The snake

Two gold snake bracelets made in Egypt under Roman rule, in the first century CE, are in the Metropolitan Museum in New York, and a gold serpent bracelet made under the Greek Ptolemies is some three centuries older. Egypt had coiled the snake on itself long before either: the first known image of a serpent with its tail in its mouth, the ouroboros, is on a shrine from the tomb of Tutankhamun.

Grief kept the circle turning. The ouroboros was a mourning motif in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and a bracelet of about 1830 braids it from human hair. After Prince Albert died in 1861, Queen Victoria made long and public mourning the custom, and jet, hair and memorial emblems spread with it. By the end of the century René Lalique was enamelling snakes on gold for an Art Nouveau brooch.

Rome rebuilt the snake on a gas pipe. Bulgari's first Serpenti, in 1948, was a bracelet-watch whose body was a Tubogas coil, supple enough to wind round the wrist, and in the 1960s its scales filled with bright enamel. Paris had answers in 1968. Boucheron cut the serpent down to its head for Serpent Bohème, a gold drop edged with beads, and Cartier made María Félix a fully articulated snake necklace in platinum and white gold, set with 178.21 carats of diamonds.