There was a grove at Nemi, fourteen miles south of Rome in the Alban Hills, that the Romans approached with a specific kind of fear — not the fear of a place where something terrible had happened, but the fear of a place where something sacred was continuously happening and had been happening since before Rome existed and would continue happening after Rome was gone. The grove belonged to Diana, goddess of the moon and the hunt and the threshold between the wild world and the human world, and it was not a metaphor. The trees were hers. The lake below — the Romans called it the Mirror of Diana, speculum Dianae — reflected the moon with a clarity that made it seem less like a reflection and more like a second moon that had come to rest in the water to be closer to its goddess. In the grove, a single tree stood apart from the others. It could not be cut. It could not be touched. The penalty for breaking a branch from it was not decided by any Roman law; it was decided by the grove itself, by Diana herself, in a judgment the Romans found it better not to test.
The priest of Diana's grove at Nemi held his position by the most extraordinary rule in all of Roman religion: he had killed the man who held it before him. The Rex Nemorensis — the King of the Grove — was always a runaway slave who had found the grove, broken a branch from the sacred tree, and survived long enough to kill the current king in single combat. Once he had the title, he kept it until another runaway slave did the same to him. He lived in the grove with a sword in his hand, night and day, in a state of permanent vigilance that was also a permanent relationship with Diana — the goddess whose protection could be earned only by the same ferocity she embodied, who guarded her grove not with walls or locks but with the knowledge that what grew inside it was worth dying for, and that the man willing to die for it was the only kind of man she wanted as her priest.
The tree in this piece is Diana's sacred tree — the one that could not be cut, reconstructed now in the medium that the sea uses to make permanent the things it has decided to preserve. The white cowrie shells that form its canopy are the shells the Romans associated with the moon — smooth and luminous, the same curve as the crescent, the same surface as still water at night. The cone shells and spiral shells embedded in the canopy are the offerings that Diana's worshippers left in the grove over centuries, each one carried from a different shore, each one placed with the specific intention of a gift given to something that will outlast the giver. The great golden pearl at the heart of the tree is the moon itself — Diana's own presence in the grove, the light that made the lake below into her mirror, the thing the tree was built around and cannot be removed from without the tree ceasing to be what it is.
The blue stones that run through the trunk are the water of Nemi — the lake that fed the grove's roots, that reflected the moon on its surface, that the Romans said was so still and so clear on certain nights that you could not tell where the water ended and the sky began. The coral mountain at the base of the tree is the hill of Nemi itself, the Alban volcano that formed the lake in its crater and the grove on its slopes, the geological fact that made the sacred place possible before any goddess claimed it as her own. And the figures that stand in the blue water behind the tree are Diana's priestesses — the women who tended the grove in the intervals between the violent successions of its priest-kings, who kept the fires lit and the offerings placed and the knowledge of the goddess alive in the centuries when the King of the Grove was looking the wrong way and almost missed the slave coming through the trees with a broken branch and a purpose.
The light that descends through the water from above the tree is moonlight — the specific quality of light that Diana controls, the light that makes the familiar strange and the strange beautiful, that turns a lake into a mirror and a grove into a sanctuary and a tree made of shells into the most sacred object in a mythology that built the Colosseum and the Pantheon and still could not produce anything more powerful than a single tree in a grove outside the city that no one was permitted to touch. The resin base embedded with gold and living color is the floor of the grove — the earth that Diana owns more completely than any other place in the Roman world, the ground that knows the weight of every priest-king who ever walked it with a sword, and the weight of every woman who ever walked it with an offering, and holds them all with equal reverence, because the grove makes no distinction between the warrior and the worshipper. Both of them, in Diana's presence, are the same.
"Diana of the crossways, thou that art of heaven and earth and hell the queen, thou triple formed, hear me who never yet called on thee in vain."
— Publius Ovidius Naso (Ovid), Fasti, Book III, c. 8 A.D.
Artist's Note
I built this tree thinking about what it means for something to be inviolable — for there to be a place in the world that exists outside the ordinary rules of what can be taken and what must be left alone. The white cowrie shells came first, one by one, each one placed with the attention that the Romans gave to their sacred groves: not quickly, not carelessly, but with the understanding that what you are building is not a decoration but a dwelling for something that deserves more respect than decoration. The golden pearl at the center was the last element, and when I placed it I understood that this was the piece's heart — the moon that the whole tree had been built to hold. The priestesses in the water behind it are not background. They are the reason the tree still stands.
At CuepoxyGift, the most sacred pieces are the ones that know what they are protecting. "The Grove of Diana" is for those who understand that the most powerful sanctuaries in the world are not the ones with the highest walls — they are the ones where something so beautiful grows that no one who truly sees it can bring themselves to break it.
🌊 Explore the full collection at CuepoxyGift — art that brings the ocean into your world.
A Private Collection Artwork
If this story has moved you and the beauty of this piece has stirred something deep within, you should know that "The Grove of Diana" is part of the artist's private collection and is not currently available for sale.
However, very soon you will be able to bring this work into your home in different sizes and formats. Subscribe below with your email address and be the first to know when it becomes available. Great works of art are worth the wait.
— ICuesta, Artist | CuepoxyGift