"Skull of Honor" Carved Rainforest Jasper Skull Sculpture — L'Aquart × Luis Alberto Quispe Aparicio

A retired soldier-skull in a spiked Pickelhaube, carved from variegated rainforest jasper — the only "Faces of Eternity" piece whose helmet lifts away. One of one.

The object

"Skull of Honor" is a permanently retired member of an honorable profession — a smiling old campaigner carved from variegated rainforest jasper from Australia. He wears a Pickelhaube, the spiked helmet of the Kaiser's trenches and a holdover still worn in dress form by police and military units across South America; tradition, as the piece observes drily, dies hard.

The detail

Alone among the "Faces of Eternity," this skull invites you to lift the headpiece off — a sly suggestion that the old war dog might need his head examined, if Dr. Lecter hasn't already seen to it. He stands on a base of deep black obsidian dressed with vermeil furniture, each corner bearing its own helmeted skull.

The stone

Rainforest jasper is a richly patterned variety of rhyolite — a volcanic stone whose spherulitic orbs and mottled greens, ochres and reds form as gas pockets and mineral growth set within cooling lava. It registers around 7 on the Mohs scale and takes a fine polish, the foliage-like figure that earns its name shifting across every carved plane. As with all jaspers the pattern is unrepeatable: this soldier could wear no other skin.

The series — Faces of Eternity

Few symbols carry the universal recognition or the suggestive charge of the skull: archetype and memento mori, relic and warning, calavera and battle trophy, the seat of personality and the face of eternity. "Faces of Eternity" is Quispe Aparicio's answer to that long iconography — a set of skulls, each carved from a different natural gemstone, given attitude and personality: a wink at mortality rather than a solemn bow to it. The concept took several years simply to gather rough of sufficient size, interest and integrity to carve, then a year at the bench, each skull requiring one to three months and its own hand-fabricated supporting metalwork. The completed collection toured the Gemological Institute of America (GIA) headquarters in Carlsbad, California; the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, in "Gem Artists of North America"; and the Lizzadro Museum of Lapidary Art in Illinois.

The artist

Luis Alberto Quispe Aparicio is a Peruvian-born lapidary sculptor and creative director of L'Aquart, heir to a family atelier whose tradition reaches back to 1968. An engineer by training, he gave the bench what engineering could not match; his carved works are held in museum collections worldwide, and since 2010 he has collaborated with S.T. Dupont on Haute Création pieces. His practice insists on harmony between lapidary carving, metalwork and structural planning — and on refusing difficulty as a reason not to proceed.

Offered by

Surround Art & Diamonds — North American representative of L'Aquart — presents this work as a singular object at the intersection of lapidary art, fine craft and collecting, with nearly a decade placing Quispe Aparicio's sculptures in private collections across the United States and Europe.

• Material: Rainforest jasper (Australia); obsidian base; vermeil metalwork with helmeted-skull corners; removable Pickelhaube headpiece
• Dimensions: 25 × 20 × 15 cm (9.8 × 7.9 × 5.9 in)
• Year: 2017
• Artwork origin: Peru
• Edition: Unique, one of one
• Status: In hand, available