Popayán, 1590s
Devotion given,
and given again.
In the 1590s, smallpox emptied the towns around Popayán, Colombia. The city was spared. In thanks, its people commissioned a crown for the Virgin of the Immaculate Conception in their cathedral.
Goldsmiths worked on it for decades, raising the gold into acanthus leaves and shells and setting more than four hundred Colombian emeralds, one stone at a time.
For three hundred years it left the cathedral once a year, carried through the streets at Holy Week. In 1936 it was sold.
Today it sits behind glass in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, where people from all over the world come to stand in front of it.
These ten pieces were made to be worn. They are not copies of the crown. They are what was in the gold before it was gold, and they carry what it was made of: the devotion of a city that believed it had been saved.