Evil eye: the amulet belt of the Sorolla Museum

A blue velvet band holds fourteen chains. From each one hangs an object. The set does not respond to the simplicity of a single emblem: it combines materials, forms and ways to claim protection. It is the amulet belt 70001 in the Sorolla Museum. Its specific catalogue entry dates it to the seventeenth century and raises a significant possibility: its richness and combination of pieces suggest it may have adorned a religious image rather than a child. Sorolla Museum, “Amulets Belt”.

Caution does not detract from the interest of the object. It places it in an exchange between body and image that is especially fertile. A form of clothing associated with child protection could also serve to present a revered figure. The materiality of care was transferred, at least as a possibility, from the person to his sacred representation.

The evil eye belongs here to a world of feared causes. A gaze was credited with the power to harm, sicken or weaken. It was not merely an unpleasant way of looking: it implied that harm could pass between the person looking and the person seen. The charms allow us to study responses to that belief without treating it as an actual explanation of illness.

Protection builds up

The museum’s study of its jewellery collection describes reliquaries and religious images alongside elements such as a badger claw, a glass sucking charm and objects that make sounds. This classification identifies different resources within the same belt. Sorolla Museum, The Jewelry Collection, pp. 9-10.

Their abundance can be read as a response to the diffuse nature of danger. Harm whose arrival and source are unknown invites multiple defences. This is an interpretation of the assemblage, not the recovered thought of a particular owner. Fourteen pendants do not equal fourteen testimonies, but they do reveal an intention to bring things together.

Bringing things together does not necessarily mean arranging a system. The efficacy attributed to a relic could rest on a relationship different from that attributed to animal material or sound. The belt allowed these differences to coexist. For someone who wore or arranged it, they might not have been opposing categories requiring a single choice.

Hence, the object is more expressive than a sharp division between religion and superstition. That separation can be used to analyze speeches, but in the velvet band we find physical proximity. The chains match, at a certain distance, pieces that refer to different authorities and expectations.

Distract, sound, intercede

The museum’s explanation connects the badger claw with diverting attention from a harmful gaze. It also describes a protective power believed to lie in coloured glass and the intention to ward off harm through small bells and jingling bells. These are historical interpretations of their uses, not demonstrated properties of the materials. Sorolla Museum, belt catalogue entry.

Within this outlook, the object does more than cover. It places something between the body and other people’s attention. Defence is imagined through activity: looking elsewhere, losing concentration or listening. The amulet turns exposure to others into a situation on which someone attempts to act.

This reading reveals a paradox. To protect against a gaze, some pieces attract the eye. The aim is not always to disappear, but to redirect attention. A striking detail can replace the vulnerable body as the immediate focus. The belt makes that wish for mediation visible, though it cannot measure what people facing it felt.

Religious objects add another relationship. An image of a saint or a reliquary refers to intercession, veneration and a sacred history. Their presence in the whole does not have to be explained as a mere disguise of other amulets. It can express a confidence that participates in the same task of care from different foundations.

The words of an inventory

Goods listed in household documents bring these practices into other social settings. Alejandro Junquera Martínez and José Ramón Morala Rodríguez study amulets and talismans in inventories from the Spanish Golden Age. Their examples include a 1663 record from Soria listing charms, children’s garments, small bells, a badger’s paw and other objects. The link with caring for a child appears in the documentary inventory itself. Junquera Martínez and Morala Rodríguez, ‘Remedios supersticiosos para sanar’, 2025.

An inventory does not narrate a scene of use. It does, however, preserve proximity: which objects are grouped together, what they are called and beside which garments they are stored. This kind of record places the amulet among things that are sewn, kept and passed on. The extraordinary can coexist with a bib and a chain, without a separate setting for magic.

Nor does a list of possessions reveal a mother’s or father’s emotions. We can speak of care because the protective function is documented, but cannot supply thoughts they did not record. Historical concern is better recognised in material choices than in an imagined dramatisation of fear.

A set with more than one age

The published dates for the Sorolla belt do not fully agree. Its individual record proposes the seventeenth century; the general presentation of the jewellery collection refers to the eighteenth. The catalogue of another belt, held by the Cerralbo Museum, describes the Sorolla example as an assemblage of pieces dated between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. This discrepancy suggests treating it as an object with a complex chronology. Sorolla Museum, "Jewelry"; Museo Cerralbo, CE00308, reasoned classification.

The possibility of gathering elements of different ages fits a characteristic of the composite object: each pendant can have a story before entering the set. We cannot reconstruct all the additions here, but we must not imagine that band, chains and charms were necessarily born on the same day.

That plurality offers a place to conclude. The belt’s history of the evil eye does not depend on a single symbol or secret formula. It concerns gathering resources, keeping them close to a body or image and giving lasting form to a wish for protection. Among its chains, the feared gaze meets an abundant material response. We encounter a historical way of organising care whose supernatural efficacy remains a matter of belief.

Sources and references

• Sorolla Museum: Amulet Belt, 70001.
• Sorolla Museum: The Jewelry Collection.
• Junquera Martínez y Morala Rodríguez: inventory study, 2025.
• Sorolla Museum: Jewelry.
• Cerralbo Museum: CE00308. Comparative reference to the Sorolla belt.