I went shopping today. I know "you should shop for the one you love", but I shopped for ME. While gazing over malachite cigarette boxes and rhodandite vases, I stumbled across a magnificent brooch, described as a suberb example of a "Renaissance-style brooch".

Now call me "classic", but this is no ordinary "Renaissance" anything, because it is simply not Renaissance. That aside--and surely anyone who knows me understands that I give a lot of leeway to everything and everyone--this is an supreme example of Imperial Russian taste. The piece was designed just before the first World War and greatly ornamated, not by Faberge', but one of his competitors. Imperial Russian taste was a hybrid of Western European ideas and the barbaric nature of the East. This produced extreme examples of "ideas" or "notions" of The Other World that existed out of St. Petersburg.

I particularly enjoy the profile; unlike the French who profiled only African images of Egypt, the Russians dug deeper into the soul of the world as they imagined. (This is not a profile of Nefertiti, it is one of a Negro queen.) The Dowager Empress, Marie, was fabled and chastised for owning a collection of monkeys with clocks in their abdomens. Similarly, one has to think of the two, bejeweled and turbaned Ethiopians who stood at the door the Nicholas and Alexandra's private apartments in The Alexander Palace to comtemplate their vision of Africa.

And, the jewels. This was not a piece for some ordinary countess; it was most probably a presentation piece from the Imperial Family.

All I know is I want it; and it is a bargain at $6,300. Christmas is coming.