In the mid-twentieth century Italian designer Aloisia Rucellai remade antique adornments to meet modern standards of taste. Today, her grand-daughter is championing Rucellai’s sleek, surreal, and unforgettable creations among a new generation of aesthetes.
A diamond and gold brooch shows two unusual creatures, like angels with outstretched wings and intertwined dolphin tails. Like the messenger Triton from Greek mythology, who was half-fish, half-man, these gilded creatures were born from the sea. The brooch was designed by Aloisia Rucellai, an Italian raised among the waterways of Venice, then later transplanted to Florence, where she set up her studio in the 1950s and produced surreal adornments in gold and precious stones, melding human and animal figures.
Rucellai’s jewelry firm, Aloisia, survives to this day, headed by her son, the humble and dedicated designer Simone Rucellai, and having flown largely under the radar. That is, until Simone’s daughter—also named Aloisia, and who is an art PR agent based in London—became involved to reinvigorate the brand. She began scouring the archive of more than six hundred of her grandmother’s drawings, sharing photographs of them online as she built up the company’s social media presence.
One of Rucellai’s designs, realized in physical form, went viral: a green translucent enamel handbag with a clasp that takes the form of intertwined snakes. It exploded across social media, being shared tens of thousands of times (including in our Antique of the Day series), and the younger Aloisia found herself becoming the official advocate for the brand among a new generation of enthusiasts.
The act of making something old seem new again is a theme in the Rucellai family’s creative process. Matriarch Aloisia Rucellai first became interested in jewelry design when she inherited a few family heirloom pieces—gaudy, ornate necklaces that no longer fit the style of the time, as modern design began to overtake old Victorian trends. Rucellai would take these pieces apart and re-create them in a sleeker, more modern taste. Soon her friends began asking her to do the same for them—to make their own precious heirlooms wearable again alongside the day’s more minimalist, cutting-edge fashions.
Drawing of Sirene Alate (Winged Mermaids) brooch, c. 1980, alongside the realized piece of jewelry, 1980, both by Rucellai. Brooch: gold and diamonds; height 2 3⁄4, width 3 1/8 inches.
Rucellai was a designer with a remarkable imagination. Her influences are difficult to trace—somehow her designs are at once surrealist and classical, two styles in opposition to each other. Clamshells and cherubs adorn vine-like metalwork, like the background figures in an Italian Renaissance fresco. A Schiaparelli-like sleight of hand transforms a snake into a pendant. “She would lose herself in her creativeness, I’m told,” granddaughter Aloisia says. Though she never met her grandmother, she remains on a quest to talk to those who knew her and to find out what she was like.
What she’s uncovered is that Rucellai grew up with “extravagant cultural gatherings” taking place in her family home—parties whose attendees included such artistic luminaries as Marc Chagall. An active social life would always be part of her day-to-day. She married a count, traveled in elite social circles, and eventually took jewelry commissions from prominent women, including Baroness Carmen Thyssen and Charlotte Ford. But, her persona was equal parts social butterfly and isolated artist: Simone Rucellai recalls his mother sitting at her desk for hours, drawing, never saying a word.
Perhaps the greatest influence on Rucellai’s career was the jewelry designer Fulco Santostefano della Cerda, duke of Verdura (1899–1978). In the 1920s Verdura earned acclaim for his iconic Maltese Cross cuffs, designed for Coco Chanel. Rucellai began working with Verdura in the late 1960s, and he helped her “clean up her [craftsmanship],” according to her granddaughter. They worked together into the 1970s, and the following decade she handed the firm over to her technically gifted son.
“He’s a perfectionist who grew up with a creative mother,” Aloisia says of her father. With her keen business sense, she’s now on a journey to reassemble the pieces of the puzzle—to weave the story of her grandmother’s vision and her father’s craftsmanship into the history of important Italian jewelry design. It’s an untold story that deserves telling: described by the people who knew her as “confident” and “stern,” Aloisia Rucellai made her way in the jewelry world by sticking to her unique vision. And that vision has proven to be timeless: in the 1960s, her friends all craved upcycled Rucellai necklaces of their own. Today, Gen Z-ers are going wild for Rucellai’s Snake handbags. We’re proud to help re-open this chapter of Italian design history.
