Sigillum Salomonis (Nodo di Salomone)

First of all, I wanted to thank anyone who might have called the Vatican this weekend and put in some good words for me, maybe called in some favors or something like that, because I have approval now to go on the Scavi Tour to see the gravesites under St. Peter's Cathedral!

This has been another busy weekend of mosaic making. I'm in a race with the contractor to finish my 'step spotter' mosaics. In addition to cups and grape leaves I've added lyres, which are harp-like things, basically the 'electric guitar' of 2000 years ago. I wonder if bands back then smashed their lyres after the concerts?

Also new are tridents (which are uncomfortably close to looking like dinner forks), and a close copy of an ancient 'Solomon knot' (top step, the one with interlocking links). You can kind of get a sense of what I have in mind for the layout with the picture below.

The photo below is of a 1700 year old 'Solomon knot' I took in an Italian cathedral. In my mosaic copy I stayed very true to these colors, using blue jasper and other semiprecious and rare stones.

The Solomon knot, or 'sigillum Salomonis' if you are MJenks / native Latin speaker, is a very old symbol. I like to think of it as the world's first 'M.C. Escher' style drawing. But, maybe a very simple 'For Dummies' style version of Escher?

It is found across many ancient and somewhat unrelated cultures. To some, it is supposed to signify eternity. To others, faith across all religions. The symbol has been associated of course with a King Solomon in the Bible, a son of King David. According to the account there, Solomon descended into some bad behavior and paid the price for it with the breakup of his kingdom.

Jumping to a completely different subject, and this is a bad picture, but my marble sign has been set in the spa wall (the stone around it is wet and appears darker, normally it is bright white plus the sun wasn't casting shadows on the letter the right way).

I was so paranoid it was going to get dropped or something right before it was done. But it's all good now. I'm entertaining the idea of gilding the insides of the letter forms or maybe casting actual bronze letters like they did 2000 years ago, but I think I'll wait until everything is done before I do that.