In 1968, Maria Felix (8 April 1914 to 8 April 2002), the Mexican actress known as "La Dona," commissioned a serpent necklace from Cartier Paris. The piece was designed to coil around the neck with naturalistic fluidity, each segment engineered to flex and move as a serpent does.
Design
The necklace is set with diamonds across its surface, with plaques along the underbelly in black, green, and coral, the colours of Mexico. The articulation of the body was a technical achievement: each section was independently hinged, allowing the serpent to drape and shift with the wearer's movement rather than sitting rigid against the skin.
Serpents had appeared in Cartier's design vocabulary well before the Felix commission. The motif carried associations with renewal, danger, and adornment stretching back to antiquity, and the house had explored snake forms in bracelets and other jewels through the early and mid-twentieth century. What distinguished the Felix necklace was its scale and the ambition of its articulation, producing a piece that behaved, when worn, less like jewellery and more like a living form.
The Crocodile Necklace
Felix later commissioned a crocodile necklace from Cartier, completed in 1975, set with emeralds and yellow diamonds. The two commissions together represent some of the most widely known individual pieces the house produced in the second half of the twentieth century, and they reflect a client whose taste ran towards the dramatic and the zoological rather than the conventional.
Sources
- Francesca Cartier Brickell, The Cartiers (Ballantine Books, 2019)
