Three Roman Glass Jewelry Pieces - Bangle, Finial & Mosaic Ring

Eastern Mediterranean, Late Roman to Byzantine. A trio of opaque black glass ornaments, each a different exercise in the glassworker's art. The largest is a smoothly drawn bangle of circular section, its diameter suited to a child's wrist, the surface still carrying a wet gloss where the metal cooled. Beside it sits a finger ring built of mosaic glass, its black body flecked with yellow and red canes fused into the matrix. The third and most delicate piece is a stamped disc-shaped finial, janiform, bearing a bearded male head on either face, perhaps a deity or, if the later end of the range holds, a saint. Together they sketch the long afterlife of Roman glassworking in the eastern Mediterranean, where opaque black glass remained a cheap and handsome substitute for jet and stone. Black glass bangles were among the most widely produced personal ornaments of the late antique and early Byzantine Levant, drawn from a single hot rod, looped, and welded at the join, a technique fast enough to make them affordable across the social spectrum and durable enough that they survive in quantity from Syria, Palestine, and Egypt. The addition of yellow and red mosaic canes, as on the ring here, was the workshop's way of imitating far costlier polychrome inlay in gold and hardstone. Janiform imagery, two faces set back to back, carried protective force in the Roman world through the god Janus, guardian of thresholds and beginnings. Its persistence into Christian centuries is well documented in minor arts, where the bearded type could be read equally as a pagan divinity or an apostolic saint depending on the eye of the wearer, a productive ambiguity in a period when both readings coexisted in the same marketplace. Item # 204550

Estimation:€200.87

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