Fit for a monarch

Platinum is one of the world's rarest metals and fiendishly difficult to master. Sarah Royce-Greensill looks back at its discovery and meets the jewellers brave enough to use it

- Sarah Royce-Greensill

IN the late 18th century, Louis XVI of France declared platinum 'the only metal fit for kings', after his royal goldsmith Marc-Etienne Janety fashioned a platinum-and-glass sugar bowl now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, US. Janety was one of the first European silversmiths to master this mysterious metal. In doing so, he set in motion a trend for dazzling platinum designs that transformed the contents of jewellery boxes for centuries to come.

Not only is platinum one of the world's rarest metals, it is also prized for its hardness, brilliance, malleability and resistance to oxidation and corrosion. Ancient Egyptians used platinum-laced gold in burial artefacts and pre-Columbian civilisations worked with platinum alloys. But Spanish conquistadors regarded it as an impurity-naming it platina or 'little silver'. In the 16th century, Italian scholar Julius Caesar Scaliger wrote about a new-found metal 'which no fire nor any Spanish artifice has yet been able to liquefy'. In 1748, in his first observations of platinum, Spanish naval officer Antonio de Ulloa dismissed it as a hindrance that interfered with gold mining. Two years later, British scientist William Brownrigg's detailed account of Colombian platinum samples led to its identification as a new chemical element.