Jewelry

The celebrated series of lectures that the Italian writer Italo Calvino prepared just before his death in 1985 were the starting point for the Van Cleef & Arpels exhibition “Time, Nature, Love,” scheduled to open Nov. 30 in Milan.

That may be an unusual inspiration for a jewelry exhibition, but Nicolas Bos, the company’s chief executive and creative director, said he wants it to be “an experience for visitors which should be very far from what they would experience or expect in a jewelry store or workshop.”

Museum shows of jewelry are nothing new. Cartier has been doing them for a generation, most recently displaying part of its enviable archive this summer at the Palace Museum in Beijing. “Bulgari: The Story, The Dream,” which detailed the history of the marque and its Dolce Vita heyday, ended early this month in Rome, following a similar show at the Kremlin Museums in Moscow.

In contrast, the Van Cleef show is to take a more abstract approach, with its curator, Alba Cappellieri, selecting themes — and jewelry pieces that illustrate them — from what Calvino wrote were his eternal values for literature: lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility, multiplicity and consistency. (The lectures were printed in 1988 as “Six Memos for the Next Millennium.”)

Familiar Van Cleef creations, including variations of its famous Zip necklace, jeweled watches and minaudières, are to be displayed in the princely apartments and tapestry rooms of the Palazzo Reale, with scenography by Johanna Grawunder, an architect, artist and furniture designer from the United States.

This layered, intellectually curious approach was promulgated by Mr. Bos who, unusually in the jewelry industry, has been both the business and artistic leader of the Richemont-owned jewelry house since 2013. But it reflects his background, from the beginning of his career at the Fondation Cartier to curating the Natural Talent pavilion last year at the inaugural Homo Faber exhibition in Venice.

Not to diminish the importance of craftsmanship or provenance (one of the show’s stars is a necklace that once belonged to Begum Salimah Aga Khan, a former wife of the wealthy religious leader), but examining jewelry’s role in a wider cultural role is the aim of the exhibition.

“The important thing for me is not so much to create a beautiful display of rare jewels,” Mr. Bos said, “as it is to present these pieces as proper expressions of art and culture, crystallizing the spirit of the times in which they were created.” He also said that such context will be a way of “enriching the way our creations are perceived.”

Ms. Cappellieri — a professor at the Politecnico di Milano and director of the Museo del Gioiello in Vincenza, Italy, which bills itself as Italy’s only museum dedicated to jewelry — shares the approach, Mr. Bos said. He described her selections as emphasizing “the connections between jewelry, fashion and other forms of decorative arts, as well as literature, over the decades. And she has done it with a very personal — and very Italian — vision.”