For “Out of this World! Jewelry in the Space Age” exhibition - opens at The Forbes Galleries in New York City on March 16th, 2013 and runs through September 7th, 2013.- Donna Distefano created a one-of-a-kind ring inspired by Dante’s The Divine Comedy, Paradiso, Canto 33, The Final Vision.
Titled “The Love that moves the sun and the other stars” (the last line of Canto 33), the breathtaking ring, 30 mm. in diameter, combines several of Distefano’s passions. She has studied The Divine Comedy in both English and Italian and has 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.” It is the moment when his life on earth intersects with his life outside of this earth. Distefano saw this commission as a chance to bring together many of her interests into a harmonious whole.
The heirloom-quality 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 down as a brilliant fireball. Combining the earthly and the celestial, the mythological and the real, visual art and literature, Distefano’s piece is truly out of this world.
