Cartier Enters the Temple: Inside the New Exhibition at the Musei Capitolini

Cartier and the Myth: Jewels in Dialogue with the Capitoline Masters

Rome has an abundance of gods, myths and gold, but Cartier waltzing into Palazzo Nuovo at the Capitoline Museums feels like an especially theatrical collision of worlds. Cartier e il Mito takes some of the Maison’s most iconic creations and places them face-to-face with the very marble deities that inspired them. It’s a kind of sacred union between ancient imagination and modern savoir-faire, a place where poetry meets exquisite craftsmanship and an exhibition like this can truly flourish.

This story began almost a century ago, in 1923, when Louis Cartier traveled through Italy with his family, wandering Venice, Ferrara, Siena, Ravello, and finally Pompeii. Europe’s taste at the time was drunk on the neo-archaeological style – a revival fueled by collectors like Castellani – and Cartier soaked it in like a sponge. Ancient forms, friezes, scrolls, mythology, geometry: everything became raw material and inspiration. This is the backbone of Cartier’s “classical aesthetic,” a kind of vocabulary the brand was loyal to.

The exhibition opens with a cinematic staircase by Dante Ferretti, the Oscar-winning scenographer whose work always looks like a dream caught between ruins and theatre. It instantly throws you out of twenty-first-century Rome and into a space where myths breathe again.

Once inside, the conversation between the jewelry and the sculptures comes to light. Cartier’s early twentieth-century designers were obsessed with order, with the geometry the Greeks believed governed both beauty and the cosmos. They borrowed heavily from mythology, though always in a way that felt distilled rather than literal. Cupid’s arrows, Hermes’ wings, the abstract symbols of travel, desire, vengeance, heroism — the influences appear, vanish, then reappear in a bracelet, a brooch, a tiara.

There’s a spellbinding detour into the world of Hephaestus, the ancient craftsman-God. According to Homer, he once apprenticed under the Cyclopes for nine years in a cave — a detail Cartier clearly adored. Hephaestus becomes an invisible guide through the rooms, the reminder that every jewel begins as a clash of elements: minerals from the earth, fire to bend them, hands trained to persuade them into shape.

Another great curatorial choice is a room where Aphrodite gets her own fragrant sanctuary. Literally. It is called “Il Profumo di Afrodite,” is centered around a statue of the goddess herself and perfumed so richly that you feel wrapped in the air of another world. You can circle her, the room breathing with this soft, intoxicating scent, and suddenly you’re reminded that the ancients didn’t separate ornament from experience — what they wore, smelled, touched, believed all folded into one.

Other myths ripple through the display: Medea and her terrible, glittering fury; Ariadne with her tragic devotion; the mischievous Dionysian world that inspired Cartier’s famous sautoir in 1914, linked explicitly to wine, ecstasy, and excess. You start to understand how Cartier used myth not as decoration but as attitude — power, seduction, rebellion, destiny — worn around the neck or on the wrist.

INSPIRATION
Rome: Capitoline Museums Experience with Multimedia Video

The immersive design helps, too! Clouds drift across the ceiling. Music floats. Hard stones and metals are set against light and movement. Cartier’s own perfumer, Mathilde Laurent, adds olfactory notes throughout the show. The whole immersive experience feels less like entering the inner chamber of someone’s imagination — maybe Louis Cartier’s, maybe your own.

What’s striking is how well the jewels hold their own against the ancient sculptures. Palazzo Nuovo is a heavy place — centuries of white marble heroes and gods who have seen too much. Yet Cartier’s pieces don’t shrink. They answer back. You can trace the line from ancient kosmos — the Greek word that meant both “ornament” and “order of the universe” — to a modern necklace that gleams like it remembers the sun that birthed it.

By the time you leave, it’s clear why this exhibition matters. It’s more than luxury. It’s about how ideas survive. How a line in a vase, a curve in a temple, a myth whispered in a cave, can cross centuries and resurface in a bracelet in 1919 or a ring in 1976 or a perfume-laced marble room in 2025.

If you care about design, myth, beauty, or just the way Rome likes to pull the ancient into the present without asking permission, this exhibition is worth every minute.

And honestly? Palazzo Nuovo hasn’t felt this awake in years.

Cartier e il Mito – Musei Capitolini, Palazzo Nuovo
Piazza del Campidoglio 1, Rome

from 14 November 2025 – 15 March 2026

Hours:
Daily 9.30am–7.30pm (last entry 1 hour before).

Tickets:
Exhibition only €8/€7.
Capitoline Museums + Exhibition €20/€13.50 (non-residents); €15.50/€12.50 (residents).

More info:
museicapitolini.org

Related Post:

Rome’s Capitoline Museums Host a Monographic Exhibition Dedicated to Fidia Tony Cragg’s Newest Exhibition Opens at the Baths of Diocletian “Picasso the Foreigner” Exhibition at Museo del Corso From the Heart to the Hands: Dolce&Gabbana Exhibition at Palazzo delle Esposizioni