ELEPHANT brooch

Enamelled bronze brooch, gold-plated.
Handcrafted in Paris using ancient techniques, including lost-wax casting and high-fire enamel.
Dimensions: 5.4 cm (H).
This jewel is entirely made by hand in Elisabeth Riveiro’s Paris workshop.
Your piece will be delivered in an eco-friendly AMBART box together with a concise brand-story note about Elisabeth Riveiro, available in English, French or Spanish.

The “Elephant” Brooch offers many styling possibilities, each according to your taste. It can be worn on a blazer or coat lapel, close to the heart, or placed on a knit sweater or a simple dress. For a more contemporary look, it may be styled on a shirt collar or worn asymmetrically on a jacket. It also looks beautiful on a felt hat, adding an elegant, unexpected touch. Finally, it may be used to secure a shawl, a cashmere wrap or a poncho on the shoulder — a refined, modern echo of ancient fibulae.

For more than forty-five years, French artist and artisan Elisabeth Riveiro has been creating jewellery using ancient, time-honoured techniques such as lost-wax casting, engraving, repoussé, hammering and high-fire enamel.

Her story began in the early 1980s at the Avignon festival, where she sold handmade resin pieces during her school holidays and met the painter Ernesto Riveiro, who was modelling small protective amulets in metal. In 1981, he began sculpting animals in wax; Elisabeth cast them in bronze, chiselled them, soldered them — and sold them. Their first professional show, with barely twenty pieces, was a success, and Elisabeth established herself as a jewellery artisan.

Driven by passion and self-taught perseverance, she trained with sculptors, studied enamel at the École de Paris, learned gilding and soldering, and installed her first casting machine in 1985. Over the years, she and Ernesto created around800 models, keeping only the ones that truly resonated with them.

Her artistic language has been shaped not only by nature but also by the museums she loves — especially the small specialised museums of Paris, the Musée d’Orsay (with which she has collaborated), the Quai Branly, Beaubourg, and the Palais de Tokyo. These collections nourished her sensitivity to forms, textures, and ancient motifs, reinforcing the archaic yet contemporary essence of her jewellery.

Ernesto was “the mind”; Elisabeth was “the hands”. Together, they developed a vocabulary of geometric, zoomorphic and symbolic forms, creating pieces that often feel as though they could have been made “in the night of times”.

Today, Elisabeth continues to cast, chisel, enamel and finish every piece herself. Her workshop remains the heart of her life and her craft. Many clients have collected her creations for decades, cherishing them as small talismans linked to personal memories — jewels she feels deeply attached to, « body and soul ».

Elisabeth Riveiro’s jewellery is rooted in a lifelong fascination with the forms, creatures, and symbols found in nature, art, and museum collections. For more than four decades, she and the painter Ernesto Riveiro explored encyclopaedias, galleries, and the small specialised museums of Paris, captivated by the diversity of animals, birds and fish, and by the ancient motifs preserved across cultures.

Lost-wax casting — a venerable technique practiced for centuries in Africa, South America and Asia — lies at the heart of her work. Through this ancestral process, each piece becomes an interpretation rather than a copy: a distilled form that feels both archaic and contemporary, as if it could belong to a museum cabinet of curiosities or to modern artistic design.

From these influences emerged a personal vocabulary of textures, lines and symbols: abstract signs, protective eyes, stylised figures, imaginary creatures and sacred thresholds. Every jewel seeks simplicity — the most difficult of all achievements, she says — and carries an expressive, mysterious, quietly powerful presence. Worn on the body, each piece becomes a small companion, imbued with memory and meaning.

No special maintenance is required. Each piece is handcrafted using techniques that give the jewellery exceptional durability. Simply store your jewellery away from prolonged humidity when not worn. Natural ageing may occur over time, as with all metals, and contributes to the beauty and authenticity of the piece. Many of Elisabeth Riveiro’s pieces have been worn for over forty years and remain in excellent condition.

Details

If you have any special requests or need assistance, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us. You can contact us via WhatsApp at (+34) 664 424 384 or by email at boutique@ambart-palma.com. We’re here to help!