Lapis Lazuli is for Spiritual Practices

There are different minerals that are used for spiritual practices. Fluorite for example, Rock Quartz. One of them is Lapis Lazuli, a stone of particular beauty, used by painters for their creations. Very often these had religious meaning because Christianity (both Catolic and Orthodox) associated blue of Lapis with the Heaven

Even if you don't like blue particularly, you will like the color of Lapis because it's a very special tint of blue.
Very often this blu is enriched by "golden" glitters. The vendors say& Oh, you have to buy this stone because it's with gold!

Well, it's not gold but pyrite, but it's not important. The stone is very beautiful in any case.

 I do not have the objects to sell in Lapis more, but I write about it here to tell you about a peculiarity of the stone because there are too many in the streets now. The high price stone does not have white etc inclusions in it. And it has very beautiful tint of blue. If it's so, you pay a right price. If the stone is more grey than blue and has many white inclusions, the price has not be too high.

Photos are from Wikipedia.

Gems Collection of Farnese Family

National Archaeological museum of Naples is famous for it's precious gems collection. The Farnese family collected camei from the middle of the XVII century.

The name Cameo is used for two kinds of treatment, today: both positive and negative. Originally, only the positive, raised picture was called Cameo.



The negative carved picture, "intaglio", you can see on this photo.



They used different semiprecious gemstones for this incredibly thin work. And the collection Farnese is the prove of it (I read in some articles that they used only 2 or 3 minerals to make camei)



One of the most known pieces is Farnese Cup, a famous cameo 20 cm large that was a cup for offerings during the Greek religious rituals: they used to pour liquids on the statues of divinities.