The Medici Jewels: How One Italian Family’s Gems Conquered Every Royal Court in Europe
Somewhere in a museum in Naples, there is a shallow stone bowl carved from banded agot about the size of a dinner plate that was once the most valuable single object in Renaissance Florence. Not a diamond, not a ruby, a bowl. It was worth more than most Florentine palaces, and the man who owned it had his initials scratched into the stone so that no one would ever mistake whose taste had found it.
His name was Lorenzo De Medisi and some of what he owned is still sitting in museum cases today in Naples, in Vienna, possibly even in the arches of a crown you’ve seen in photographs. Thank you so much for all your comments and likes. They genuinely mean a lot. If you want to keep following these stories, please subscribe and hit the notification bell.
There’s so much more to tell. Lorenzo and the cameo obsession. The bowl is called the Tazafanes and it was carved in ancient Alexandria sometime in the 2nd or 1st century before Christ. When Lorenzo Demedisy bought it in Rome in 1471, he valued it at 10,000 Florence, an almost impossible sum for a single portable object at that time.
In the same inventory, his Jasper wine cooler was worth 2,000 Florence. His palace in Florence cost about that much to build. The medicine understood something almost nobody else in Europe had worked out yet. A large diamond was easy to buy if you had money. An ancient engraved gem was impossible to manufacture.
You either found one or you didn’t. A cameo, a hard stone carved by Greek or Roman hands that had been dead for a thousand years, meant taste, connections, and the patience to track down something that no goldsmith could simply make for you on commission. Lorenzo had more than 3,000 of them.
Cameos, inalios, portrait stones, mythological scenes accumulated across three generations of medicine collecting. He kept the finest ones in rotating cases in his palace and he did something that no private collector had ever done before. He had his initials engraved into the stone itself so that every gem wherever it ended up would carry his name inside it.
Many of them did travel. When a young medicine widow remarried in 1538 into the Farese family, the Tazafanes went with her as part of her dowy. It passed from Florence to Palmer to Naples, fled to Palmo during a war, and came back to Naples in 1817. It’s been in the National Archaeological Museum there ever since.
Lorenzo’s bowl in a city he never visited. Still carved with figures he spent 10,000 Florence to own Catherine de Medicy’s pearls the jewels that outran two queens. In 1533, a 14-year-old girl boarded a ship in Levveno and sailed to France to marry the son of a king. She was an orphan. The French court called her a merchant’s daughter.
What she carried with her, packed into chests below deck, was a set of pearls that would still be making news centuries after she died. Katherine de Medicy’s diary from Pope Clement IIIth included six long ropes of the finest natural pearls in Europe threaded with 25 large pear-shaped drops. Natural pearls of that quality gathered by divers formed over decades in the Persian Gulf or the Indian Ocean were rarer than large diamonds.
You couldn’t manufacture them. You couldn’t order them. You simply waited and hoped. Catherine wore them at the French court for 30 years. Then in 1558, she gave a rope of them to her daughter-in-law Mary, Queen of Scots, on Mary’s marriage to the future King Francis 2. Mary wore them in her portraits. Those luminous strands draped across black velvet.
And when her regents needed money and she was imprisoned in Scotland, the pearls went to England. Catherine tried to buy them back. She placed a bid. Queen Elizabeth I outbid her. Elizabeth, who had plenty of pearls, simply refused to let the most talked about pearls in Europe return to France. She wore them in the Armada portrait.
She wore them in the man portrait. And after Elizabeth, they passed to James I. Then to his daughter Elizabeth of Bohemia, then to her daughter Sophia, who married the elector of Hanover, at which point they became known as the Hanover Pearls. George I brought them to England in 1714. Queen Victoria eventually inherited them and when the Duke of Cumberland tried to claim them back as a German family heirloom, she fought him in court for 20 years and won.
There’s a tradition contested by some scholars, but never disproven that four of the large pear-shaped drops hanging from the arches of the Imperial State Crown are Catherine’s original pearls. Started in Florence in 1533, still there. Elanora Di toedo, the Duchess in the portrait.
Walk into the Azi Gallery and you’ll find Bronzino’s portrait of Elanora Diedo, painted around 1545. She’s dressed in a gown of white and gold briade that looks more like architecture than fabric. around her neck, two ropes of pearls, a choker sitting high at the throat, a longer strand falling lower, pearl drop earrings, and woven through her hair, a gold mesh net set with more pearls, a Spanish style she had introduced to Florence when she married Kosumo Ida Medisy.
Before Elanora, Florentine noble women didn’t wear that kind of hairet. After her, everyone did. Ben Venuto Chelani, the goldsmith and sculptor who worked for Kosumo, wrote in his memoirs that Elanora once asked him to lie to her husband on her behalf. She had found a pearl necklace she desperately wanted, but the price was higher than Kosimo would approve.
So, she asked Cheloni to tell Kosumo it was a fair price. He did. She got her pearls. He wrote it down, apparently without embarrassment. When she died in 1562 and was buried in the medicine chapel, investigators who opened her tomb nearly 400 years later found her wearing almost nothing. No ropes of pearls, no gold hairetss on her finger.
The table cut diamond ring Kosimo had given her when they married in 1539. That ring, small, plain by the standards of their world, is now in the Barello Museum in Florence. It’s one of the very few pieces of medicine personal jewelry that survived without being melted down or sold. She’d worn it for 23 years.
Marie de Medsy and the Bos Sansancy diamond. The second Medisy Queen of France arrived in Paris in 1600 with a dowy valued at 600,000 gold scooi and a stone that would travel further than either of them. The Bosansi was a pear-shaped diamond of 34.98 carats cut in the double row style from rough found in the GCond mines of India.
The same legendary source as the hope diamond. Marie de Medsy wore it at the very top of her coronation crown on May 13th, 1610 at the Basilica of St. Dennis. The next day, her husband Henry IVth was stabbed to death in his carriage on a Paris street. She had been queen for one day. She held power for years after that as regent for her young son, but eventually lost.
Her son Louis I1 13th had her exiled and in 1630 she fled France. What stayed with me about that moment is the detail of her first escape 13 years earlier from the shadow of Bl. She was 46 years old. She lowered herself down a rope ladder from her bedroom window in the middle of the night. She left behind her furniture, her courters, her wardrobe. She brought her jewel case.
The Bosansi had to be sold eventually. Exile is expensive and she died nearly destitute in Cologne in 1642. The diamond passed through her granddaughter to the Prussian royal family where it became the centerpiece of the Hoen crown jewels and was worn by every royal Prussian bride for generations.
When the German monarchy collapsed after the First World War, it went into private hands. In 2012, the head of the Hoenzan family sold it at Sures for $9.7 million. What Chelani actually made and what was lost. Ben Venonuto Chelani gets described as the great medicine goldsmith so often that it’s become a kind of reflex but it’s not quite accurate and the real picture is more interesting.
Chelani’s most famous surviving gold work, the Cira, a 26 cm golden enamel salt cellar with Neptune and earth reclining at its base was made for Francis eye of France, not the medicine. It lives in the Kuntist’s museum in Vienna. In 2003, a former security guard stole it by climbing through an open window in the early morning, wrapped it in a raincoat, and buried it in a forest outside Vienna.
It was found 3 years later. What Chelani made for Kosumo Medisi were sculptures. The bronze Perseus in the lodia de Lanszi. A bronze bust marble figures. He did make a jeweled gold clasp for Catherine de Medicy’s 1533 wedding truso commissioned by Pope Clement IIIth. That clasp no longer exists. Almost all mediciney gold work is gone, melted down over the centuries because metal has value and fashion changes.
What’s still standing? A marble crucifix cheloni completed for Kosimo which was given as a diplomatic gift to King Philip II of Spain. It hangs in Eliscoral Monastery near Madrid exactly where it was placed in the 16th century. Go there now and you can see it. Most of what the medicine commissioned in gold has long since been poured back into the world as something else. Stone lasts.
Gold gets recycled. The Florentine diamond 137 carats hidden in plain sight. There is one stone from the Medisy Treasury whose story just got its ending 100red years late. The Florentine diamond was a pale yellow gem of 137.27 carats cut in a distinctive double row style that made it look different from every angle.
The mediciney had it from at least the early 1600s when the dynasty died out in 1737 and the Habsburg Lraine family took over Tuskanyany. The diamond went with everything else to the new rulers. The Habsburgs wore it, cataloged it, displayed it at the Hofberg Palace in Vienna. Then came the First World War and the collapse of the AustroHungarian Empire.
In 1918, Emperor Charles I sent the family’s jewels ahead to Switzerland as his empire came apart around him. He died in exile on MadiRaa in 1922. His wife, Empress Zeta, kept moving Spain, then Belgium, then as the Nazis closed in in 1940, across the Atlantic to Canada with her eight children. For over a hundred years, nobody outside the family knew where the diamond had gone.
Historians guessed it had been secretly recut and sold. Others thought it had ended up in South America. It became the subject of novels, films, even a perfume named after its mystery. In November 2025, the family finally explained the diamond had been with Zeta the entire time, carried across four countries in what her grandson later described as a small suitcase and locked in a Canadian bank vault since the Second World War.
Zeta never told anyone where it was, even after she returned to Europe in 1953. The stone stayed behind in the country that had taken her family in. She died in 1989 and the secret held for another 36 years after that. Anna Maria Louisa and the document that saved everything. By 1737, there was one medicine left.
Anna Maria Louisa was 70 years old, widowed with no children. She had watched the dynasty collapse around her. Her brothers had failed to produce heirs. Her family’s political power was gone, and a new dynasty from Lraine was waiting to take over Tuskanyany. Everything the medicine had collected across three centuries.
The paintings, the sculptures, Lorenzo’s ancient cameos, the treasury at Paladity was about to pass into foreign hands. On October 31st, 1737, she signed a document now called the Pate Diiglia, the family pact. She agreed to hand over the entire collection. One condition. Nothing leaves Florence.
Not the paintings, not the sculptures, not the jewels. The new rulers agreed. They didn’t have much choice. Anna Maria Louisa died in 1743. She was buried in the Medy Chapel in Florence wearing the crown of the Electress Palatine, the title she’d held through her German marriage. Not a grand jugal crown, not a queen’s crown, just hers.
Centuries later, Anna Maria Louisa’s tomb was opened as part of scientific studies of the Medisy family remains. Researchers examined the last medicine not as a legend, but as a woman who had lived through the collapse of one of Europe’s most powerful dynasties. The examination revealed details about her final years and confirmed the identity of the woman buried in the medicine chapel in Florence.
There was no hidden treasure waiting inside the tomb. Her greatest treasure had already been given away, not in gold or jewels, but in words written on a document that changed the fate of Florence forever. The last medicine was gone, but her decision survived. Her will left the equivalent of £500,000 in jewelry to the new Grand Juke, all bound by the same condition.
The Ephesi Gallery exists because of that document. The treasury of the Grand Jukes at Padza Pitty, where you can still see Lorenzo’s hardstone vasees and Eleanor’s rings, exists because of that document. Florence became one of the great museum cities of the world because a 70-year-old woman with no heirs decided in the last act available to her that what her family had collected would belong to everyone.
Her name appears in almost none of the tourist guides. The medicine banked on the idea that beauty was power, that a carved ancient gem or a rope of natural pearls carried more authority than a sword or a treaty. For about 300 years, they were right. Their gems funded alliances, crossed borders, ended up on queens who didn’t speak Italian in countries the medicine never visited.
Some are still in museum cases. Some were sold. One famous diamond vanished entirely. What they left behind is still in Florence. You can go and look at it. Lorenzo’s stone bowl is in Naples. The Bose Sansancy sold at Sures in 2012. The collection Anna Maria Louisa refused to let leave the city is still there, exactly where she put it.
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