Condition
Fragment, broken all around.
Description
Concave fragment, probably from a bowl. The exterior is undecorated, a translucent purple appearing black. On the interior, five florets are randomly placed on a translucent purple (appearing black) background. In addition, one white curved stem is visible. Each circular floret consists of a central red rod surrounded by eight elongated white petals set in purple.
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 fragment belongs to a class of vessels ascribed to late first-century BCE Egypt, known as Egyptian Cast and Inlaid Bowls (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. 197). The vessel was formed by slumping a single-colored matrix of glass on whose surface inlay elements were added, forming a decorative pattern on the surface of the vessel. A fragment of a very similar vessel from Karanis, Egypt, is in the Kelsey Museum in Ann Arbor, Michigan. It is a broad shallow bowl with flowers and wading birds (Cool Root, Margaret. 1982. Wondrous Glass: Reflections on the World of Rome c. 50 B.C.–A.D. 650. Ann Arbor, MI: Kelsey Museum of Archaeology., p. 17, plate 18e). Further parallels from Fayum, Egypt, preserving parts of the depictions of birds, garlands, and loosely arranged stars and rosettes, are published as well (Kunz, Martin, ed. 1981. 3000 Jahre Glaskunst: Von der Antike bis zum Jugendstil, exh. cat. Lucerne: Kunstmuseum., p. 41, no. 36, color table F 4 = Ancient Glass. Formerly the Kofler-Truniger Collection, March 5–6, 1985, sale cat. London: Christie’s., pp. 116–117, no. 225). Another example, a shallow bowl of almost-opaque medium blue glass with floral decoration, is kept in the Toledo Museum of Art (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. 208, no. 227), and a few more are now in the Corning Museum of Glass (Whitehouse, David B. 2003. Roman Glass in the Corning Museum of Glass, vol. 3. Corning, NY: Corning Museum of Glass., pp. 128–130, nos. 1099–1103).
Provenance
1983, Jiří K. Frel, 1923–2006, donated to the J. Paul Getty Museum, 1983
Bibliography
Unpublished
Exhibitions
None