A New Diamond Museum Opens in Antwerp

Antwerp has earned the right to tell this story. The city has been the heart of the diamond trade since the fifteenth century, and though it competed fiercely with Amsterdam from the seventeenth century until the Second World War, it has been the most powerful diamond trading city ever since. Today more than 80% of the world’s diamonds pass through Antwerp. A museum devoted to that history is, in a sense, long overdue — and very welcome.

The new institution is DIVA, Antwerp’s home of diamonds, jewellery and silver. It gathers the city’s oldest craft under one roof: the rough stone and the cut one, the bourse and the bench, the long line of hands through which a diamond travels before it ever reaches a finger. To walk it is to step behind the curtain of the jewellery world — the same atmosphere that has always lived in the Hoveniersstraat, the most famous street in the industry and the quiet centre of the trade.

A city that has always collected light

A diamond museum belongs in Antwerp because so much of the city already reads as one. As one of the oldest and largest ports of Europe, Antwerp drew wealth through the ages, and in the sixteenth century stood among the most important financial capitals of the world, with traders arriving from across Europe and Asia. That same prosperity made it a centre of art: the Antwerp School of Painting gave the city Rubens, Van Dyck, Jordaens and the Teniers, and the spirit they left behind still runs through its streets.

The diamond sits naturally in that company. It is the most concentrated of luxuries — the smallest object that can hold the most light — and Antwerp has spent six centuries learning to read it, weigh it and set it free. A museum simply makes that knowledge visible, and hands it to the visitor as well as the trade.

Worth the journey

The city around the museum rewards the trip. Antwerp is the cosmopolitan capital of Flanders, and its versatility surprises: diamonds, of course, but also art, history, and a place among the capitals of fashion, thanks to its Royal Academy of Fine Arts and the avant-garde designers known as the Antwerp Six.

For a house built in the heart of this city, the opening is a quiet pleasure: the craft we practise every day, finally given a public home of its own.