What secrets lie behind a dead weasel with a jewel-encrusted mask? Why do diamonds dominate Medici paintings? Why would an accountant be painted wearing an eight-minute hourglass?

Jewellery in art is often overlooked – dismissed as decorative or incidental. Yet it shaped how people were seen and judged: proclaiming power and lineage, advertising fertility, signalling desire, enforcing virtue and betraying private anxieties.

In The Secret Language of Jewellery in Art, Stella Grace Lyons exposes a forgotten visual language hidden within early modern painting. From queens and courtesans to merchants, lovers and enslaved children, this book reveals how the full gamut of human desires, aspirations and fears glittered in the smallest of details.

Stella Grace Lyons is an art historian, writer and Arts Society accredited lecturer, known for bringing works of art vividly to life through storytelling. She is the founder of Stella Talks, her online lecture platform,which attracts a following across five continents. She lectures widely throughout the UK and internationally, in Europe and Asia. In 2022, she was invited to give a lecture marking the fortieth anniversary of Goldsmiths’ Jewellery Fair, where she first explored the overlooked role of jewellery in art – revealing a rich and largely unexamined field of study. From this lecture emerged The Secret Language of Jewellery in Art.