Bahia, named for its country of origin, is a massive gemstone sculpture made from an 800-pound raw quartz crystal. The crystal was unearthed in Bahia, Brazil in 1987. It is regarded as the world’s largest transparent gemstone sculpture and the world’s largest cut gem.
It took seven and one-half years of highly skilled artistry, lapidary expertise, and engineering to create. World-renowned gemstone carvers Lawrence Stoller and Glenn Lehrer carefully carved three magnificent pieces from the mother stone.
Once the pieces were faceted and polished, the two artists commissioned Pepe Ozan to fashion
Bahia's mounting. The finished design, a large frame made from gold-plated steel, is fastened to the ceiling by two steel cables and makes the sculpture appear to be the pendant of a gigantic necklace.
The Bahia's size is astonishing but its most captivating attraction lies in the depths of the crystal's structure. There are shimmering sunbursts and arcs of golden threads within the crystals. These threads are rutile inclusions. Rutile is a mineral that is made up mostly of titanium dioxide. As a mineral, it's very high on the refractive index and disperses more than almost any other mineral. This means that, when it appears in other minerals, it almost always appears in long, thin shots of color. The combination of these golden sunbursts and the stone's clarity and transparency make Bahia one of the finest specimens of quartz crystals in the world.
Suspended from the ceiling, Bahia captures the inherent beauty of gemstones and the skill of man’s creativity in sculpting and faceting.
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