This Cartier style is expressed fluently in the Parisian maison’s Nature Sauvage collection of high jewellery, which unveiled a second chapter of 36 jewels and two high jewellery objets d’art in Shanghai last year. It continues a story first set out in Vienna, expanding and pushing the boundaries of a jewelled bestiary chez Cartier.

Animal inspirations are treated as more than just figurative representations at this maison. Its most iconic is the famed panther. The earliest known appearance of a panthère was in 1914, as an illustration on an invitation to an exhibition of jewels. In time, the panther took on life as three-dimensional jewels that have grown in detail and life (Cartier designers spend hours at the zoo studying the musculature and movements of big cats). In modern forms, this great feline has been interpreted as variously with curved, rippling muscles or faceted geometric armatures, cats that perch, stretch, recline, gnaw, paw, hug and roar.

One of the centrepieces of Nature Sauvage’s second chapter is the Chryseis, a necklace inspired by and named after the Bombyx Chryseis family of leopard moths. Speckled among large chalcedony beads are curved triangles, detailed with diamonds and onyx, that simulate their wings, hidden in plain sight. The design, mounted in platinum, is topped off with an impressive 63.76-carat rubellite drop pendant.

There’s also the Paradisier demi-parure, consisting of a rubellite cocktail ring and earrings, that reflects the gracious flight of a bird of paradise. Its features—head, wings and tail feathers—are captured airily with diamonds set on white gold. On the cocktail ring, yellow diamonds dot the eyes, and the bird’s body is made from an exceptional cushion-cut 23.69-carat rubellite with a mesmerisingly deep reddish purple colour.

Cartier pioneered geometric jewellery in the ’20s with art deco, and it’s obvious that even today this vocabulary of style continues. It is furthered, in fact, by fusing figurative representations with subtle volumes and dimensions. The elephant, and the necklace it’s framed on, is made up of a dazzling array of triangular, lozenge, tapered and round brilliant diamonds. The effect is subtle and delicate, though its genius is unmissable once the eye identifies the creature.

One more remarkable creature of the land: the tiger, Panthera tigris, is rendered in a fully articulated four-finger ring with emerald eyes, and a diamond coat with onyx streaks. Each of the tiger’s four paws rests on a ring, so that when the jewel is worn the feline’s articulated form is animated by movements of the fingers.

The crocodile, perhaps an amphibious analogue to the maison’s panther, is captured in two remarkable ways in Nature Sauvage. The first is with the Sibaya, named for the South African lake where Nile crocodiles can be found. Cartier combined its love for abstracted geometry and veneration for nature into a supple design that evokes a crocodile’s scaly exterior. A beautifully chosen suite of sugarloaf cabochon emeralds are set in a grid pattern, the sloped shapes of the gemstones chosen to emulate the angles of scales. Among these are a pavé-set motif of diamonds that evoke water flowing past the back of a crocodile. At its centre is a verdant Colombian sugarloaf emerald weighing 7.96 carats.

But perhaps the most expressive and playful of the Cartier bestiary in this second chapter of Nature Sauvage is the Wani, a necklace that takes its name from the Japanese Kanji character for ‘crocodile’. These beasts may be fearsome, but Cartier has endowed the lovely Wani with a sense of playfulness, rendering her sensuously curved, scaled form with a face that bears a coy grin. Her scales are represented with pavé-set calibré emeralds and lozenge-shaped diamonds.

The emeralds, in particular, called for several hundred hours of lapidary work and were cut from a medium-green rough— intense yet radiant to sustain a sense of levity. And unlike a fiercely possessive panther that might guard its centre gemstones, Wani the crocodile instead seems to gesture playfully at her treasure hoard of three Zambian cabochon emerald drops, weighing 27.83 carats in total.