C for Codognato

The latest jewellery at the Hôtel Drouot in Paris is a pair of ghostly pendant earrings, given a touch of the screaming habdabs by the presence of a skull and spider. This brilliant, spectral, unique piece fetched €20,000 in 2010 – and there's been virtually nothing since! It's true that Codognato's death-defying jewellery is not to everyone's taste: too macabre, too mannerist, too decadent…Sensitive souls, beware! Moreover, the company refrains from advertising, letting novelists do the job. Ernest Hemingway and French art historian Maurice Rheims have taken turns to burnish the legend of this fantastical merchant of vanitas, whose favours are mysteriously shared between a handful of devotees including great scholars and cosmopolitan women – perhaps because it is the last survivor of a golden age, libertine and ethereal, as sensual as it was morbid. The snake haunts the company's creations. © Courtesy of Laziz Hamani ("Codognato", published by Assouline In the Etruscan Style A Venetian institution referenced in the trendiest guides of the day, Codognato fosters a strong spirit of "keeping it in the family." To…