Orloff — The Russian Imperial Sceptre Diamond
Orloff — The Russian Imperial Sceptre Diamond
189.62 carats of rose-cut Indian diamond, mounted in the Imperial Sceptre by Catherine the Great in 1774
The Orloff (also spelled Orlov) is a 189.62-carat Indian-origin rose-cut diamond, mounted in the head of the Russian Imperial Sceptre commissioned by Catherine the Great in 1774. It is one of the largest historical diamonds with a documented provenance and is held in the Russian Diamond Fund (Almaznyi Fond) within the Moscow Kremlin, displayed alongside the other state-treasury crown jewels of the Romanov era. The stone has a distinct faint bluish-green tint that distinguishes it visually from the major colourless historical diamonds, and the surviving rose-cut form shows the cutting style of the late Mughal period in India.
Description
The Orloff is approximately the size and shape of half a hen's egg, with the flat face roughly oval and the rose cut covering the dome. It carries 180 facets of the historical Indian rose pattern. Weight is recorded at 189.62 carats, with the stone retaining the characteristic high-domed Indian cutting style rather than the symmetrical European brilliant standards. Refractive properties are those of diamond, with the visual colour of the stone described as faint bluish-green by competent observers, although the colour grading by modern GIA scale has not been published in detail.
Provenance
The Orloff is generally believed to have originated in the alluvial fields of southern India, most likely the Kollur mines in the Krishna river basin, in the seventeenth or early eighteenth century. The stone's early history is bound up with several romantic legends — most colourfully that it was set as one of the eyes of a temple deity statue in a Hindu temple in southern India and stolen by a French soldier — but the documentary record begins reliably with its appearance in the European market in the eighteenth century.
The diamond takes its name from Count Grigory Orlov, the Russian aristocrat and former favourite of Catherine the Great, who, by the standard account, presented the stone to the empress in 1773 in an attempt to regain her favour after his political eclipse. Catherine accepted the gift and commissioned the goldsmith Leopold Pfisterer to mount the stone in the head of the Imperial Sceptre, which was completed in 1774. The sceptre has remained in the Russian state treasury since then, surviving the Revolution and the Soviet seizure of crown property and emerging in the Diamond Fund display established in 1925.
Significance
The Orloff is significant as one of the very few historical Indian diamonds preserved in their original cutting style. The Mughal-era rose cut, with its high dome and many small flat facets, was the standard form for major Indian diamonds before European cutting houses began to recut them in the brilliant style during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Koh-i-Noor and the Daria-i-Noor were both reshaped, leaving the Orloff among the largest survivors of the Indian rose-cut tradition.
The stone is also significant as an artefact of the Russian-Indian gem trade route and of the eighteenth-century European court taste for mounting historical diamonds in working state regalia rather than displaying them as separated specimens. The Imperial Sceptre is still functional regalia in the formal sense, although it has not been used in coronation ceremony since the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II in 1917.
In the trade
The Orloff is not a commercial stone and will not appear on any market. Its importance to the trade is as a reference object for the cutting and provenance of major Indian historical diamonds. Reproductions and study casts are held by several gemmological institutions, and the dimensions and proportions of the stone have been published in the Russian Diamond Fund's own catalogues and in international gemmological literature.
See also Diamond, Russian Diamond Fund, Koh-i-Noor.