Tuesday, 24 November 2026, 6:00 PM | Annemarie Jordan Gschwend (Lisbon), La Peregrina. An Extraordinary Renaissance Pearl

Abatract: The Peregrina was fished from the Gulf of Panama in 1577 by a young enslaved African and quickly became the most celebrated natural pearl of the Renaissance. Its extraordinary beauty, size and perfect pear shape inspired the Milanese court jeweller and lapidary Jacopo da Trezzo to christen it La Perla Peregrina –‘the rare one’. Rudolf II of Prague coveted it; King Philip II of Spain secured it in 1586 for the astonishing sum of 9,000 ducats, three times what Michelangelo was paid to paint the Sistine Chapel ceiling. Before his death in 1598, Philip II decreed that the Peregrina remain an inalienable jewel of the Spanish Crown Treasury. For more than two centuries, successive Spanish queens, infantas and kings wore the Peregrina as a symbol of global rule and imperial power. It appears in countless court portraits by leading artists including Alonso Sánchez Coello, Juan Pantoja de la Cruz, Bartolomé González, Diego Velázquez, Francisco Goya, the miniaturist Guillermo Ducker and, later, Sir Edwin Henry Landseer. No jewel has captured the imagination like the Peregrina Pearl, with its vivid history as a Spanish crown treasure and its dramatic disappearance from Madrid’s Royal Palace in 1813. Its last owner, Dame Elizabeth Taylor, called it ‘the most perfect pearl in the world’.

About the speaker: Annemarie Jordan Gschwend is a distinguished art historian, curator and independent research scholar. She is the author and editor of many books, including the award-winning The Global City: On the streets of Renaissance Lisbon.

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