Rebecca Rau was skimming an auction house’s catalog last year when a bronze amulet from the ancient Central Asian region of Bactria caught her attention. Shaped like a four-spoke wheel and covered in a soft green patina, the piece from 1,200 to 800 B.C. seemed to call out to her.
“It was like an orphaned artifact whispering to me, ‘Don’t leave me behind,’” said Ms. Rau, a jewelry designer who lives and works in New York City. Such items are often overlooked by collectors, she said, because they are too small to stand alone as decorative objects.
Ms. Rau envisioned a second life for the ancient amulet. She set it with pink spinels and sapphires, a red rubellite and a baroque South Sea pearl and hung it from a Victorian-era 14-karat gold lariat chain. The resulting Criss-Cross Necklace is part of her Then & Now jewelry collection, which features one-of-kind gems incorporating objects from 1,200 B.C. to 1880 and was introduced in November.
“I’m compiling layers of different periods and stories, hoping that they add up to something that feels both approachable and interesting for someone today,” Ms. Rau said.
A Growing Movement
An increasing number of jewelry designers have been incorporating ancient artifacts into contemporary designs, producing the kind of distinctive creations that people crave today. While the practice isn’t new, recent pieces have been bolder and more attention-grabbing than those in the past.
The London jeweler Glenn Spiro, for example, has paired antique gold tiles made by the Baoulé people of Africa’s Ivory Coast with diamonds of 10 carats or larger in necklaces and earrings, while the Munich jeweler Hemmerle has created a necklace of old agate beads with a 19th-century cameo pendant.
For Ms. Rau, 37, finding beauty and intrigue in ancient artifacts comes naturally. In 1912 her paternal great-grandfather founded M.S. Rau, a New Orleans purveyor of antiques, fine art and jewelry still in operation today.
She grew up accompanying her father on buying trips to antique fairs, galleries and estate sales around the world. After studying art history at New York University and earning a master’s degree at Sotheby’s Institute of Art in London, she returned to New Orleans in 2016 and began experimenting with antiquities in jewelry design.
“I find a richness and intimacy in these small ancient pieces,” she said. “There’s something powerful about holding something ancient in your hand and being able to wear it on your body.”
In 2024, Ms. Rau moved to New York, where she now collaborates with local jewelers to execute her creations, which start at $10,000.
One of her recent pieces is the Glowing Glass Necklace, which features a glass vessel originally made in 14th-century Europe to be filled with water blessed by a clergyman and then sewn onto garments, according to Sylvie Lhermite-King, an antiques dealer who sold the artifact to Ms. Rau.
Ms. Lhermite-King’s shop on Rue de Beaune in Paris specializes in 16th- to 18th-century antiques and Venetian glass. “Rebecca has an interesting eye,” Ms. Lhermite-King said. “I appreciate how she is using antique objects with contemporary mounts; it is very chic.”
Ms. Rau set the vintage glass on a 24-karat gold pendant suspended from a modern gold paper clip chain.
Jewelry for Connoisseurs
Designers creating this kind of jewelry note that the artifacts’ provenance ensures the finished pieces are precious, but in a subtle way that transcends the attention drawn by large diamonds and gems.
“My clients have a lot of jewels, and they find these pieces exceptionally wearable because most people don’t know what it is,” said Marc Auclert, whose Maison Auclert shop on Rue de Castiglione in Paris offers his one-of-a-kind jewels featuring ancient and antique carved gems.
“However, if they wore them at TEFAF, no doubt people would ask, ‘What is that?’” he said, referring to the annual European Fine Art Foundation show in Maastricht, the Netherlands. “These pieces speak to cognoscenti.
“It’s not about the intrinsic value of a piece, but rather it has cultural value,” he said of his collection, which ranges from 5,000 euros to 20,000 euros (about $5,800 to $23,300).
Mr. Auclert said he had recently observed increased interest in jewelry incorporating antiquities. “When I launched my collection 15 years ago, people considered it eccentric, and only a few of us were repurposing old relics this way,” he said. “Now a new generation of young designers are pursuing this approach.”
Over the years, he has acquired pieces from antique shops, auction houses and through dealers, but now finds the most interesting items in private collections, he said. His focus includes coins, beads and glyptics, an industry term for carved gems.
“I look to create tension between the antique and the modern, and it is super important that my jewelry be very modern,” said Mr. Auclert, whose interest in antiquities stems from his paternal grandfather, a Frenchman who dealt in antiques. One example: his Fragment Cameo earrings (€18,000). Each earring is fashioned from half of an 18th-century cameo and half of a gold cast of the missing portion.
Storytelling Through Design
The Brazilian designer Silvia Furmanovich has drawn inspiration from a lifelong fascination with the world’s ancient cultures. Her annual excursions have led her to remote regions in Japan, Egypt, Uzbekistan and other countries, and seen her return to her home in São Paulo with unusual craft items and historic objects.
“I’m always looking for unusual things, antique fragments, and objects that tell a story,” Ms. Furmanovich said, “and I’m giving them a new life in different ways.”
Over the years, she has transformed carved snuff bottles from China’s Qing dynasty (1644-1912) into earrings with diamonds and gemstones. She returned from Egypt with 1,000-year-old papyrus fragments with faded gold inscriptions, which became earrings. And in Japan, she discovered inro — the small, lacquered containers used by men to hold seals or medicine during the Edo period (1603 until 1868) — and reimagined them as necklaces and earrings. Prices start at about $9,000.
Ms. Furmanovich’s creations attract attention through color and texture, such as the red cinnabar of the snuff bottles and the smooth Japanese lacquer. Pieces by Loren Nicole, a Los Angeles area jeweler, reveal their age through form and patina.
For example, Ms. Nicole’s Persian Bronze Arrow Lariat Necklace set an ancient Persian arrow with champagne diamond accents on a handwoven gold lariat chain ($63,000).
The arrow was “a hard shape to use in jewelry,” she said. “It was too heavy for an earring, but I wanted to create something versatile and comfortable while taking advantage of the directional quality.”
Whether buyers instantly recognize a museum-worthy antique or not, designers say they are drawn to its aesthetics. “Once we explain the piece’s origin and story,” Ms. Furmanovich said, “it becomes even more beautiful to them.”
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