La Peninsula

What happens when one of the world’s most influential jewelry maisons enters the Eternal City not as a visitor, but as a narrator of its myths? Cartier e il Mito, now on view at Palazzo Nuovo in the Musei Capitolini through March 2026, answers with an air of inevitability, as though Cartier’s jewels had always been destined to return to the legends that shaped them. Marking the first temporary exhibition ever staged in this storied Roman palace, the result is nothing short of revelatory.

Cartier Rome Exhibition at the Musei Capitolini

Entering the Capitoline Museums feels like time travel. Cartier creations drawn from the Cartier Collection appear in quiet dialogue with ancient marbles once assembled by Cardinal Alessandro Albani, alongside loaned antiquities from major Italian and international institutions. The jewels do not compete with the sculptures; they converse. Across centuries, both recognize a shared language of beauty, proportion, and meaning.

This exchange is deeply rooted in Cartier’s history. In 1923, Louis Cartier journeyed through Italy—Venice, Ferrara, Siena, Ravello, Pompeii—absorbing the neo-archaeological revival then captivating Europe. Friezes, geometry, mythic symbolism, and architectural clarity became foundational to the Maison’s classical aesthetic. Cartier e il Mito brings that lineage home, placing inspiration beside origin, not as imitation, but as evolution.

Mythology, Jewelry, and Classical Aesthetics

Visitors ascend a dramatic staircase conceived by Oscar-winning scenographer Dante Ferretti, whose design transforms the palace into a cinematic threshold. Inside, the galleries unfold like chapters of an epic. Cartier jewels emerge as protagonists—objects of ornament and meaning—while ancient sculptures seem to stir beneath shifting light, shadow, and sound.

The exhibition pays particular homage to the Greek concept of kosmos, meaning both “ornament” and “order of the universe.” Cartier’s disciplined geometry—bracelets echoing columns, brooches recalling waves, motifs hinting at myth without replicating it—embodies this ideal. Cupid’s arrows glimmer in suggestion; Hermes’ flight appears in fleeting detail. These are jewels as symbols, meant to communicate inner life as much as external beauty.

Cartier Palazzo Nuovo and the Gods of Craft and Desire

One of the most evocative sections honors Hephaestus, god of fire and craftsmanship. Long embraced by Cartier as a patron of artisanship, he represents the transformation of raw minerals into meaning. Hardstone works from Cartier’s glyptic atelier reinforce this ancient-modern lineage, reminding visitors that every jewel begins with labor, heat, and devotion.

Scent deepens the experience. Cartier perfumer Mathilde Laurent introduces subtle olfactory installations, most strikingly in the Aphrodite gallery. Il Profumo di Afrodite envelops the statue in a soft aura, transforming the room into a multisensory sanctuary. Beauty, as the ancients believed, is something worn, breathed, and felt.

Mythology flows throughout with fluid elegance. Medea’s dangerous intelligence, Ariadne’s labyrinthine longing, and Dionysian abandon all surface through form and motif, most memorably in Cartier’s 1914 sautoir, whose exuberant length evokes ecstasy and restraint in equal measure. Myth, for Cartier, is not a theme but a lens: an emotional terrain rendered in gold and stone.

As the exhibition unfolds, the boundary between antiquity and modernity dissolves. Cartier’s creations feel predestined among the marbles of Palazzo Nuovo, answering the statues’ gaze with confidence rather than contrast. For visitors, the experience is less about observing history than feeling its resonance, an aesthetic suspension between past and present that suits both Rome and Cartier.

For those in Rome between now and March 2026, Cartier e il Mito is more than an exhibition. It is a luminous encounter between marble and gemstone, myth and modernity, the city that shaped history and the Maison that continues to shape beauty—a dialogue across time, brilliantly alive.