Condition
Rim and upper body fragment.
Description
The rim is vertical and ground, and the body continues with a mild convex curve, probably a bowl. On the interior, 0.5 cm below the rim, a horizontal groove 0.1 cm wide is visible. The body tesserae compose a checkerboard pattern with rows of opaque green, yellow, white, and red tesserae.
Comments and Comparanda
For the production technique, see comments on cat. 86. On the trade of small fragments of mosaic glass in nineteenth-century Rome and on the different techniques and classes of mosaic glass present in the Getty collection, see comments on cat. 95. This bowl belongs to Roman Cast Composite Mosaic vessels and in particular to the Non-Carinated Bowls group (Grose, David Frederick. 1989. Early Ancient Glass: Core-Formed, Rod-Formed, and Cast Vessels and Objects from the Late Bronze Age to the Early Roman Empire, 1600 B.C. to A.D. 50. New York: Hudson Hills Press., pp. 258–261), which are one of the most numerous groups of mosaic vessels, with deep and shallow bowls being among the most widely appearing forms; others are plates and beakers. The checkerboard pattern is quite rare, and the other published examples are broad shallow bowls with single interior grooves; the pattern is created by tesserae in two or three colors (Grose, David Frederick. 1989. Early Ancient Glass: Core-Formed, Rod-Formed, and Cast Vessels and Objects from the Late Bronze Age to the Early Roman Empire, 1600 B.C. to A.D. 50. New York: Hudson Hills Press., p. 260, nos. 564–567). Known carinated mosaic bowls with checkerboard patterns date this group to the late first century BCE–early first century CE (Abdul Hak, Sélim. 1959. “Contribution à l’étude de la verrerie musulmane. VIIIe, IXe et Xe siècle.” In Annales du 1er Congrès des “Journées internationales du Verre,” Liège, 20–24 août 1958, 79–96. Liège: Edition du Secrétariat général permanent à Liège., p. 81, fig. 14; Goldstein, Sidney M. 1979. Pre-Roman and Early Roman Glass in the Corning Museum of Glass. Corning, NY: Corning Museum of Glas., pp. 186–187, no. 497).
Provenance
Pierre Mavrogordato, Greek, 1870–1948 (Berlin, Germany); by 1974–1988, Erwin Oppenländer, 1901–1988 (Waiblingen, Germany), by inheritance to his son, Gert Oppenländer, 1988; 1988–2003, Gert Oppenländer (Waiblingen, Germany), sold to the J. Paul Getty Museum, 2003
Bibliography
Saldern von, Axel, Birgit Nolte, Peter La Baume, and Thea Elisabeth Haevernick. 1974. Gläser der Antike. Sammlung Erwin Oppenländer. Mainz: von Zabern., p. 123, no. 332; p. 121, plate no. 332.
Exhibitions
Molten Color: Glassmaking in Antiquity (Malibu, 2005–2006; 2007; 2009–2010)
Gläser der Antike: Sammlung Erwin Oppenländer (Hamburg and Cologne, 1974–1975)