The fear of losing one's head returns from time to time. More precisely, perhaps, it never truly disappears; it merely retreats into silence, lying dormant for a while. The image of a head suddenly breaking away and running off may seem strange. Yet it illuminates another kind of fear—one of a psychological order: the separation of body and spirit, the distorted estrangement of one from the other.
By the end of the nineteenth century, the necklace often came to embody this anxiety. The tensions that become palpable in a given moment—their psychological unrest, their openness to the unknown—are not expressed solely through literature, for example. Jewelers, like everyone else, belong to that same world of emotions and questions, of phobias and laughter. The Pre-Raphaelite painters, too, portrayed figures adorned with jewelry rich in symbolic meaning.
It was not uncommon for them to paint women wearing coral necklaces around their necks. And we should remember that, in Greek mythology, when Medusa was beheaded by Perseus, coral was born from the blood that flowed from the severing of her head from her body. Corals are marine animals capable of trapping fish. Though they resemble underwater sculptures, they are, in fact, living creatures that feed on flesh.
They are, then, hunters born from a mythological decapitation—carnivorous beings that, in the form of jewelry, adorn the necks that bind the head to the rest of the body.
