Tip-to-Toe Body Ornaments Bedazzle at the Met

Gold sandals, ceremonial swords, jeweled earrings, nose rings, armbands, and bracelets The Metropolitan Museum of Art's fascinating new show, Jewelry: The Body Transformed, has many strengths This show draws almost entirely from the Met's little-known collection of jewelry.

The show begins with the body, the thing we humans universally share, and it cleverly does it in the first gallery from toe to head Jewelry is the unique unity of body and art, the body a moving canvas to which the best jewelers, great artists and designers, respond I loved the sections of the show on American jewelry, especially the great early-20th-century designers and the artists making jewelry today.

I look at jewelry as art and its own medium, but contemporary jewelry is often sculpture meant for display on a body It's perfect for the objects and the themes, whether elegant evening jewelry or jewelry for the afterlife The Met's jewelry show was a good collaboration. Source