This piece is part of the Royal College of Art Visiting Artists Collection. Every year from 1987 to 2006, while David Watkins was Professor of Goldsmithing, Silversmithing, Metalwork and Jewellery at the RCA, he invited four jewellers and silversmiths from outside Britain to give a week-long masterclass. The artists brought diverse skills, aesthetics and approaches. The first call on their time was to interact closely with the students. In addition, although concentrating on their teaching and working in an unfamiliar studio, each artist generously made an object for the RCA's collection. The Royal College of Art Visiting Artists Collection, now transferred to the V&A, is a major document of international contemporary jewellery, a tribute both to the artists and to the vibrancy of the RCA as a teaching institution.

In common with artists working across a wide range of media, jewellers may set out to convey or provoke human emotions. Their work reaches beyond the figurative to the philosophical. Eyes, fingers, lips and other fragments of the human body were used as metaphors for personal and political concerns, from the meaning of life to world events. Bruno Martinazzi (1923-2018) had studied chemistry and later psychology, before becoming a jeweller and sculptor. He moved easily from the miniature form to the monumental and vice versa.

The eye, a window to the soul, is a motif Martinazzi has turned to repeatedly throughout his work with varying interpretations. The brooch with eye in the V&A belongs to the ‘Energy Series’. These were inspired by his meeting with Professor Sydney Leach, at the University of Paris in the late seventies after which he became interested in laser energy. Leach was researching the laser effect and spectrum of radiation from stars millions of light years away. A remark from Bruno Martinazzi sums up the meaning behind the brooch and its engraved symbols zero to one: ‘what fascinated me was the way energy went from zero level to level one. This leap was fantastic; zero is absolutely nothing, one, on the other hand is everything, the beginning of everything’ (Carla Gallo Barbisio, Bruno Martinazzi, Schmuck – Gioelli – Jewellery, Stuttgart 1997, p. 109)