Pair of Byzantine Glass Bracelets w/ Trailing & Stripes

A pair of hand-formed bangles drawn from translucent blue green glass, each closed into a slightly irregular circle that betrays the working of a hot rod around a former. One carries a trailed thread wound along its exterior in a continuous looping rhythm, catching light along the raised ridge. The other is dressed with applied patches of white and black striated glass, small polychrome accents fused into the body while still soft. Iridescence and earthen encrustation cling to both surfaces. Bangles of this kind were produced in enormous numbers across the Byzantine east, worn stacked on the wrist by women and often buried with them, an inexpensive luxury that put the glassmaker's art within reach of ordinary households. Glass bangles are among the most abundant small finds on Byzantine and early Islamic sites in the Levant, Anatolia, and the Balkans, recovered by the thousands from domestic contexts, workshop dumps, and graves. They were made by winding a gather of hot glass around a mandrel or by bending a drawn rod and welding the ends, a rapid technique that leaves the characteristic seam and slightly oval profile. Decoration was applied in the same heat: threads trailed and then marvered flush or left proud, and blobs of contrasting opaque glass pressed on and combed into stripes. Because the forms and colors changed slowly over centuries and crossed political frontiers freely, close dating of any individual bangle remains difficult without an excavated context. Item # 204552

Estimation:€223.19

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