“The Love that moves the sun and other stars”

“The Love that moves the sun and other stars,” (the Love ring) is my singular ring that travelled to be featured in prominent exhibitions including The Forbes Galleries (2013), the Carnegie Museum of Natural History (2015-16), the Tellus Science Museum (2020), and is now back home at the atelier.

It was part of an exhibition called, “Out of this World! Jewelry in the Space Age,” a group show that included some of the world’s most revered jewelry designers (I was in good company alongside Tiffany, Van Cleef and Arpels, Cartier, and other contemporary designers whom I admire). It was curated by Elyse Zorn Karlin, Co-Director of the Association for the Study of Jewelry & Related Arts. 

InStyle coverage of the Love ring and the Forbes exhibition in 2013.

 The Love ring is one of a kind and is inspired by Dante’s The Divine Comedy, specifically Canto 33, "The Final Vision" (its title is the last line of this canto). When I created it, I kept sacred geometry, numbers, and symbols of the poem in mind. I tend to obsess over my creations, especially when they involve another creative's work. This time, it's a ring named after the founder of the Italian language, who established modern Italian and wrote the most important poem of the Middle Ages — the greatest literary work in the Italian language.

The underside of the ring with hand engraving that reads "L'Amor che move il sole e l'altre stelle", "The Love that moves the sun and other stars" in Italian. 

The Love ring measures 30mm in diameter and combines several of my passions.
I studied The Divine Comedy in both English and Italian and have always loved the way the poem combines so many seemingly disparate elements: mythology, realism, love, judgment, geometry, and astronomy to name a few. In Canto 33, Dante faces God and sees, “the Love that moves the sun and the other stars.”

Me in front of Dante Alighieri's house in Florence, Italy in the early 1990s.

The Love ring combines 22-karat gold, the color of the sun, with diamonds, earth’s hardest and brightest substance. In the center of the ring is a cross of Gibeon meteorite. Known for its incomparable stability and beauty, the Gibeon meteorite entered our atmosphere at seventeen miles per second an estimated 30,000 years ago. It exploded high in the atmosphere, showering fragments over a large region of what is present day Namibia. The meteorite had traveled through space for over four billion years before it was trapped by the Earth's gravitational field and pulled to earth as a brilliant fireball.

Allegorical Portrait of Dante, late 16th century

Combining the earthly and the celestial, the mythological and the real, visual art and literature, I wanted to make something that is truly out of this world to honor Dante.

Me in Piazza Dante, Naples in 2016

A behind-the-scenes look at the creation of the ring.