Taming a Bezoar Stone

While the precise travels of our bezoar will always remain a mystery, its history encompasses a multitude of exchanges, moving it gradually from Asia to Europe. Like so many similar exotic objects, somewhere amongst these exchanges, the stone was clothed in golden filigree, framing it in a new way. Was this done to convince buyers of its worth or was it a whim of a new Dutch owner looking to show off an expensive purchase? Like so many aspects of this object, we cannot know for sure, but we can look at the different ways bezoar stones were transformed after leaving the forest.

Within the Malay world, little seems to have been done to frame or transform bezoars. This may have been for several reasons. Unlike in Europe, bezoars would not have been perceived as exotic objects requiring “Europeanizing” to make them suitable for use or display.Anna Grasskamp, Objects in Frames: Displaying Foreign Collectibles in Early Modern China and Europe (Berlin: Dietrich Reimer Verlag, 2019), 11. They were also frequently used as tools by Malay shamans and magicians.Farouk Yahya, Magic and Divination in Malay Illustrated Manuscripts, Arts and Archaeology of the Islamic World 6 (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2016), 28. This required their surfaces to be readily available, since they were often rubbed across the body during rituals, worn against the skin as amulets, or grated for medicinal tinctures. When worn, they were typically hidden from sight, tied in cloth bands to the body underneath the clothing.Skeat, Malay Magic, 277, 441.

Other cultures, however, took a less minimalist approach to decorating these objects. In India, the example of the golden bowl with attached bezoar (Figure 1), turns a prized organic object into an even more precious artifact. The object is now a purpose-built vessel, perhaps for the daily ‘bezoar in rose water’ tincture Orta describes in his treatise on Indian drugs.Orta and Ficalho, Colloquies on the Simples & Drugs of India, 364. In Portuguese controlled Hormoz, bezoar stones were framed in elaborate strips of undulating gold filigree (Figure 2). In Western Europe, bezoars were framed and mounted in a variety of different ways, depending on the purpose and the desired effect. This act of transformation can be interpreted in multiple ways – as a means of taming an exotic, foreign object, creating a more dramatic or dynamic display, changing its tactile or sensual qualities, making it more functional, and adding or highlighting value.

The example from the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna (Figure 3) featuring a bezoar stone mounted in a tree with a golden pig below creates a dramatic setting for the stone while also hinting at the stone’s provenance from within an animal. The inclusion of a cowrie shell as a base both increases the exoticism of the tableau, while comfortably domesticating the foreign material, separating it from its mollusk origin and turning it into an abstract decorative element – a subtle representation of a forest floor or meadow.

Besides providing interesting ornamental tableaux for a ruler’s curiosity cabinet or fabricating clever stories of provenance, frames also created value and celebrated the materials they were framing. The goblet formed from rhinoceros horn, set with a bezoar, and mounted on the primly turned gold foot (Figure 4) provides one example of this. The severity of the European mount serves to highlight the asymmetric curves and Chinese motifs of the cup. This admiration is also found in the brilliantly enamel-framed bezoar goblet also from the Kunsthistorisches Museum (Figure 5). Here its mount hearkens to the elaborate enameled passages of Renaissance jewels. This rustic, uncomfortably organic object is visually transformed into a precious stone, as if it were an emerald or baroque pearl. Simultaneously, the typically European motifs highlight the otherness of the object, both taming it and celebrating its strangeness.Smentek in Petra ten-Doesschate Chu, Qing Encounters: Artistic Exchanges between China and the West (Los Angeles, California: Getty Research Institute, 2015), 47. Its shape would have encouraged the user to cradle it in the hand, to experience the different tactile sensation of the cold, hard enamel and the light, smoothly textured concretion.

Since bezoars were primarily valued for their magico-medicinal qualities, the framing and mounting of these objects often had a highly functional component. The enameled bezoar is also a goblet, rendering any poison placed within it benign (or so its owner hoped), while the stone bound in filigree can be worn as a protective amulet or steeped in water or wine to create a healing tonic. The rhinoceros’ horn goblet with its fixed bezoar serves a similar purpose. Bezoars were worked into functional jewelry, set in rings and necklaces, sending a message that this person was important enough to be worth harming and wealthy enough to be able to protect themselves. Bezoars may have been physically exchanged between the Malay world and the West, but approaches to framing were not. Bezoars, like so many rarities, were reinterpreted and customized to fit the demands of their new milieu.