(soft piano playing)
(Latin folk music playing)
Much of the story that we tell
with the collection that we've inherited
at this point in time is a story of British America,
with a great focus on northeastern centers.
The notion of American art
is coming to be seen in a more nuanced
and a broader, more hemispheric context, let's say.
- There are whole new frontiers,
Native American and Latin American,
where I believe we have really important work to do
in the coming years.
And I think the Crown of the Andes is really
a demonstration of our ambitions in this area.
- The Crown of the Andes is recognized
as one of the finest surviving examples of goldsmiths' work
from colonial Spanish America.
This crown is made of 5.3 pounds of gold.
There are more than 400 emeralds.
I think when you first see it, you're almost overwhelmed
by the richness of it and the wonder of it,
the wonder that it's even survived.
The Crown of the Andes
is the popular name for
the Crown of the Virgin of the Immaculate Conception
of Popayán.
Popayán is a city in southwestern Colombia,
and it formed part of the Spanish viceroyalty
of New Grenada.
The crown was made to adorn a sculpture of the Virgin Mary.
You have to think of this object
as a crown that's made for the queen of heaven.
This isn't an object that would have been visible every day.
It was visible only on feast days.
The sculpture would have been
brought down from the altarpiece,
dressed in cloth of gold and all sorts of other jewels,
raised on a platform, and carried in the streets.
If you visit Popayán, or for that matter, a city in Spain,
during Holy Week or on a particular feast day,
you're apt to see sculptures being carried in the street.
(Latin folk music playing)
I think when we talk about the history of the crown,
we need to separate the legends from the history.
And many of those legends were fabricated in the 1930s,
after the crown was brought to the United States.
Warren Piper, who was a Chicago gem dealer
and a bit of a showman,
bestowed the name Crown of the Andes on it.
He invented all sorts of legends having to do
with conquistadors and pirates,
headhunters, plagues, and miracle cures.
All sorts of the things in order to market it.
He put it on exhibit in various venues, including world's fairs.
It was displayed in department stores.
It was displayed at Macy's in 1941.
One of the strangest uses of it that I've encountered
was as the centerpiece for dinner parties.
So there's this culture of spectacle
that's associated with the object
from the beginning, really.
(Latin folk music ends)
- The crown is staggering.
I mean, talk about bling.
Now, there were certain questions.
Were all the emeralds original?
And we weren't quite sure about the relationship
of the upper part of the crown to the lower part of the crown.
In first examining the crown,
we could see that there were different techniques used
for different parts of the crown.
We were looking at what appears to be a 17th-century diadem.
Techniques are typical for the period.
Hand-hammered repoussé gold sheet.
The arches are clearly later in design.
These are not hammered, they are actually produced
by a stamping process.
So the object was at some point
updated in the 18th century,
possibly due to damage of arches,
or possibly because styles changed,
and they wanted to upgrade her.
Many of the emeralds we're seeing in the arches
date to the time of the original diadem.
So clearly those were reused.
And the clarity and the color of these is really unsurpassed.
Even one individual one would be incredibly valuable.
So the fact that we have this many emeralds in one object
that we know are from the colonial period is astounding.
- The long-term goal is
that the Crown of the Andes will be the centerpiece
of a presentation of colonial Latin-American art.
In the meantime, visitors will see it
in lots of different contexts.
Eventually, they'll see it as the centerpiece
of a permanent collection gallery.
(acoustic guitar playing)