The Rembrandt Book Bracelet: Behold a Functional Bracelet Featuring 1400 Rembrandt Drawings

Admit­ted­ly jew­el­ry is not one of our areas of exper­tise, but when we hear that a bracelet costs €10,000, we kind of expect it to have a smat­ter­ing of dia­monds.

Design­ers Lyske Gais and Lia Duinker are get­ting that amount for a wrist­let com­prised chiefly of five large paper sheets print­ed with high res images down­loaded free from the Rijksmu­se­um’s exten­sive dig­i­tal archive of Rem­brandt draw­ings and etch­ings.

Your aver­age pawn­bro­ker would prob­a­bly con­sid­er its 18-karat gold clasp, or pos­si­bly the cus­tom-made wood­en box in which it can be stored when not in use the most pre­cious thing about this orna­ment.

An ardent bib­lio­phile or art lover is per­haps bet­ter equipped to see the book bracelet’s val­ue.

Each gilt edged page — 1400 in all — fea­tures an image of a hand, sourced from 303 down­loaded Rem­brandt works.

An illus­tra­tion on the design­ers’ Duinker and Dochters web­site details the painstak­ing process where­by the book­bracelet takes shape in 8‑page sec­tions, or sig­na­tures, cross stitched tight­ly along­side each oth­er on a paper band. Put it on, and you can flip through Rem­brandt hands, Rolodex-style. When you want to do the dish­es or take a show­er, just pack it flat into that cus­tom box.

Gais and Duinker also include an index, which is handy for those times when you don’t feel like hunt­ing and peck­ing around your own wrist in search of a hand that appeared in the Flute Play­er or  Christ cru­ci­fied between the two mur­der­ers.

The Rembrandt’s Hands and a Lion’s Paw bracelet, titled like a book and pub­lished in a lim­it­ed edi­tion of 10, nabbed first prize in the 2015 Rijksstu­dio Awards, a com­pe­ti­tion that chal­lenges design­ers to cre­ate work inspired by the Rijksmuseum’s col­lec­tion.

(2015’s sec­ond prize went to an assort­ment of con­serves and condi­ments that harkened to Johannes Hannot’s 1668 Still Life with Fruit. 2014’s win­ner was a palette of eye­shad­ow and some eye­lin­ers inspired by Jan Adam Kruseman’s 1833 Por­trait of Ali­da Christi­na Assink and a Leen­dert van der Cooghen sketch.)

But what about that spe­cial art lov­ing bib­lio­phile who already has every­thing, includ­ing a Rem­brandts Hands and a Lions Paw boekarm­band?

Maybe you could get them Col­lier van hond­jes, Gais and Duinker’s fol­low up to the book bracelet, a rub­ber chok­er with an attached 112-page book pen­dant show­cas­ing Rem­brandt dogs sourced from var­i­ous museum’s dig­i­tal col­lec­tions.

Pur­chase Rem­brandt’s Hands and a Lions Paw lim­it­ed edi­tion book bracelet here.

And embark on mak­ing your own improb­a­ble thing inspired by a high res image in the Rijksmu­se­um’s Rijks Stu­dio here.

via Colos­sal/Neatora­ma

– Ayun Hal­l­i­day is the Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine and cre­ator, most recent­ly of Cre­ative, Not Famous: The Small Pota­to Man­i­festo.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.