GENEVA – The coloured diamond is today’s ultimate possession; in a climate of intense connoisseurship, the ravishing coloured diamond is appreciated as the rarest of the rare, with a mystical, miraculous beauty that comes from the unique, emotive blend of the diamond’s unrivalled fiery brilliance with an exquisite palette of colours, the most appealing being cherry-blossom pink, and the rarest of all diamond colours, noble, contemplative blue. This spring, in the Magnificent Jewels & Noble Jewels auction in Geneva, Sotheby’s presents the ultimate in coloured diamonds: Apollo and Artemis, two breath-taking and exceptional stones. The divine diamond twins—one pink and the other blue—are perfectly matched in size, cut and tonality. The stones are currently mounted as a spectacular pair of earrings, but are being offered separately, on account of their extreme rarity, power and presence. They are, says David Bennett, Worldwide Chairman of Sotheby’s International Jewellery Division, “by far the most important pair of earrings ever offered at auction.”
Sent from the Gods: The Apollo and Artemis Diamonds
The Apollo Blue is a Fancy Vivid Blue, 14.54 carats, Internally Flawless, Type IIB, and 'The Artemis Pink', a Fancy Intense Pink, 16.00 carats, VVS2 clarity, Type IIA; both are amongst the purest, chemically, of all diamonds, with an alluring limpidity, while the Apollo belongs to the most elite group comprising less than one-half of one percent of all diamonds, pure, with the presence of boron, the element that gives the diamond its blue colour. Diamonds of this quality, with this extraordinary depth and sophistication of colour, and of this size are unfathomably rare. The sheer randomness of their very existence, the confluence of cosmic conditions that generated their miraculous formation process, billions of years ago, deep in the earth, is wondrous. Twinned, as they are, both cut into lyrical pear-shapes, and named, appropriately for the most revered and powerful of Olympian deities, enhances and intensifies their rarity, mesmerising beauty, dignity and distinction.
THE APOLLO AND ARTEMIS DIAMONDS. EXCEPTIONAL FANCY VIVID BLUE DIAMOND WEIGHING 14.54 CARATS, INTERNALLY FLAWLESS, TYPE IIB. CHF38,125,000–50,160,000 ($38,000,000–50,000,000). IMPORTANT FANCY INTENSE PINK DIAMOND WEIGHING 16.00 CARATS, VVS2 CLARITY, TYPE IIA. CHF12,545,000–18,060,000 ($12,500,000–18,000,000). MOUNTED AS A PAIR OF EARRINGS. TO BE OFFERED IN MAGNIFICENT JEWELS & NOBLE JEWELS ON 16 MAY IN GENEVA.
Vivienne Becker is a jewellery historian and a contributing editor of the Financial Times’s How to Spend It.
