells of Midwestern mussels–into their own native pearl oysters. The oysters dutifully secrete shell material around the seeds to produce spherical pearls.
Midwest mussel harvesters ship tons of shell to pearl farmers worldwide.
Amid the celebration of beauty, the exhibition also spells out how human interference endangers the whole naturally renewable pearl production process.
The exhibition, which closes Jan. 5, costs $6 in addition to the Field Museum’s general admission of $8 for adults and $4 for seniors, students and kids 3 to 11.
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