DIVA opened on Suikerrui in May 2018, between the Grote Markt and the river, with a party over three days and an unusual guide: a butler. The museum, which calls itself DIVA, Antwerp Home of Diamonds, and in full the museum for diamonds, jewellery and silver, merged two older collections, the provincial Diamond Museum and the Sterckshof Silver Museum, into the former home of the city’s Ethnographic Museum at Suikerrui 17-19. It shows about 650 objects. Eight years and one renovation later, it has become a better museum than the one that opened, mainly because it now talks about where the stones come from.

The location is the right one. The audio tour that DIVA developed with Visit Antwerpen starts at Het Steen, the fortress on the Scheldt, and walks up Suikerrui, where goldsmiths and jewellers have worked for more than 500 years, before reaching the diamond district by Central Station. The museum sits at the old end of that route: the end where the jewellery was made and worn, not the end where stones are traded by the lot.

Six rooms and a butler

The 2018 museum was built as a house with six rooms: a Wonderkamer, or cabinet of curiosities, about Antwerp’s 16th and 17th-century trade in art and luxury goods; an Atelier; an International Trading Room; a Dining Room; a Boudoir; and the Vault, a strongroom given over to diamond crime. The interior designer Gert Voorjans did the Wonderkamer, the set designer Carla Janssen Höfelt the other five. The diamond route covers about 550 square metres. In each room visitors met Jérôme, DIVA’s butler, a character dreamed up by the director Frank Van Laecke, who introduced each theme, while short radio plays brought some of the objects to life.

The oldest pieces are the ones that show how recent the sparkle is. “You can see really old diamond jewellery from the 16th century where diamonds were not worked on yet,” the curator Romy Cockx told reporters at the opening. “So they are pointed diamonds. You can see how these cuts evolve throughout the centuries.” The same report picked out diamond-encrusted boots and a tennis racket set with diamonds, which gives an idea of the range.

The museum also invites guest curators. The first, Wonderkamer I, ran from 19 October 2018 to 28 April 2019 and was put together by the dealer and interior designer Axel Vervoordt, who mixed DIVA’s jewels with pieces from his own collection, loans from the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and the natural sciences institute in Brussels, and work by Anish Kapoor, Pablo Picasso, Jan Fabre and Niki de Saint Phalle. A second Wonderkamer followed in 2019.

A difficult first year

The start was not smooth. Three months after the opening, VRT reported a shortfall of €2 million at the Museumstichting, the foundation that ran DIVA, about 10 per cent of its budget, partly blamed on the cost of shipping top pieces to touring exhibitions in China. Luk Lemmens, the foundation’s chairman, called overruns on new projects normal. In the same report the director, Jeroen Martens, who had built the museum, announced he was leaving, saying he was not the right person for day-to-day management. The foundation said the two were unrelated.

The arrangement has since changed. DIVA started as an initiative of the Province of Antwerp with the city and Visit Flanders, and it now sits with the city: it is run by the city’s autonomous company for cultural institutions and heritage. The Flemish government classes it as a museum of more than local importance and pays it an operating grant of €313,000 a year under an agreement for 2024 to 2028.

The brilliant story

In 2022 the museum closed for a renovation the building urgently needed, roof included. The reopening was pushed back by rising energy costs, and DIVA reopened in March 2023 with a rearranged permanent display, DIVA, a Brilliant Story. “An extra seventh room was added,” the curator Cathérine Regout told VRT, and the route now follows a piece of jewellery from the raw material, diamond, gold or silver, to the finished object. A set of 17th-century silver toilet articles, bought by the Flemish government, is the new highlight, and there is a separate route with interactive pieces for children.

What makes the new display better is the part about consequences. It covers urban mining, the recovery of precious metals from old electronics, upcycling, laboratory-grown diamonds, and the ecology and ethics of digging stones out of the ground, with contributions from traders and designers. A diamond museum in the city that handles much of the world’s rough trade should explain the stones, not only show them, and since 2023 DIVA does.

The museum also keeps the goldsmiths’ side of Antwerp’s trade alive. It hosts the Silver Triennial, an international competition for silversmiths whose 20th edition ran from late August to early October 2023, and it has hosted jewellers in residence.

Visiting

Allow an hour and a half, and check the museum’s own website for current hours and exhibitions before you go. The audio guide is included in the ticket, which cost €10 for adults and €7 for visitors aged 12 to 26 when the museum opened, with children under 12 free. There is a museum shop. There is no café, whatever older guides promise about afternoon tea; the cafés are on the Grote Markt, which you cross on the way. From Central Station, trams 3, 5, 9 and 15 run to Groenplaats, and from there it is a walk past the cathedral and across the Grote Markt towards the Steen.

In a city that sells diamonds by the lot, DIVA is where you look at them one at a time.