L’ATLANTIDE

Leaving the shores of Terra Ferma and its earthly wonders,

Van Cleef & Arpels plunges to the depths of the sea to find
Atlantis.
The House has rediscovered the mythical story of this lost
paradise that was submerged by the sea; a kingdom of beauty,
abundance and brilliant civilisation, and has called upon its
utmost creativity and skill to unveil the mystery.
Thus, Van Cleef & Arpels recreates the universe of this wondrous
isle where Neptune reigned with his queen Cleita and their court of
nymphs, mermaids and other mythical sea-animals. Fantastical
creatures, wondrous fish and extraordinary fauna arise from a
great wave of freshness and imagination, to form a collection of
fascinating jewels that reveals new figures and designs, using
intriguing precious gems.

Press contact:
Didem Turkmen
Rawaj International FZ-LLC
Tel. +971 4 391 3560 / 0248 – Fax : +971 4 391 3564
Email: didem.t@rawajinternational.com
The Odyssey to Atlantis

The Odyssey to Atlantis begins with the exploration of this secret universe and the
discovery, amidst the ocean waters and undercurrents, of the fabulous creatures that play in
the shining surf, such as Calypso, a pendant whose centrepiece is composed of a bloc of
onyx, set with diamond and white gold coral-like branches, Héra, a clip where Burmese ruby
spheres and diamonds adorn a 17, 92 carat natural pearl, or Maéra, a necklace made of a
gradation of sapphires that highlight an incredible black opal, alive with green and blue sparks
of colour.

The Amentha necklace features three lavender blue chalcedony stones, delicately set in a
subtle combination of blue and pink hues which seem to sparkle like sapphire bubbles around
the neck whilst the open structure of the Amphérès necklace (there is no clasp), fans out in an
incredibly supple sea spray of diamonds and sapphires, cabochon rubies and white pearls.

More treasures imitate the sparkle of sun on water; the Coquillage clip whose diamonds seem
suspended in a precious swirl and ends with a briolette diamond, or the Océan rings, one of
which boasts an exceptional 60 carat white cultured pearl set with diamonds in white gold
while the other is adorned with a spring green 20, 44 carat tourmaline.

Out of the silent blue depths swims the Oranda clip representing a lion headed fish, whose
body is entirely set with diamonds and whose fins are afire with cabochon rubies. He does not
disturb the slumber of the Nymphe endormie as she curls up on a magnificent black opal pendant.

Amentha Clip
Cleita’s jewels

The voyage continues as Van Cleef & Arpels unveils Cleita’s jewels. Cleita, the ideal spouse,
mother and goddess whose intriguing treasures reveal a woman of timeless style...Treasures
such as the Néphélée ring and necklace and its magnificent star sapphires or the diamonds of
the Cleita suite: a tiara and a necklace in white gold set with diamonds, each adorned with a
sumptuous rose cut diamond, and a between–the–fingers ring whose precious ribbon entwines
an elegant pear cut diamond.

Plunging to the indigo depths, the Anthélia suite, all in diamonds and sapphires, is inspired
by the curls of the underwater plants, while the Charis necklace deploys the transparent
swirls of a jellyfish’s umbrella. The bold Thétis necklace, made up of a supple ribbon of
emeralds and diamonds, brings to mind the scintillating strands of sea-weed dancing in the
undercurrents, and the Thétis ring, highlights a splendid, 32.67 carat, mint green tourmaline.

Surging to the surface with scintillating grace, the Haliades bracelet and ring represent two
fishes, united in a diamond sea foam to symbolise happiness and the bond of love, while the
minaudière shows them playing next to emerald studded sea grass. Lastly, like drops from a
wave of sea foam, the cuff bracelet, hair clip and ear-clips of the Aphrodite suite seem to
splash the air with diamonds.

Haliades bracelet
Kingdom of Neptune

Sailing the world’s ocean, Van Cleef & Arpels discovers the Kingdom of Neptune, a
fabulous territory where the god of the all the seas appears on his chariot drawn by surf
coloured horses...One of these stallions is represented by a spirited bracelet and pendant,
where the horse’s mane transforms into a cascade of blue sapphires, diamonds and natural
pearls; or another, whose splendid mane spills across the round cover of a compact mirror, in
a wave of sapphires, diamonds and mother of pearl…

Amongst the mythological creatures of this kingdom, the Amphitrite clip represents a
delicate seahorse made of pink gold, pink sapphires and diamonds, floating mysteriously in
the light. On his path is Océanide; a clip whose movement transforms the creature into a
flower in a swirl of blue sapphires, Europe; a gossamer necklace made of diamond droplets
and the Néréïde clip representing a wondrous nymph of yellow gold set with yellow and
white diamonds, gazing at the fabulous peach hued 7 carat spinal that rests in her open hand.

The ocean’s blue hues transform as one plunges deeper into it, as do the fascinating tones of
the opal and grey pearls of the Cyllène necklace. The Scylla necklace - named after the sea
nymph who was changed into a dragon – is intriguing: open and entirely articulated, it
represents a dragon-snake that softly winds around the neck and whose head and tail can be
transformed into two mysterious clips…

Néréides clip
Atlantide is a splendour. (…). Its riches are infinite. Its seabed abounds with
nature’s goodness. ” Gilles Lapouge

Atlantis is a splendour. The size of two continents, this empire dating from the dawn of time
reigns beyond the Pillars of Hercules, in the furthest reaches of the Atlantic Ocean. Its riches
are infinite. Its seabed abounds with nature’s goodness. Through its fields and forests roam
elephants, squirrels and every creature of earth and sky. Its countryside is filled with sweet
scent. Its cities built of white, red and black rock possess the beauty of barbaric marquetry.
This enormous empire is composed of five concentric rings of land separated by rings of
ocean. Its rulers are descendents of the titan Atlas, brother of Prometheus, whose daughters,
guardians of the golden apples in the Garden of the Hesperides in the Canary Islands, are
called the Atlantides.
At the centre of the capital city rises a monument made of ivory and metal. This is the temple
of the god Poseidon, whose conch-shaped chariot is pulled by golden-maned horses. The
shrine is built around a stele upon which is inscribed the law of Atlantis. It is at the foot of
this stele that priests slit the throats of sacred bulls.
Upon this imposing labyrinth of sea, sky and earth, engineers constructed vertiginous works
of art: bridges and locks, subterranean lakes, canals, gangways, towers, roads, tunnels and
harbours.
Atlantis is a Venice of outrageous proportion. Like something out of a picture by Piranesi or
one of his visions. Enormous fleets glide along the canals, for Atlanteans are seafaring people,
merchants and warriors. Its divinities are water gods: the Nereids, among them the
magnificent Amphitrite, seductress of Poseidon; the Oceanids; the Nymphs and their
procession of dolphins, seahorses and tritons.
Passing through porticos in the silky softness of twilight, we picture elegant youths – slightly
capricious, perhaps – dressed in tulle and netting, flowing tunics, satin dotted with tourmaline,
aquamarine, opals and sapphires as blue as the sea. The gods had the novel idea of endowing
the island with a metal unknown to man: orichalcum, nearly as precious as gold, and fire-like.
What mortal with an ounce of sense wouldn’t wish to own an orichalcum necklace, a ring or a
pendant made of flame? Who wouldn’t gladly sell half his soul for a bit of orichalcum finery?
We would like to take a look around this sea kingdom, but how do we get there? The roads
leading to the great empire are not to be found on any map. Even its discoverer, Plato, never
saw it, though this fact in no way diminishes his merit, since finding a land that no one can
see requires a great deal of genius. Moreover, Plato can be excused for his ignorance: Atlantis
sunk beneath the waves thirteen millennia ago, nine thousand years before Plato’s birth in
Athens.
So? Did Plato play a trick on us? Was the empire of the sea a mere product of his lyrical
mind? Is it an illusion, an object of desire, an intellectual distraction, a hoax? Plato, the
greatest philosopher of all time, is anything but a prankster, however. He was never one for
speaking nonsense.
In Timaeus and Critias, he takes great pains to convince us that Atlantis is a reality. He
provides details. He names his sources: in ancient times, Egyptian priests of the temple of
Sais first spoke of Atlantis to another Greek philosopher, Solon. From then on, the secret
travelled from philosopher to philosopher before finally reaching Plato. Without a doubt, if
we value Plato’s word, Atlantis is no fable. Atlantis stands firmly on our shores, at the
threshold of human history.
In Critias, Plato describes the sinking of Atlantis: such a jewel is not to everyone’s liking. Its
prosperity and great beauty, its rivers of precious stones and its mines of orichalcum, its
princes, and its magnificent women… all of this fosters jealousy. Zeus, who never much liked
his brother Poseidon, worries that the Atlanteans, heady with glory, have forgotten the rules
of wisdom and modesty. He puts an end to the adventure. He proceeds with a certain
brutality: in the space of one night and one day, an earthquake sends Atlantis plummeting to
the bottom of the sea. And since Zeus appreciates a job well done, he adds a flood (or three or
four) for good measure. Critias has nothing more to say on the matter. The story ends
abruptly, whether because Plato was weary and approaching death, or because the end of the
tale has similarly vanished into the abyss.
Sad and fateful day! The great island sits at the bottom of the sea. The maritime empire is no
more. But mourning does not come to Atlantis. It bides its time a few centuries after Plato's
death before leaving the watery depths and embarking upon its long resurrection. Never was it
more active than the moment it ceased to exist. Rather than languishing peacefully in its
eternity of blue, Atlantis floats to the surface. It moves. It refuses to stand still. It migrates.
Atlantis is a nomad. It travels on every compass rose, between north and south, Orient and
Occident.
Civilizations follow its every move. For twenty centuries, an army of scribes and scholars,
monks, astrologists and magi, geographers, geologists and poets pursue it. From time to time,
its appearance is announced here or there, generally in maritime settings, in isles or geological
zones conducive to tumult.
The Canary Islands are an obvious choice. Everything seems in their favour. They are made
up of seven islands, a sacred number. Quite popular throughout antiquity, they possessed the
Garden of the Hesperides and its golden apples. Later, they are forgotten. No one knows what
became of them. It is not until 1402 that a Norman sailor, Jean de Béthencourt, catches sight
of them again. There, he is received by an unknown people, the Guanches, who are, of course,
the Atlanteans.
There are other candidates. Crete, in the Aegean Sea, has its supporters, among them Jacques
Cousteau, who often plumbed its inlets in search of Cyclopean walls. There is no lack of
arguments in favour of Crete: as early as the third millennium, at the dawn of history, it
formed a « thalassocracy » (or sea empire), as did Atlantis. And at the centre of the island, in
its labyrinth, reigned the Minotaur, the monstrous bull risen from the sea by Poseidon and
who feasted upon young women and men offered up by Athens every seven years. Another
coincidence: the dazzling Minoan civilization disappeared in 1500 BC, following a volcanic
eruption on Santorini.
The most brilliant minds join the debate, put their two cents in. At the beginning of the 19th
century, the naturalist Georges Cuvier reminds us that, nine thousand years prior, the natural
dam of the Bosporus, located on the Eurasian tectonic plate, collapsed, causing the flood
mentioned in the Sumerian epic of Gilgamesh. Nine thousand years brings us right around the
time of the sinking of Atlantis.
Scholars are unable to follow all of the lost continent’s activity. It moves too quickly, it is
capricious, lacks steadfastness. Twenty times it was spotted; twenty times it slipped away.
Some caught sight of it near Gibraltar, most closely following Plato’s original text; others
even saw it in the Bay of Cadiz, not far from the Atlas Mountains which bear the name of
Atlantis’s first king. The island of Cyprus, the Azores, Sardinia all have their partisans.
The seekers’ subtlety is peerless. One of them swears that after the flood, Atlantis foundered
at the other side of the ocean. He finds traces of it in Rio de Janeiro, on an enormous boulder
called la Pedra de Galvea, shaped like the head of an Atlantean and decorated with
indecipherable graffiti of a Phoenician appearance.
Further complicating matters is the fact that the survival of Atlantis does not depend solely on
historical and geographical elements. It is also revelatory of religious or political
preoccupations. In the 17th century, a reputed Swedish scholar, Olaüs Rudbeck, realizes that
Atlantis is at his doorstep. The magnificent empire is, quite simply, Sweden.
Another possibility emerges: Biblical scholars investigate the matter and quickly come to the
conclusion that following the catastrophe, a group of Atlanteans slipped in amongst the
earliest Jews: Jericho, cosmic phenomena, divine wrath, an exiled tribe - Plato's story holds
up.
The Hermeticists are not to be outdone: in their opinion, the Atlanteans possessed esoteric
knowledge. Hence, it suffices to decrypt – as only they know how – the hieroglyphics left by
the Atlanteans on the pyramids of Egypt, in the caves of the Hittites, in the intertwined
arabesques of Irish art or on the islands of the Pacific in order to reconstruct the beginnings of
human history. The alchemists devote their energies to orichalcum: to them, this flame-like
metal represents the gold of the philosopher’s stone the ancient philosophers of Prague’s
Golden Street collected in their alembics.
A fourth family of Atlanteans accounts for sacred places so foreign to human memory it is as
if they were sculpted by no one at all, or perhaps by gods of the abyss. Such are the stone
giants who watch over the vast Pacific on Easter Island, off the Chilean coast. Or the
megaliths of Brittany, the dolmens and the menhirs, whose dimensions defy all human
enterprise. A bit further north, in England, the site of Stonehenge plunges us into a similar
state of wonder : the alignment of its steles depicts geometrical forms so precise and so
learned that they no doubt constitute a clock marking the passage of geological, historical, and
cosmological time.
Numerous novels, films, plays and comic books borrow from Atlantis. Pierre Benoit’s novel,
The Queen of Atlantis, is famous. In it, Plato’s city is transported to the Ahaggar Mountains in
the Sahara. There, a young woman reigns in ornate palaces of unspeakable luxury. Her name
is Antinea. She wears « a tunic of netting glazed in gold, ever so light and held barely in place
by a muslin sash embroidered with irises of black pearls. » Though she may be beautiful, her
habits are reprehensible. Her favourite past time is seducing young French officers who come
her way. She takes their lives, embalms them and deposits their exquisite corpses in niches
found in the « hall of red marble ».
Pierre Benoit’s novel is quite beautiful, but it is unfaithful to the genius of the founding tale.
He erects his Atlantis in the ground, at the heart of the African continent, far from any shore,
while Plato evokes a city of waves and spray, of tempests and tranquillity, of sea foam and
ships and harbours. The Romantic and the Symbolist movements concoct a far more precise
impression of Atlantis: the images they depict celebrate the mysterious, fluid and elusive
universe of the sea.
At times, they expound upon the magnificence of the capital city, when kings and their
betrothed reigned over the vast territory of the ocean. At other times, they lead us into the
ruins of sunken cities after the catastrophe, into brightness so soft and blue it’s like caressing
the sea depths themselves, amidst palaces, marble and hypogea, temples haunted by sea
creatures, sirens, medusas, tritons and water maids – the lovely Atlantides.
Did Atlantis ever really exist? Did its temples cast their shadow on the edge of human history,
or only in Plato’s dreams? The debate is as eternal as it is futile. Whether Atlantis is a fable or
a chapter of history, it has obsessed entire civilizations for over twenty-four centuries. It
governs their fantasies, their afflictions, their sensual delights. The border between dream and
waking is tenuous, porous and forever fleeting. Mirages play an important role in the epic of
mankind. Perhaps all of history is merely that of our mirages.
Plato swears Atlantis is an episode of history. Let us trust him, but let us not forget that
history is made of « the stuff of dreams » : the countless peoples, the murmurs of waves and
swells, the heaps of gold, the regal women gliding with statuesque gestures along the island’s
shores, the temples and the luster of their gods… All of these are figments of both dream and
reality.
A lone light casts a halo over the buried shrines of the inhabitants of Atlantis, over the fleets
of Athenian sailors sent by Themistocles to face the squadrons of Xerxes. The banners of
Alexander the Great and those of the great Chinese fleets could just as easily whip in the
tempests of Atlantis, and there would be nothing unusual about finding the hundred bronze
doors of the first Babylon, the labyrinths of Crete or the clash of Ottoman and European ships
at the battle of Lepanto at the centre of the lost empire. Are reality and dream distinguishable
from one another? Plato’s tale intertwines them. He makes them one. Within the maze of the
ocean, the gods of Atlantis still clamour in the abyss, the echo of which human history
ensures never ceases to reach our ears.

Gilles Lapouge
 L’Atlantide collection

Odyssey to Atlantis

Amentha Clip
Clip in white gold set with pink and blue sapphires gradation and rubies, round diamonds

Calypso necklace
White gold set with round diamonds, onyx and red coral

Cleita’s jewels

Haliades Ring
Ring in white gold, round and baguette-cut diamonds, calibrated sapphires
Ring in white gold set with round diamonds

Kingdom of Neptune

Amphitrite Bracelet
Bracelet in pink gold set with a gradation of pink sapphires and round diamonds

Océanides Clip
Clip in white gold set with gradation of pink sapphires and round diamonds, face in a rose-cut
diamond
Clip in white gold set with blue sapphires and round diamonds, face in a rose-cut diamond
Clip in white gold set with round and baguette-cut diamonds, yellow gold set with yellow
diamonds, and face in a rose-cut diamond.

Néréides Clip

Clip in yellow gold set with yellow and white diamonds