The Dom Pedro Aquamarine
Bernd Munsteiner (born 1943) · Mined about 1980; cut 1992
A column of pale sea-blue crystal, taller than a bottle of wine and weighing more than two kilograms, stands alone in a case lit from below so that light travels up through the stone. This is the Dom Pedro, the largest cut aquamarine in the world, at more than ten thousand carats. Instead of being faceted like a ring stone, it has been carved into a slender obelisk with a series of long grooves cut into the back, and as you move around it those grooves catch the light and throw it forward in shifting bars, so that the whole crystal seems to glow from inside.
Aquamarine is a form of the mineral beryl, a cousin of emerald, coloured blue by traces of iron. This crystal was found in the state of Minas Gerais in Brazil around 1980, part of a single crystal nearly a metre long that broke into three pieces when the miners dropped it. The largest fragment went to the German gem artist Bernd Munsteiner, a pioneer of what he calls fantasy cuts, who studied it for months before spending four months cutting it in 1992. Look at the notches from the side and you will see that they are not decoration; they are precisely angled reflectors, designed so that the stone lights up when viewed from the front. Munsteiner named the finished piece after Pedro the First and Pedro the Second, the two emperors of Brazil.
The obelisk was bought by the American collectors Jane Mitchell and Jeffery Bland, who donated it to the Smithsonian in 2011 so that it would stay on public view, and it went on display in 2012. It is displayed near the Hope Diamond and the Logan Sapphire but feels more like a sculpture than a gem. Notice how the colour deepens toward the base, where the stone is thickest, from almost clear to the blue of shallow tropical water.
Did You Know? The original crystal, nearly a metre long, broke into three pieces when the Brazilian miners who found it dropped it.
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