Hammered silver heart pendant with two-tone purple enamel diamonds, silk cord included

A domed silver heart, hammer-beaten across the whole surface: the light does not run over it, it breaks inside it, and every hollow sends it back on its own account. On the front the plate stays solid — the lozenges are not voids going through, they are cells of color that the metal holds, and nothing passes through the heart. The cells sit three by three around the same vertex, so that each set of three reads as a small cube seen from the corner and the whole face becomes a row of cubes resting against one another. What builds them is not the relief, it is the color: of the three lozenges of each cube one is closed with a dark purple enamel, almost indigo, and the other two with a pale lilac, and it is the two tints that decide which face is in light and which in shadow. The silver ribs between one lozenge and the next stay in relief and hold the beating; where three cubes touch, the metal left over draws a six-pointed star. Towards the edge the pattern breaks off: some cells are left cut in half, some close into a round drop, and around it runs a band of beaten silver with no color. The reverse is not enameled and not pierced: it is a single dome of hammered silver, still in design and moving in surface. The bail is a plate bent into a cone, wide below and narrow at the top, mirror-polished — it is the only part of the piece over which the light runs whole; underneath, a single small ring holds the heart and lets it swing on the silk cord.

Eight grams and ten of silver at nine hundred and twenty-five thousandths for a heart of twenty-six millimeters by thirty-four, measured with the bail: the company writes the weight beside the hammered silver and lists the cord separately, so how much the two ends weigh is not said. At the neck there is no chain: there is a purple silk cord, thirty-nine and a half centimeters, closed at the ends by two silver end caps. The company names it among the materials together with the pendant, and it is included in the price; the silver chain is added on request, and that one is not. The purples are two and you can see them, but which enamel it is is stated nowhere, and we do not write it: the families are different processes from one another, and from a photograph they cannot be told apart. The color is in any case the fragile part: the pendant comes off before detergents and solvents, and it does not go into an ultrasonic bath. The silk even more so, because it is a fiber and not a metal — it fears water, perfumes and rubbing, and unlike silver it cannot be re-polished: it is replaced, and the heart stays. Presentation box included.