Tiffany & Co.: The Medusa

The piece

The MedusaLouis Comfort Tiffany, around 1904

Missing

1943 to 2021Listed as whereabouts unknown

Home

2021Bought back by Tiffany at Sotheby's

Our part

Eighteen monthsFrom found state to the flagship

Shot on

16mm and four camerasPlus Hasselblad and Canon stills

Where

Studio, the Met, the LandmarkThree chapters of one story

Louis Comfort Tiffany made the Medusa around 1904 for his first collection of jewelry, shown at the World’s Fair in St. Louis: one of 27 pieces, the only one he ever gave a title, and signed on the back Louis C. Tiffany, Artist. Ten years later he chose it as one of just two jewels to illustrate in the book of his life’s work. By then it belonged to the Baltimore collector Henry Walters, and later to his wife, the former Mrs. Pembroke Jones. It was sold from her estate in 1943, and then it vanished.

For almost eighty years nobody knew where the Medusa was. Right after Tiffany bought it back, we started filming, and we followed it all the way home.

The slide at the end of every talk

Alice Cooney Frelinghuysen, the Met’s curator of American decorative arts, has lectured on Tiffany for decades. At the end of almost every talk she put up the same colour plate of the Medusa and asked the room for help.

Nobody ever did. In 2021 the call came from Sotheby’s instead: the Medusa had surfaced in the collection of the Schocken family and was going to auction at Sotheby’s as lot 171. Estimated at $100,000 to $200,000, it sold on December 7 to Tiffany & Co. for a record $3.65 million, and went home to the Tiffany Archives.

Cobwebs and all

Before anyone cleaned it or put it behind glass, the Medusa came to us for two days in May 2022. Our brief was to record it exactly as it had survived: the dust, the tired settings, a strange white material creeping out from under the stones, and an old inventory sticker still on the back.

When the Met’s conservator Anne Grady first saw it at Sotheby’s, she told us, it was this mix of a totally gorgeous piece of jewelry and a question: “What happened to you? Where were they keeping you?”

We shot it on four digital cameras, on 16mm film and on a Hasselblad, with the room almost dark. A probe lens travelled over the pendant like a drone over a landscape, close enough to read the hammer marks. Then we passed single strips of light across the big central opal, and everyone in the studio stopped talking. It shifts from pastel to fire as the light moves.

Under ultraviolet and coloured light it became something else again: the gold fell away into the dark, and the stones glowed violet, green and blue, the jellyfish Tiffany was reaching for.

The Met, on a closed day

That winter the Medusa went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to be examined and cleaned, and we went with it. We filmed there twice, in November 2022 and February 2023, the first time on a day the museum was closed, with the American Wing empty around us and Tiffany’s own windows lit in the galleries.

Downstairs in the Department of Scientific Research, Anne Grady and the scientist Federico Carò started where conservators always start: looking, for a long time, under magnification. Then came the questions, and the machines to answer them. X-radiography showed how the piece was built, joint by joint. X-ray fluorescence read the metals and the stones. X-ray diffraction identified that creeping white material: zinc phosphate, a dental cement introduced in the late 19th century.

Most of the Medusa’s stones aren’t held by metal at all. Tiffany pressed them into dental cement, laid a mercury filling amalgam over it, and tamped gold into that, which is why the gold glitters but stays matte around the stones.

“The fact that he was just using this dental cement is wild to me.”

The centre turned out to be cleverer still. Pale sapphire cabochons sit over thin slices of what looks like opal, so you see straight through one stone and catch the colour of another: in Anne’s words, a stone that doesn’t exist anywhere else, made for this piece alone.

Once she knew the old cement was still holding, she cleaned it herself under the microscope. It took about a week. Warm water and tweezers first, to lift out decades of hair and dirt, then cotton micro swabs rolled from a few fibres so nothing got too wet, and only at the end a little solvent.

Her rule for all of it was the difference between restoring an object and conserving it.

“Every object is an artifact of its own history. Conservation is trying to maintain all of those interactions.”

The X-rays went back to Tiffany, and its jewelers spotted something in them nobody had seen: traces of a second set of hinges on the straight arms, so the tentacles would once have moved with the wearer. Tiffany’s Jewelry Design Innovation Workshop then scanned the pendant in 3D, so every repair could be tried on a printed copy before it went near the real thing. The plan was to do as little as possible, and make every change reversible.

Returned home

In April 2023 the Medusa went on show at Tiffany’s newly reopened Landmark on Fifth Avenue. That November its story filled a sold-out talk at the 92nd Street Y, where Marion Fasel spoke with Alice Cooney Frelinghuysen and Christopher Young of the Tiffany Archives, promoted with teaser films we cut from this footage.

We cut what we had into a trailer, built around the people who know the piece best. Nonie, as everyone at the Met calls Alice, told us what it was like to finally stand in front of the jewel she had been asking about for years.

Who wants to see the whole film?

There is a longer film in these frames: the archives, the auction, the Met, the workshop, and the people who brought the Medusa home. We still want to make it. So, in the spirit of Nonie’s old slide, we are asking the room.

Want to help bring the full film to life? Please let us know. If you are a funder, a broadcaster, a streamer or a fellow Tiffany obsessive, get in touch.

ServicesDocumentary·Product Photography·Branded Content·Editing