In Pearls for the Crown: Art, Nature, and Race in the Age of Spanish Expansion, Mónica Domínguez Torres reconstructs the itineraries of Caribbean pearls drawn from fisheries of Cubagua and Margarita—off the coast of Venezuela—as they moved through the material, symbolic, and political economies of the Spanish Empire and the broader constellation of courts tethered to Habsburg power. Central to the study is the insistence that early modern consumers were anything but naïve about the conditions under which these precious materials were extracted. As the author claims, the grueling, often coerced labor of Indigenous and African divers was not peripheral but constitutive of the gems, folded into the very objects that displayed them and the visual programs that articulated their origin stories. The book thus aligns with recent historical studies that have foregrounded the human ecologies of pearl fisheries, such as Molly Warsh’s American Baroque: Pearls and the Nature of Empire, 1492–1700 (The University of North Carolina Press, 2021), to show how the staging of pearls as courtly treasures mediated and naturalized inequitable notions of humanity that became central to these gems’ value.

The author narrows the broad field of inquiry of pearls as symbols of mastery over human agents by turning to what she terms “self-reflexive” works: objects and images that framed pearls in ways that indexed their provenance, circulation, and transformation, making visible the geopolitical configurations from which they emerged and those into which they were recast. Each chapter, accordingly, is structured around a case study of one or more artworks, allowing the author to trace these nacreous materials at the intersection of disparate contexts and bodies of scholarship—from discussions on devotional imagery, epistemic objects, and print culture, to evaluations of courtly collecting, pageantry, and festivals.

The first case study centers on the Virgin of the Sagrario of Toledo, whose mantle—encrusted with approximately seventy-eight thousand pearls—had by the seventeenth century become inseparable from the Virgin’s iconography. Pearls transformed her from a Romanesque sedes sapientiae into an image of the Immaculate Conception. Understood in early modern natural philosophy as the product of “virginal birth,” pearls emerged as especially apt for articulating this devotion, one that the Habsburgs championed as part of their universal monarchy. What renders the discussion most compelling, however, is the insistence on the convergence of local and global politics in this particular use of the gems. Toledo, sidelined after the court’s move to Madrid, sought to reassert its primacy, and the pearl-embroidered mantle of the Lady of the Sagrario became a key instrument in this campaign. The mantel mediated the link between the Virgin and the cult of San Ildefonso, a legend long mobilized to secure Toledo’s claims to spiritual authority. By encrusting Mary’s new garment with pearls wrested from colonial seas, the cathedral, as Domínguez Torres persuasively argues, not only reactivated this local topos but projected it into an imperial register, binding the city’s ceremonial identity to the Crown’s transatlantic geographies of extraction.

The natural history and mutable interpretation of pearls within early modern science form the subject of chapter two. It traces how reports from the Americas challenged ancient theories of spontaneous generation as European naturalists incorporated New World eyewitness accounts into their encyclopedic compilations. Domínguez Torres foregrounds a frog-shaped pendant as a materialization of this epistemic shift. In so doing, she advocates for an expanded notion of the types of objects considered within the history of visual scientific culture, aligning with recent scholarly efforts to move beyond pictorial representation. By privileging the analysis of textual sources, however, the chapter only partially illuminates how emergent understandings of pearl formation intersected with the visual and material grammar of this and related pendants. In particular, the iconographies of pendants shaped as lizards, turtles, or mermaids carried early modern natural-philosophical resonances with notions of transformation, mutability, and hybridity beyond their exotic appeal. One of the chapter’s strengths, however, is its attentiveness to Indigenous worldviews, both as captured in European chronicles and as they existed outside them. For example, Indigenous jewelry that was not only collected but that also inspired European-produced ornaments effectively frames this category of objects as artifacts that period actors recognized as carriers of epistemic value.

Chapter three is among the strongest in the book, providing a compelling overview of the longue durée visual narratives constructed around the imperial economies of pearl extraction in the Caribbean. It focuses on an eighteenth-century engraving depicting pearl divers from Antonio de Herrera’s Historia general de las Indias Occidentales, derived from a sixteenth-century print by Theodor de Bry. Domínguez Torres unpacks what she terms the paradoxical nature of this image: initially created to support the Black Legend, a narrative advanced by competing European powers to emphasize the mismanagement and abuses of the Spanish Crown in the Americas, yet redeployed in Herrera’s work to celebrate the Spanish conquest and exploitation of the colonial domains. By tracing the genealogy of these prints across various texts, images, and contexts, the author demonstrates how De Bry’s representation of the Caribbean pearl fisheries both legitimized forced Indigenous labor and sustained idealized visions of limitless wealth, thereby creating a discursive framework that enabled the virality of the image, functioning simultaneously within ambivalent ideological spaces and even persisting across centuries.

The fourth chapter shifts attention to the cultural and diplomatic context of Florence, centering on Antonio Tempesta’s painting of pearl fishers, executed on lapis lazuli and produced as a gift for the Medici family. Domínguez Torres argues that paintings like Tempesta’s not only thematized mastery over nature, but also over the commercial networks that made their consumption possible. To substantiate this claim, she undertakes a careful comparison between the divers in Tempesta’s composition and analogous scenes in Medici collections, reading them alongside contemporaneous textual accounts that distinguish the techniques of labor employed in the Caribbean from those practiced in the Persian Gulf. Such distinctions, according to Domínguez Torres, mattered; yet, in Tempesta’s painting, both spaces seem to collapse. Caribbean bodies and Persian traders inhabit the same pictorial field, while the very substrate of the painting—Armenian lapis lazuli—pulls the scene eastward. She proposes that such mixing may be explained by the fact that, after King Philip II claimed the Portuguese Crown, the major pearling centers of the world came to be nominally under Spanish Habsburg control. While such explanations reinforce the book’s central argument of how the provenance of pearls was key to their consumption, a different type of logic could have been summoned as well, one by which the painting refused to stabilize geography as a way to articulate the Medici’s aspirational access to global networks.

Chapter five turns to a pair of statuettes of Black figures bearing pearls and gems, produced in the eighteenth century for Augustus the Strong’s Kunstkammer. The pearls themselves had been in the Dresden treasury since the sixteenth century. Their placement within these new sculptural arrangements, then, was less about introducing novel materials than about re-presenting existing holdings through a newly racialized idiom. However, the author explains that in these works, Black bodies—rendered as exotic attendants, clad in feathered skirts and pearls after Theodor de Bry’s depictions of a Timucua leader—were not only racialized but also “Americanized,” encoding a broader perception of enslaved Africans as central to the extractive economies of the Atlantic world. Particularly successful here is the analysis of the resonance the statuettes had with Saxony’s cultural landscape of festivals and pageants, where allegorical depictions of the continents and Black servants became central to the court’s symbolic structure. In foregrounding the particularities of this context, there remains room for a more sustained analysis of perceptions of Caribbean pearls in relation to Saxony’s mining industries, through both comparisons with objects designed to visualize the earth’s generative capacities and engagement with local theories of mineral formation, such as those of Georg Agricola, that found parallels in the study of pearls. Pursuing such lines of inquiry would have revealed ways in which the pearl industry fit within the broader discourse of the extraction of this region: the ocean figured as a kind of underwater mine, yielding its treasures through the labor of divers who, like miners, toiled under demanding conditions.

As the final three chapters make clear, Pearls for the Crown—despite its seemingly Spain-centered title—shows a sustained engagement with a wider European stage. German and Italian contexts emerge here as deeply entangled with the Habsburg court and the Americas. The book’s force lies in this insistence on the translinguistic and transgeopolitical intersections that defined the early modern exploitation of colonial nature and peoples under Spanish control. Across these contexts, Domínguez Torres reconstructs how early modern consumers marveled at pearls not only for their iridescent surfaces and singular forms but also with an awareness—however mediated—of the arduous and often perilous labor that brought them forth from the sea. Lavishly illustrated, Pearls for the Crown: Art, Nature, and Race in the Age of Spanish Expansion challenges its readers, too, to sit with the uneasy reality of these objects whose aesthetic splendor was, and still is, at odds with the violence of their making. That discomfort, as its author reminds us, is precisely where the history of pearls as colonial gems must be confronted.