Incredible Iridescent Opals from the Habsburg Crown Jeweler Hit the Auction Block

A pair of classic diamond brooches set with luminous opals, made for an Austrian imperial bride, will soon be sold in Switzerland

Our survey of the magnificent royal jewels offered for sale in an upcoming auction at Sotheby’s in Geneva continues today with a piece of jewelry that belonged to a trio of royal women, including the great-niece and namesake of the iconic French queen, Marie Antoinette.

In the spring of 1814, after Napoleon’s abdication and exile to Elba, royals from the days before the Bonaparte dynasty crept carefully back on to their thrones. The monarchs of the House of Bourbon returned to France, Naples, and Spain, and the Congress of Vienna, held that autumn, redrew the map of Europe. In Paris, a grand state funeral was finally held for King Louis XVI, Queen Marie Antoinette, and their son, Louis Charles, with their only surviving daughter, the Duchess of Angoulême, in attendance. In Vienna, a few weeks later, Marie Antoinette’s only surviving sister, Queen Maria Carolina of Naples and Sicily, died of a stroke.

The family of King Francis I of the Two Sicilies, painted in 1820 by Giuseppe Cammarano, with Princess Maria Antonietta pictured third from the left (Museo di Capodimonte)

At the time of her death, Queen Maria Carolina’s son, Prince Francis, was back in Palermo, where he was serving as regent for his father. Around the time of the Queen’s passing, Francis and his wife, Infanta Maria Isabella of Spain, discovered that she was pregnant. The child would be the seventh in the family, joining a sister, Princess Maria Carolina, from Francis’s first marriage, and five more siblings–Princess Luisa Carlotta, Princess Maria Cristina, Prince Ferdinando Carlo, Prince Carlo Ferdinando, and Prince Leopoldo Beniamino–from his second.

When the little princess was born in December 1814, she already had a sister who had been named in tribute to her late grandmother, so the family decided instead to honor her great-aunt, the late French queen, by naming her Maria Antonia. For the whole of her life, her family members would call her Maria Antonietta.