130. Fragment of a Mosaic Glass Vessel

Condition

Rim and upper body fragment.

Description

Deep hemispherical bowl. The body is formed by spiraling ribbon canes with bands in the following order: white, blue, red, yellow, green, and white. The rim is finished with an applied twisted coil of colorless and yellow glass.

Comments and Comparanda

For the production technique, see comments on cat. 86. For comments about the various types of mosaic vessels present in the Getty collection, see cat. 95.

This bowl belongs to a group of early Roman glass vessels, almost exclusively bowls, deeper or shallow, and occasionally pyxides, distinguished by the applied, twisted coil that formed their rim, and the body almost always made of lengths of composite canes. It can be ascribed to a very small group known with the illustrative name Meandering-Strip Mosaic Vessels that stand outside of the usual canon for striped vessels in the Romano-Italian tradition, their body having been made of very large cane sections formed of several colored strips that were coiled, forming curvilinear, meandering, or sinuous motifs; they are dated to the Augustan or Julio-Claudian period (Grose 1989, family II: pp. 252–253, nos. 390–397).

Provenance

Pierre Mavrogordato, Greek, 1870–1948 (Berlin, Germany); by 1974–1988, Erwin Oppenländer, 1901–1988 (Waiblingen, Germany), by inheritance to his daughter, Ingrid Reisser, 1988; 1988–2004, Ingrid Reisser (Böblingen, Germany), sold to the J. Paul Getty Museum, 2004

Bibliography

von Saldern et al. 1974, p. 123, no. 332.

Exhibitions

Gläser der Antike: Sammlung Erwin Oppenländer (Hamburg and Cologne, 1974–1975)