La Peregrina

Retraces the Peregrina Pearl’s many journeys and misinterpretations and revisits its famous and infamous owners

No jewel has captured the imagination like the Peregrina Pearl, with its vivid history as a Spanish crown treasure and its dramatic disappearance from Madrid’s Royal Palace. Its last owner, Elizabeth Taylor, called it “the most perfect pearl in the world”.

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 shape inspired the Milanese court jeweller Jacopo da Trezzo to christen it La Perla Peregrina –“the rare one”. King Philip II of Spain secured it in 1586. For more than two centuries, successive Spanish queens, infantas and kings wore the Peregrina as a symbol of global rule and imperial power.

Drawing on decades of archival work in Austria, Italy, Portugal, Spain and France, Annemarie Jordan Gschwend 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 through to its place in the collection of Elizabeth Taylor.