The Art of Donna Distefano
By Sara Evans
Ever since the first Neanderthal strung a shell around her neck, we have had the impulse to adorn ourselves. Jewelry doesn’t feed or clothe us, or satisfy our basic needs. But the desire to decorate our bodies is eternal. The artist Donna Distefano pursues this quest for beauty on a rare level. I met her in the spring of 2025, when I attended a press event at the newly reimagined Frick Museum. A small display case in the tiny gift shop held a few pieces of her work, the most astonishing jewelry I have ever seen, with the special glow of 22-carat gold — rings set with luminous cabochons and golden orbs, some studded with tiny gemstones.
“Hi, I’m Donna. I’m the jeweler.”
It was one of those instant clicks. Our deep conversation moved from a shared passion for jewelry that transcends commercial hype and convention to the search for God and the journey of the soul. Distefano is now the head jeweler at the Frick, with a brief to create pieces inspired by its paintings. Previously, she was Senior Craftsman Jeweler at the Metropolitan Museum, intepreting pieces from its vast collection. I wanted to know more.
“Come visit my atelier,” she said, enticingly, handing me her card.
Distefano is one of those exceptional individuals in whom intellect and artistry converge—and then ignite. Her atelier is in a landmark industrial building so far west in New York’s Chelsea district that it is practically in the Hudson River. When I arrived at her workshop, two apprentices were at their stations, crafting medieval gold chains. The large, daylit room was filled with vitrines containing the artist’s work.
While studying jewelry-making at New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology, Distefano was also diving deep into Dante’s masterwork, in Italian, at Hunter College. She has a special passion for “Paradiso,” the final canticle of this great work that considers “the love that moves the sun and the other stars.”
Distefano spoke of her childhood love of jewelry, of apprenticeships with master jeweler Cecelia Bauer and metalsmith Tim McCreight—and confessed to being utterly, almost dangerously overcome by her first visit to Florence, in her 20s. She felt instantly at home, and if there is such a thing as past lives, I can imagine her working on her craft in Dante’s medieval city. Since that first visit, she has made The Divine Comedy the focus of her study and the theme of her most stunning work.
Arguably the greatest poet in the Western canon, Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) spent the last 13 years of his life writing about the soul’s search for the divine. He was influenced by the ideas and beliefs of Homer and Virgil, by Aristotle, Hildegard of Bingen, Ptolemy, Ovid, Aquinas, Cicero, and Islamic sages. His grasp of philosophy, theology, and the sciences, especially astronomy, was staggering.
The Divine Comedy is divided into three parts or canticles. It contains a total of 100 cantos, each intricate stanzas. This epic poem is still being deciphered by scholars all over the globe. It is the ultimate Grand Tour, a journey through Hell and Mankind’s depravity, to Purgatory, the waiting room of the questing spirit, culminating in an arduous climb to Paradise and the final union with God in a realm so luminous as to defy description. Dante’s guides on this long and arduous journey are the ancient Roman poet Virgil and the captivating Beatrice, a young Florentine girl he first saw in a church, and who became his anima, or soul guide.
Dante’s Florence was a powerful city-state, a political, financial, artistic, and mercantile mecca. Cosmopolitan and sophisticated, it was a center of learning and discovery and artistic creation. Florence’s seven guilds were powerful trade associations that controlled the city’s economy, politics, culture, and social structure. Dante himself was a member of the prestigious guild of Physicians and Apothecaries.
The hallmark of Dante’s scholarship is his all-encompassing cosmology—grounded in his sophisticated understanding of astronomy. Nine concentric circles lead to Heaven. Dante leads us to the moon and sun, and to the planets Mercury, Venus, Mars, and Jupiter. At last, we come to the Fixed Stars and the “Primum Mobile,” the home of the holiest of souls, as well as the source of time and motion. The poem ends with a vision of the Empyrean, pure spirit, pure light, mysterious and glorious—where Dante encounters God. “Light from light, True God from True God,” as the Nicene Creed tells us. Ineffable, incandescent, this holy spirit is the source of everything in the universe.
In her treatise, “Dante and Gems: An in-depth study of Dante’s use of precious gemstones and metal in the Commedia,” Distefano notes that, in the Inferno, gold is a symbol of avarice and greed. But in the Paradiso, it becomes “a symbol of divinity, enlightenment, and God.” Likewise, gemstones transmute from symbols of sinful materialism to gleaming essences of purity. The poet praises emeralds, sapphires and rubies. Upon escaping Purgatory, he remarks that its gates are “made of diamond.” What Distefano told me next was fascinating: Arriving in Paradise, Dante depicts the angels and spirits as gems. The beauty of these stones is inextricably linked with the divine.
By now, I was spellbound by Distefano’s storytelling. At the end of our magical time together, she placed one of her Paradiso-inspired gold orbs in my hand. In it, I felt the weight of the ages, a physical embodiment of time and space. Every piece she crafts is imbued with history and knowledge, with earthly beauty and otherworldly spirit.
Reluctantly, I handed it back. Then, she put on surgical gloves and took out her magnum opus–this extraordinary love ring. This piece embodies, and includes, the final words of Dante’s epic: “The Love that moves the sun and the other stars.”
Distefano’s craft has left others breathless, too. Arielle Saiber, the Charles S. Singleton Professor of Italian Studies at Johns Hopkins University, and the preeminent Dante scholar in America, writes, “If ever there were a list of the most extraordinary homages to Dante’s Divine Comedy, a ring by master goldsmith Donna Distefano would be at the very top. It is, simultaneously, both a translation and illustration of Dante’s Paradiso…a remarkable feat that condenses Dante’s elaborate poetic description of Heaven (the material and the Divine realms) into a single expression of earthly, cosmic, and spiritual matter and form.”
Saiber continues, “Created in 2012 and first exhibited in New York City’s Forbes Galleries in March of 2013, Distefano’s Love ring is a wonder—a unique blend of beauty, science, exquisite materials, and exceptional craftsmanship. Its thirty-three diamonds symbolize each of the cantos in the Paradiso. Other elements familiar to Dante’s readers are the flame and the rose. At the center of the ring is a cross or a plus-sign, set with shards from the Gibeon meteorite that fell to earth in Namibia in 1838. Inscribed inside the ring are Dante’s words, ‘The Love That Moves the Sun and the Other Stars.'”
As scholar and artist, Distefano has fully entered Dante’s world. “Like the precious gems that Dante so artfully employs,” she says, “so does his masterpiece transcend time and inform the artists of today.” Distefano travels with the poet, as he learns from all the realms of human experience. Her Paradiso jewelry captures the depths of our longing for wholeness and our quest to find the soul’s true home.
Sara Evans is a lifelong New Yorker and the East Coast editor of Reinventing Home. She has written about travel, child development, gardening, antiques and the arts for The New York Times, Art & Antiques, Town and Country, Travel & Leisure, Parents, House Beautiful, Metropolitan Home, Country Living, Fine Arts Connoisseur, Art of the Times and Martha Stewart Living.
