Tiara Elizabeth of Bavaria - diamond tiara , made by Cartier in 1910 and owned by Queen Elizabeth of Bavaria of Belgium. Made of platinum and diamonds in the prevailing Art Nouveau style . Decorative ornament, consisting of curls and floral motifs, refers to the Baroque era of King Louis XV . The product is 150 mm long, and the height in the middle is more than 5 cm. A large diamond, located in the center of the upper part of the tiara, has a weight of 5.84 carats .
Tiara was acquired by Queen Elizabeth of Bavaria in 1912. In this ornament the queen was repeatedly captured in photographs and portraits. In the 1920s, Elizabeth wore the tiara as a gang in the “roaring twenties” fashion. It was in this tiara, only topped with an additional large diamond (probably removable; the diamond does not appear anywhere else), the queen was captured in the portrait of Philip de Laszlo . Elizabeth also donned her to the weddings of her grandchildren Baudouin and Albert .
After the death of Elizabeth in 1965, the tiara was inherited by her son, Leopold III , who gave it to his wife Lillian , Princess de Reti. In 1987, after the death of her husband, Lilian sold the tiara to the collection of the company Cartier, in which the jewel was made. Probably, Lilian needed funds to pay Leopold’s inheritance tax and to maintain the estate in Paris’s Argenteuil . This decision extremely outraged the public; there were opinions that Princess de Reti had no right to sell the jewel and that the tiara should have remained in the royal house. However, unlike the jewels of other European monarchical houses, in Belgium jewels of queens and princesses never belonged to the state and were not part of the assets of the royal family, but were their personal property. As a result, after the death of their owners, they, as a rule, were either sold at auction, or turned out to be outside of Belgium as part of the estate.