The Paris Review

Coveting Cartier Necklaces and Celtic Torques at the Met

View of “Jewelry: The Body Transformed,” 2018, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Image copyright The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

When I walk through museum galleries, stocked with the bravest of human efforts suspended luminescent on canvas or rising in harmonious stone, I feel covetous. And though I am awed by the aesthetic achievements before me, I also diminish them to what I would collect. I would hang that Veronese. I would like to wake to that celadon moon jar from

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