rushthatspeaks has treasure overload

[rydra_wong]

There is a room in the Argenti devoted entirely to gadgets made out of deformed pearls. No, really. The artisan would take a deformed pearl and say, clearly God intended this to be the hump of a camel, although in fact God intended no such thing and probably the opposite, and then the artisan would graft a camel's neck and head and legs and tail onto the thing in extremely precious materials and say, oh, look, I have cunningly made it obvious what this particular deformed pearl really looks like. And then one of the Medici daughters would buy it, so that we centuries later could stare at it and say, that is the worst miniature of a camel I have ever, ever seen. There are deformed-pearl babies' cradles. Ships in sail. Insects. Harlequins with pearl legs. Mermaids with pearl tails. The mind begins to bleed.

Context is in Florence.