"Boys get skulls, girls get butterflies"

"Boys get skulls, girls get butterflies...," the New York cult tattoo artist Scott Campbell said in an interview in Inked Magazine. The dictum is the point of departure for a major exhibition of jewelry at the Museum fur Angewandte Kunst Koln (MAKK), Cologne, and the title of this book, which traces the lives of the ornaments on desplay from birth to death and associates them with issues such as mysticism and power, love and sentimentality, extravagance and splendor. The jewelry selection ranges from antiquity across the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and the Baroque to the present; the ornaments are presented side by side with rare and exemplary pieces by the Dusseldorf-based gold-smith and artist Georg Hornemann. For a limited time, they leave their places in the chronology of art history to appear arranged by themes. The publication of documents the interplay of continuity and change, tradition and radical transformation, endurance and sometimes forced evolution. With essays by Petra Hesse, director of the MAKK; Valeria Liebermann, curator of the exhibition; and Gundula Wolter, Kunsthochschule Berlin-Weissensee.