ORNAMENTS AND DECORATION 433
and
the House of the Poor of the church of St. Peter, Lima, was Dona Maria
Fernandez de Cordoba, from the family of Borda, grandmother to the
minister of Peru in Washington. She was a descendant of Hernan Cortés
and of Pizarro by her ancestor Carmen Cortés.
The
pearls of Lima figure prominently in the history of the Peruvian
families. The war of independence, which ended in 1822, was followed
by the suppression of the entailed estates ; this forced a division of
the family fortunes, and it became necessary to sell the family jewels
in Europe. Thither went all the famous pearls of the Peruvian
aristocracy, whose luxury is proven by the fact that in 1780 there were
in Lima no less than two thousand private carriages.
One
of the most remarkable uses of Bohemian pearls was that of a large
triptych owned by Count Moritz of Lobkowitz and Duke of Raudnitz. It
measured six or more feet in height. The entire borders were ornamented
with pearls. The center of the triptych represented the ascension of
Christ on a chariot drawn by lambs. In the panel to the right was the
Angel Gabriel, and to the left the Virgin Mary praying. The borders
and lettering were magnificently embroidered and decorated in Bohemian
pearls. This object probably dated from the sixteenth or early part of
the seventeenth century. It was estimated by one of the authors to
contain at least one hundred thousand pearls.
Madame
Zelie Nuttal, the great Maya scholar, personally writes that pearls are
not mentioned either as articles of tribute or of decoration in
ancient Mexican codices; possibly a lack of fine, hard instruments
with which to drill holes in pearls may have caused them to be
comparatively little used in personal adornment. Neither do they
appear to have been found incrusted in prehistoric objects, and we
have no written evidence of their having been used in this way. We do
not know of any instances of the wearing of pearls by the Indian women,
but the women of the higher classes used to wear them profusely, more
especially drop-earrings and pendants. Madame Nuttal also communicates
as follows :
Bernadino de Sahagun states: "There are also pearls in New Spain, and they are familiar to everybody. They are named epyollotti,1
which means the heart of the shell, because they are formed in the
shell of the oyster." In Molina's dictionary "seed-pearls" are named
"piciltic epyollotti," which means "water-stars," a poetical name,
composed of the word a = att = water, and cit-tallin = star. The latter
name leads us to infer the possibility that the "star-skirt, or skirt
of, or with stars," the "cittallin icue" of the living image of the
goddess "Tlamateculitti" was decorated with pearls, although it
is only described (Book II, chap. 36) as being "of leather, cut into
strips at the bottom (forming a fringe), at the end of each of which
hung a small shell named 1From eptli—shell, and yollott—heart, i.e., life.
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