Despite his book's very new copyright date, Faber rehearses myths, outdated speculations, and uninformed personal opinion as though it were all fact, neverminding the fact that discoveries in the early 2000s had blown the lid off many of these misconceptions. ![]() This awful book is prejudiced, self-contradictory, and absurdly ill-informed. Faberge's Eggs provides an engrossing, compelling and at timessurprising window onto the empire these masterpieces outlived. Now, as they return to Russia, bought by oligarchs, their history - like that of Russia itself- seems to have come full circle. Eggs have been sold and smuggled, stolen and forged. Their subsequent history encompasses Bolsheviks and entrepreneurs, tycoons and heiresses, con-men and queens. As he and his family were brutally massacred in a Siberian basement, the eggs disappeared, only to emerge years later in the storerooms of the Kremlin. The muted austerity of the final few eggs seems all too appropriate for a country fighting to survive in the First World War." The abdication of the last tsar, Nicholas II, brought the sequence to an end. Others contrast the joie de vivre of the older tsarina, Marie Fedorovna, with her daughter-in-law Alexandra's shy and domestic spirituality. Lavishly extravagant eggs commemorate public events that now seem little more than staging posts on the march to revolution. It would see him exploiting, and extending, almost every jewellery technique and style available, creating eggs which reflected the lives and characters of the empresses who would receive them. Every one of these masterpieces is a slice of history, with each telling its own remarkable story." "Commissioned to produce a different egg every year, Faberge began a relentless search for novelty. ![]() They have become the most famous surviving symbols of the Romanov Empire: supreme examples of the jeweller's art, but, to some, the vulgar playthings of a decadent court on the brink of revolution. Between 18, Carl Faberge made fifty fabulous jewelled eggs - Easter presents from Russia's last two emperors to their wives.
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