Many children might have been frightened by the 17th-century Capuchin crypt in Rome, where the walls are encrusted with skeletal remains. But for a young Elsa Peretti, visits to the macabre site would ignite one of her lifelong fascinations: bones. Over the decades the Italian model turned sculptor and jewelry designer would collect them as objects of intrigue.
“Her creativity was always pushed by her curiosity,” explains Nando and Elsa Peretti Foundation board member Stefano Palumbo.
After Peretti sculpted her famous bone cuff in the 1970s, she crafted crystal candlesticks with Tiffany & Co., introduced in 1980, from a similar inspiration. The shape, something like an elegantly twisted femur, debuted in sterling silver and terra-cotta two years later and then, in 1986, in magnolia wood. Today, Tiffany still produces the silver versions in Spain (from $2,300).
“Good design for the home should be universal…like old shoes,” Peretti told the Chicago Tribune in 1999, explaining the fundamentally utilitarian nature of the things she designed, which showed up in dining areas, kitchens, and bedside tables in her homes in New York, Spain, and Italy, the last of which is the subject of a new book, The Italian Interiors of Elsa Peretti, published in May by Apartamento.